Photography.Book.Now 2009

Blurb just announced the call for entries for Photography.Book.Now

that was the sofobomo, that was

That's how the global blog traffic looked for this year's SoFoBoMo. A slow burn up to the start of the fuzzy month, then a crazy flurry of activity and now all but a receding memory. My book is finally put to bed and I still haven't really returned to using my camera. I'm in danger of becoming someone who used to be a photographer and who now owns cameras. I haven't been trying to force it though, focusing instead on other things to keep me busy.

I've wanted to review some of the SoFoBoMo books on the blog but haven't managed to find the time yet. In fact, I'd be happy if I just could look at all of the 59 finished projects. (Who would have thought way back at the start of that graph above that we'd see 59 finished books! - an awesome achievement all around). The simple whimsy of ndalum78's I can count charmed me the first time I saw it and still brings a smile to my face thinking back on it. Such a simple idea, very well executed. I think there's often a tendency to over think these sorts of projects, aiming for a complex message or set of ideas, when a really clear, simple concept can be beautiful if treated well.

Bernie Sumption's Eyes project is another that stands out in my mind from the early finishers. It was an example of great technique and a clever concept, handled in an interesting way, combining the head shots with the eye images to create a unique blended portrait of each subject. There are many more books that arrived later that I haven't yet seen. Maybe it'll rain some day in Texas and I'll have the time to investigate further! I am starting to feel the old familiar tugging to pick up the camera again. My 'other' book project, that SoFoBoMo was the pathfinder for, has started impinging into my consciousness again. I was lucky enough to get a MacBook Pro for work and have been exploring some of the writing tools available exclusively on that platform. I remember reading enviously about tools like Scrivener, when I was trying to outline the book. Now I have access to them and maybe that'll be enough of a jolt to move the project forward. New toys always help! I also think I'm going to be trying to resurrect the Everyday Ironman project in 2008/2009. It didn't happen this year for a variety of reasons, weather, injury and a whole host of other excuses. But the same team is putting together an even bigger contingent for the 2009 Ironman Coeur d'Alene and I'm going to attempt to document it this time around. The race is later in the year, so the weather should be better. Not so many workouts in the dark depths of winter and hopefully I should be a bit more mobile next year and able to keep up!

photo expressions available from blurb

Photo Expressions

v2.0

By Gordon McGregor

Book Preview

Finally, after a couple of revisions and a bit of colour management tweaking, my SoFoBoMo book is now available from blurb. I know a couple of people have expressed an interest in buying a copy. The image wrap version of the book arrived today, which has quite a different finish to the classic hardback style, with a sleeve cover. I tweaked some of the images to get better colour and printed using the B3 custom workflow, this time around. As a result the new v2.0 version has much better colour reproduction and I'm happy with it. Finished at last. While looking through it, I did find one small imperfection, that I'm going to consider my Persian flaw and leave in. A few people have asked about my portrait approach and the two short essays in the book lay it all out. Now I just need to work out what's next!

sofobomo : now in 3d

sofobomo : covers again

For those of you finishing up a SoFoBoMo book, cover design might be one of the last things you've been thinking about. If you are looking for ideas, Blurb's blog has an interesting entry and links to a variety of articles and sources of inspiration for cover design.

Still alive

I'm still alive but mostly exhausted by the whole book process. I finally finished soft proofing all of the images for a Blurb version of the book. That took most of Saturday morning, to produce a new version of everything then relink to the soft proofed images. Got it laid out and uploaded to Blurb and a printed version should hopefully be arriving in the next week or so. I'm excited to see the finished version and perhaps more excited just to be done, for now. Other SoFoBoMoers are finishing up around now. I've seen several excellent results popping up. I particularly was taken by Paul Butzi's walk around his home with his dog. The words and pictures flowed together really well and there were a few good insights shared along the way. The other Paul, Paul Lester, also shared a beautiful look around a small glen, close to home. Getting to experience his Taoistic approach to arranging the images was a delight. Looking forward to seeing the other books as and when they arrive. I haven't taken a picture since the last SoFoBoMo shot. Almost have a couple of times but the urgency isn't there for now. I did wake up on Sunday morning with a fully fledged, fully visualised idea in my head that I'd love to follow through on. That hasn't happened before - I can really see the image in my mind's eye. All the details. How I'd like it to be lit, what the colours would be, how it would work. I know the story and what the concept is. It even has scope to be an entire other project - a series of conceptual images. But I'm daunted. Daunted by the thought of trying to put it together. Daunted by the work required to pull it off. Scared it might not be as good as it still is in my mind's eye. Unsure why I'd spend the money required to make it happen, with no general point to doing it. All sounds silly after I've typed it out. Mostly though, I just feel tired of the whole thing for now. I need to recharge. Another indication that that's true: I went to set up the camera to play around with some stroboscopic shooting and I've stripped the tripod thread. So no tripod shooting until I can get that repaired (anyone know what the cost is?). I'll take that as a sign to slow down for now and enjoy some other things. Reflecting on the whole SoFoBoMo effort - I'm amazed at how much I learned, in such a short period of time. Adobe InDesign from scratch, in a few days. The ins and outs of basic typography and layout, enough that I could at least understand all the mistakes I'd made when Holly pointed them out. Enough to have not made many more along the way. Insights I gleaned about how a book should be structured. The front pieces and how they relate. The application of graphic design and the torture of trying to come up with a passable design. The issues around layout of pages and display of images. The struggle to take enough images and then to have enough good ones. The always twisted writing process. How little I enjoy editing what I've written after the first draft. The great sense of shared purpose between all the people participating. The fun and excitement of sharing your book with someone for the first time. It certainly makes me want to do it all again, some time soon. I'm just not sure if I can face up to trying to do another one in May. Going to mull it over for a few more days.

