Utah

Spent a week driving around Utah, camping, taking pictures and having a great time. Will be posting photos over the next few weeks but here's a quick taste. Great scenery, great weather and a good chance to take one or two SoFoBoMo images.

form and function

A good read on the distinction between definite and formless content for books. Also touches on how content should be designed for a device like the iPad. Photobooks strike me as often really just formless content - a sequence of images with no real design or layout happening. In fact, often the idea of design around the photographs is rejected as getting in the way or trying to make up for poor images. In that respect, the iPad and similar devices may be a better home for photobooks than the printed page. Potentially (eventually) better dynamic range, reproduction accuracy, colour control. If the original images are digital, then we'd also avoid the one step removed distance of trying to print the images too. Lots of half-formed thoughts swirling around in my head on this topic.

Austin Icons

Slowly coming to realise that SoFoBoMo kicks off next week. Life has been running me ragged recently, but I'm starting to form some ideas. Just picked up an iPad and I think my SoFoBoMo effort this year is going to be targeting an iPad format e-book. I still need to give some thought on what that means, but that's the end goal for me this time around. I think there is the potential for this to be the realization of a lot of the things Scott McCloud was talking about that I picked up on last year. An window onto an infinite canvas, rather than a series of pages. Not entirely sure how or if I plan on exploiting that but the potential is intriguing.  

For a topic, I just recently passed my 10 year anniversary of moving to the US so I'm thinking of reflecting and inspecting Austin and the sights that have inspired me over the last 10 years. Something of a retrospective, introspective tour of Austin's landmarks and iconography. We'll see how that changes or survives as a concept as I start to shoot.

wife stalking

Meanwhile, Paul has a good post on the current state of SoFoBoMo, where the buzz is, how you can help. I'm still cogitating on what my topic is going to be. Maybe rediscovering the love affair with my camera might be a good way to go.

Get your cameras ready

SoFoBoMo'10 is coming soon. The fuzzy window will run from June 1, 2010 to July 31, 2010. The rules will be unchanged from previous years. More details and the new web site to come.

inner workings

One of the more unusual SoFoBoMo books I've seen this year is Paulo J. B. Mendes book, Inner Workings. This is a simple concept, exploring the inner details of electrical instruments from the middle of the last century. Superficially not the most visually exciting idea, but Paulo pulls it off with a simple style. Clean, well lit images illuminate how the instruments are constructed and what's going on behind the metal and bakelite facades. As an electrical engineer I'm probably in a small minority of potential viewers who are fascinated by this sort of thing-I loved this book. I understand if you don't share my enjoyment of this book, but I think that's a big part of what SoFoBoMo is all about. You don't have to make a book that has to appeal to a mass market, but you can make a book that can let you explore what you love and still find an audience. If you are interested in how things work, then take a look at Paulo's book and see what's inside.

bottom up

If you want a treat, check out Alexandre Buisse's SoFoBoMo book, Bottom Up. Some luscious, otherworldly landscapes. Jaw dropping mountain scenery, blue footed boobies, bright red frigate birds and a 6354m mountain climb. Great images. Makes me want to go and climb a mountain.

mama-san say...

Deb Hall has put together an inspired portrait of her mother, for SoFoBoMo. Some lovely images, great individual portraits that made me laugh out loud, and wise words combine to give an insight into the person that her mama-san is. One of the best parts of SoFoBoMo is getting to see what other people are capable of putting together within the constraints of the challenge. This is a fine example and worth taking the time to look. Great.

on the edge

April Siegfried's SoFoBoMo book, On the Edge , starts out with some dramatic design and bold typography. The strong edge placement sets the tone for some very well thought-out layout. The images don't disappoint either, making me smile, feel sad or amused in new ways on each page. She has brought a good eye for colour and light and applied it to a very simple concept - edges. The turns that this simple concept takes are delightful, finding new twists on the idea through the book, enough to keep things interesting. This serves as a great example that projects don't have to have lofty goals or broad remits. The project idea is just the thing that motivates you to go and take the pictures. It doesn't have to be addressing world peace or famine. I think sometimes we get caught up in needing to find something worthy, when the theme really isn't that important at all, as long as it gets you moving.

17 to Portland

Amy Sakurai's love affair with Portland continues in her 2009 SoFoBoMo book, 17 to Portland. Last year she sent a love letter, this time around we go for a ride with the city, along the number 17 bus route. I thought this was a great idea to tie the images together on a theme. I also enjoyed how she used a graphic of the bus stops to tie the sections together as a repeating design element. The writing is good, too, giving some insights into the shooting and hectic schedule. I was particularly tickled by the driver's bemusement about why she was shooting just the #17 route. Because it is special. That captures one of the things I love about photography. We can use it to explore anything in such detail that what might appear to be mundane can be made special, just by the attention and care. Amy does that in this slice of life in Portland.

clear light, high country

Ron Dowd is a lucky man. You can tell this by looking at the stunning scenery he got to explore while making his 2009 SoFoBoMo book, clear light, high country. This ten day trip around New Zealand takes in a lot of ground. Mountains, lakes, farmland, all unroll in front of Ron's burnt orange Camry and camera. I'm struck how much New Zealand reminds me of Scotland, not just because they seem to have pinched many of the same place names. Dramatic light, high mountains, threatening clouds and snow all conspire to provide a great road trip and some lovely images.

lightness

Somehow I struggled through and finished SoFoBoMo, just in time. About 37 other people have reached the finished point and uploaded their books to the site now. I've started looking through the books put together by the other participants and there are some impressive results.

So far, I really enjoyed the photography and layout in Julie Matkin's book, Lightness. The images are beautiful, with a lovely sense of timelessness and gorgeous light. I feel transported to a beach, long ago. I also liked the non-standard layout on one long, wide PDF page. Once you get the zoom level set right in the PDF viewer, the images just unroll in front of your eyes. Worth a look. It creates a great sense of place.

around the bend

Finished off my SoFoBoMo book this evening, right on the last day to get it done. I put more effort into the pictures this time around but quite a bit less into the book design. I borrowed heavily on the work I did last year for the layout and inDesign templates, although I've sized it for a blurb 11x13 book. Not sure I'll get around to it any time soon, but the book is done! You can download the version from SoFoBoMo.org, or flick through the Issuu presentation. I prefer the pdf version, if I had to choose. All images, editing and layout done in the last 31 days.

big bend

A couple more Enfuse HDR-like blends from Big Bend, both playing upon the idea of repeating shapes and rhythm. In the shot on the left, of Santa Elena canyon, the repeating V shape of the cliffs, in the water and also in the smaller rocks in the foreground. For the skulls on the wall, at the Gage hotel, the clouds were kind enough to form similar shapesto both the smaller skulls and also the overall arrangement.

enthusiastic about enfuse

I've dabbled with HDR photography a bit in the past, but always felt the results were quite cartoonish. The saturation is often off the charts and the local contrast added by most tone mapping algorithms typically seems very heavy handed, for what I want to achieve. While that is a perfectly valid thing to do, it just doesn't appeal to me that much. I have managed to do some more realistic HDR images, using the Wukong beta/ Essential HDR product from Imaging Luminary but since I moved to a Mac, I haven't been able to use their software. I started looking for something similar for OS X and got a recommendation for Enfuse. This is an open-source solution to the problem, that takes quite a different approach to blending the exposures.

Instead of generating a merged, high dynamic range image with floating point pixel values, the enfuse algorithm picks out from across the various exposures what it considers to be the best exposed pixels for a particular region, then merges them all together. There is some level of control for the user; to provide masks, or bias it towards keeping contrast or saturation in the image. The algorithm can also automatically align images, if you haven't shot them all on a tripod. I've found that the defaults work well to merge a well exposed set of images. The resulting merged image is then a great starting point for further adjustments.

While Enfuse is open source and available for free, I've been using an Adobe Lightroom plugin that is sold as donationware, by Timothy Armes. The LR/Enfuse plugin simplifies running the merge from Lightroom. I just have to select the various exposures and run the plugin to get a merged result back in Lightroom, ready for further adjustment.