finish line in sight

I don't think I could take four times a year. I'm exhausted by just one attempt. Strung out, tired, burned out and ready to put my camera away for a few weeks. Or at least avoid shooting people for a while.

It has been quite surprisingly intense. I didn't think it would be this tough at the start. Portrait photography always does leave me tired, so I suppose that I shouldn't be too surprised to be exhausted after committing to a book of portraits in a month. It probably didn't help that I was struggling with man flu for the last 3 weeks either. Still, I've been surprised just how much really goes in to doing something like this, passably well. The shooting was only half the battle. Editing, finishing and laying out the pages took just as long. But the good news is - I finished the final layouts last night. It is done. All that is left is some proof reading and checking. I might still tweak some layout pieces and maybe get rid of one spread (I'm around 82 pages/sides - might drop it down to 80 sides, just to round it out). I still have a bit of work to do in creating the final PDF version and then also soft proofing and adjusting for a print version but that is all quite minor. I'm also playing around with using http://www.issuu.com for an online viewable book version. That will be yet another layout that needs to be done with a different number of pages. Then all that is left is the anxiety of showing it to people. Nobody has seen it yet. That changes this evening.

sofobomo : more layouts

I'm finding this part of the project the most painful. The shooting was a lot of fun, but now the editing and assembly is starting to drag. The images are mostly edited down and finished, so I've gotten over the hump of that. All I have to do is put them together in some sort of coherent and stylishly designed way. Or maybe just coherent and designed.

Hmm. This is all new. Anyway, here are some more sample layouts that I put together last night. Feedback as always is very welcome. With the realisation that each page doesn't need to be the same as long as they are somewhat related and consistent, the layout design became a much bigger issue than just dropping pictures on the page. Mostly that came from the understanding that just having the exact same layout and number of images on each page would be really boring. As I shot, I also found that some people were more expressive and willing to act up, giving me more material than others. Consequently, some pages deserve more images than others.

Both of those decisions increase the thought that goes into each page - how to lay it out, how many pictures to use, how to size them and so on. I'm trying to just let it flow and keep some design elements to pull it all together - the deep red blocks, white space. Making slow progress with this.

sofobomolimbo

The layout is mostly done. I kept it simple, a 6x6 underlying grid and then tried to align most of the elements to that in something of a consistent way. I like how it looks for now. The fonts are mostly settled. The text is written. A big chunk of the photos have been taken. Now all I have to do is start editing them, pick them, finish them off and start pulling it all together. One consideration I haven't quite got to grips with yet is when to do colour proofing and adjustment if I plan on doing blurb output. Do I lay out the images on the pages and then proof the entire page, or proof each image individually and then re-embed them. Any thoughts ? I can see that doing the images on their own will lead to more work and probably better results. If I embed them I run the risk of tweaking the colour for layout elements as well, so each page would be subtly or not so subtly different which will probably look bad. But if I do each image on its own, I'll basically have to lay the whole thing out twice. That doesn't seem right, either. (Once for a web ready, web proofed version and one as a print ready, soft proofed version). Must be missing something, I hope. Other than that, I'm feeling a bit blah. Got a cold or similar and can't seem to shake it. Isn't making me want to get out and shoot too much. Still, plenty of time! That and we finally filed our taxes for the year. Woohoo!

trial balloon: experiences with blurb.com

I've been ruminating on a couple of book ideas; for SoFoBoMo and another in progress and wanted to try out blurb.com as the printer. They seemed like one of the few PoD companies that would do decent photographic prints while also being geared up to at least allow some resale. I have a notion of creating a teaching book that people could purchase and blurb.com might well be a good outlet. I can revise and update the book as I go along, releasing new versions and potentially if there is interest use it as an avenue in to showing a publisher. I've tried other PoD companies, such as lulu.com and was very disappointed in the print quality. I've actually seen blurb.com books in person at trade shows and was reasonably impressed. The booksmart client software that they provide is not terrible. I don't relish the idea of authoring a book with much text in it though - in terms of desktop publishing support it is pretty basic. I think I'll use Adobe InDesign for layouts, then just paste full-bleed pages into blurb for a final print version. However, for this sample, I took a simpler approach. One picture per page, full bleed with a black background for the remainder of the page. I picked a somewhat funky font, made it large and kept things simple. For the book, I picked the cheapest hardback sample that I could put together, 7" square book, with about 15 pages - you could do more pages for the same price - up to 20 for the cheapest book - then you start paying an incremental cost per page. As this was a trial, I thought that would be enough. I selected and edited the images in Lightroom then exported them to Photoshop for a final tweak and colour profiling. The one thing I have heard are lots of horror stories about bad colour from blurb and other PoD companies. I'd found a colour profile for their printer and picked a challenging image for the cover - bright, lime-green with magenta highlights. Perfect. I switched on the soft proof in Photoshop and the defaults looked terrible. Muddy sickly yellow. Anemic colour, flat highlights, muddy shadows. But with a bit of tweaking, some selective colour adjustments to move away from the real lime green to another apparently printable green and some additional contrast, things were looking much better. I went through the same process with all the images, doing some radical adjustments to the original image, just to get it back to close to how I wanted it in the soft proof. That always concerns me, but I thought I'd go along with it.

Assembling the book was straightforward in booksmart. I uploaded the final version after some previewing and bought a copy. Surprisingly, the book shipped only a couple of days later - I'd expected a longer lead time. The book arrived in decent packaging, quickly and without any problems. There I had it, a few days later, a book of my photos! First thing is to notice how fantastic it is to have a hardbacked book of your images. There's a certain thrill to that that is difficult to replicate with online displays or even individual prints, mounted and framed or not. I know all I did was pay some money, there's no real validation involved, but it sure looks good! I've put together a few books for different purposes and the feeling hasn't gone away yet. The second thing to note is that 28 sides (14 pages) isn't very many. You end up with quite a slim volume, particularly in hardback. All cover and no content, if you aren't careful. The slip cover looked great - particularly that green I'd been worried about translated very well, close to how it looked in the soft proof. I'm impressed with how similar it all turned out - throughout the book. On the other hand, I think if I'd uploaded straight, unadjusted sRGB versions of the files I would have been quite disappointed. Some of the original colours just wouldn't have worked out at all. Blurb doesn't make a big deal out of mentioning this - it is there on their site, but they certainly don't push colour management and soft proofing. Something to watch for. The print quality is certainly not as good as I can get from my inkjet (an Epson R800), but is certainly well above acceptable on most of the images. There is a slightly visible cross-hatching in the smoother areas of some images, if you look particularly closely, but from a normal viewing distance all of the images look great. Some of those that were slightly less sharp than others really become more noticeable on the printed page. Also higher ISO black and whites lost a lot of the presence and depth that they have online. They just don't translate too well, the noise becomes more noticeable, the contrast isn't as strong and they just don't have the same amount of life. The one disappointment for SoFoBoMo is that booksmart isn't a simple way to get a PDF of your book. At least, not without a large watermark through each page. using pdf995 I was able to get a final PDF of the book from booksmart, but the layout is not great and the watermark is very visible. Might do in a pinch, though. I also made one rookie mistake, putting something too close to the edge of the slip cover. The cropping is probably about a quarter of an inch tighter than the previews - certainly you are well warned about this but I almost lost an eye from the cover! This particular book has a bar code printed on the rear. From blurb's blog it appears that different printers and different books may or may not end up with this bar code. I've also read that all of the books larger than 7" are printed on a slightly better printer, so the quality should improve even over this quite acceptable start. The binding seems solid, the book feels like a real book. The pages appear to be glued and stitched into a cloth-backed hard cover. It all looks professionally put together, though a bit skinny. A 14 page book cost $22.95 for the 7" hardcover, plus $8 shipping. It is the same price, up to the first 40 sides. Note that blurb refer to pages as each side of one physical piece of paper being one page for the cost calculation. An additional $3 doubles the page count and the book would start to feel more substantial. White space is your friend. Overall I'm happy with the results and plan on using blurb for a final copy of my SoFoBoMo book.

photography. book. now.

If your SoFoBoMo book happens to be better than just good enough, this might be an interesting home for it. Blurb just announced the PhotographyBookNow contest. Closing date is July 14th. Rules and FAQ didn't look like some sort of rights grab, at least at first glance. The photo ? It's another one from Death Valley. I've never seen it look like this before. A dramatic change from the rock and mud I found on the last trips. I feel lucky to have turned up at the right time, mostly by accident of birth.

SoFoBoMo

Paul Butzi is putting the finishing touches to the Solo Photo Book Month challenge. I want to urge you to take part. Not for me. Not for Paul. For you. But why would you want to put a book together ? All photographers seem to want to put a book together. It is a cool thing to do - to have a book of your images, in your hand. We print few enough images any more. Digital photographers have drives stuffed full of digital images and not enough printed. At least I fall in to that category and I suspect many of you do, too. Lots of unfinished images, cluttering up the place. Maybe some of them get released into the wild and end up on flickr. Even there though, they are seldom solid enough for you to really look at them. A single finished print teaches you a lot about the image that is hard to discover on a screen. A book is a different order of magnitude, again. Final. Solid. Scary.

That I think is why many of us don't do it. A book seems like such a big task. Daunting and also final. You have to commit to the content of it. Those pictures are there to last. So all the fears well up. I'm not good enough. I don't know how to do it. I don't think I can finish it. Who am I to be putting a book together? Well, why not ? Even if you are the only person who ever sees the finished book, you'll have achieved something. The end result is a completed, finished piece of work - as polished as you can make it. It might be a file generated with a free pdf printer from any word processor, or a presentation tool, even Microsoft works or Adobe InDesign. It could be a blurb.com or lulu.com print-on-demand work. Perhaps you use it as something to approach a publisher with. It might just stay on your hard drive, never to be seen by anyone other than you. But it would still be a finished book. With your name on the cover. How cool would that be ?

But a book is a big commitment and a lot of work. That to me is the beauty of the SoFoBoMo challenge. It isn't a huge commitment. It'll all be over in a month, one way or another. You'll either have a book, or you won't. It can't stretch out into a multi-year or multi-decade albatross around your neck. You finish it, or you don't. So the scale is a whole lot smaller. The opportunity to procrastinate and prevaricate over choices or deciding when it is done just isn't there. The required number of pictures isn't too high - 35 - but enough that you'll need to engage, think about it and make an effort. Along the way you'll learn about editing your images - making those final painful choices on what to include or not. You'll probably learn a bit about book layout, design and what goes in to making a book. You'll find out how good you are at working to a deadline - or not. You'll actually finish something. That in particular is powerful stuff. It forces you to make decisions and live with them. You might find you don't like those decisions afterwards and that way, you'll have learned more than if you never started. I'm sure once you finish the first one that the next book will be that much more like what you actually want to create. If you never finish, you'll never get to start the next one and the next one and the next one.

The challenge would also be a fantastic opportunity to pick a project and shoot images on a consistent theme or subject. Return to a theme multiple times. Explore it. Go a bit deeper than those great one off images you always take. Or start a new short-term project if you normally work on projects already.

So give it a go. Sign up and commit to participating in SoFoBoMo. Make a book.

book options

Larry Hayden pointed me towards a good review of various print on demand book publishing options. It seems that that reviewer favoured sharedink.com. I've looked at their books before at conventions and they are certainly high quality. very much in the portfolio or wedding album style, with a whole host of cover/binding options. The review is also not very positive for blurb.com, though I've been considering going with them. I think I need to put together a test book and get them to print it. The thing that does appeal about blurb is their client-side software for doing the book and text layout. I'm planning something that is probably half text/half photos so would really need some reasonable layout options. Blurb seem more biased towards that style of book than many of the other photo-centric options out there.

The flip side is I could do all the layouts myself and upload completed pages to various print on demand providers. That would require me to start learning about page design, layout software and so on. Interesting, but maybe just a side diversion from the real point ? I also found some useful resources on the blurb website. They have a book they sell, called how to make a book but you can also download the whole thing as a pdf and read it online. Sam Edge has written a helpful app note on colour management and soft proofing for blurb, that you can download here. There is also another note there on how to approach writing a book with a lot of text and using blurb's layout software. Jeff Curto has a good list of book publishing resources on his site, here. So - spend time worrying about layout, design, publishers and final look. Or get my head down and write the thing. I know which I should be doing. I also have a good idea which I'll end up getting caught up on for a few days.