Many years ago I learned to shoot pretty wide brackets around a given exposure when I'm working on a tripod. With digital, the brackets are essentially free and this ensures you have all the data you might need to merge exposures back at home. Particularly when working with fleeting light or in hard to get to locations, I'd rather shoot a few more frames at the time, than wish I had them when I got home. I'll typically pick a working f-stop, based on the depth of field I want in the scene, then shoot at one stop intervals around the metered exposure, from -2EV, -1EV, 0, +1EV and +2EV. I normally do this in Aperture Priority mode, so that only the shutter speed is changing, but the depth of field is constant. In some cases, if there are particularly extreme lighting situations, I might shoot another stop above or below those as well, but I've found that five stop increment is often more than I need, particularly shooting around twilight. These 5 exposures give me a great starting point to blend for a final image. In the past I might have processed them as multiple exposures and then layered them in Photoshop, using masks to pick out particular parts of the image. Now they are a great starting point for Enfuse. In the example above, the porch of the building was in really heavy shadow, in the noon day sun, so I've shot 6 exposures, to get some detail and deep colour in the shadow areas (in the lightest exposure, to the far right), while still trying to keep some detail in the white, reflective roof (in the leftmost exposure).

To run the merge, I pick the darkest exposure that still had the right levels for the lightest parts of the image and the same at the other end, selecting the lightest exposure that had the shadow values that I wanted. I then use those as the outliers and pick all the in-between exposures and run the Enfuse plugin. I haven't tried varying the default values yet, as it has given consistently good results from the images I took in Big Bend. Enfuse is a great option if you are interested in working with scenes with a large range of tonalities or extremes of lighting, but want to try to produce more natural results. The price is right too. There are other GUIs available for Enfuse, if you don't like using Lightroom. I haven't had any experience with these, but options such as EnfuseGUI do exist if you wanted to avoid Lightroom and also the command line.

balmorhea

Balmorhea is great state park, out 'near' Big Bend national park. Spring fed by the San Solomon Springs, 72-76F all year, huge, flowing at a rate of 22 to 28 million gallons per day and in the middle of the desert. Just what you need after a hot day. These shots were all taken with the Canon G10, using the underwater housing (WP-DC28). Everything worked, even though I was a bit apprehensive the first time getting into the water with the camera. Easy to use, almost all of the controls (apart from the rear dial) work.

star party

At the McDonald observatory, Fort Davis, Tx. Shot with moonlight and the red safety lights they use, to help preserve your night vision. The observatory does a few tours and star viewing sessions a week. I was really impressed by how good their presentations were and how well they explained things. Learned a few ideas that really helped through the whole week. Also got to see Saturn through a big telescope - could see the rings really clearly and a couple of the moons. It was almost a full moon last week, hence all the bright moonlight in this shot, shining off all 3 domes. Was also great for actually viewing the moon directly.

I've done the first pass on the images I took last week, cut away about 75% of the shots so far, down to a final selection of close to 500. There are quite a few potential HDR shots in there, maybe 100 or so frames to be combined as and when I work out a workflow for doing them. Getting there slowly.

ghost town graveyard

This is from the graveyard in the Terlingua ghost town. I photographed here about 5 years ago and never really felt I got something that gave a sense of the place. I think I did a bit better this time around. I took more time, thought about what I wanted to show. Still working on the early selects for SoFoBoMo and doing very quick processing on a few images as I go along.

a long journey

The technical guff is almost done. Soon be time to actually start finding images and doing some editing. Least all the pictures are taken, for good or ill. The final totals; 2045 miles driven. 2185 exposures taken. About 21 miles hiked. My feet and shutter finger are sore.

Yes, that's a moai, overlooking stonehenge. It was a strange trip in many ways.

the aftermath

So back home and now trying to manage the rest of the SoFoBoMo process. Haven't really even started looking at the images, never mind editing any of them. Just shuffling around the 20Gb, 2000+ image files, renaming them, backing them up, getting previews set up and that sort of thing, ready to start looking at what I took. I've picked out a few that have caught my eye and done a quick edit, like this one above and the previous two posts. I've got no idea if they will make the cut for the final book. I don't even know what the final book is going to be about - probably just bundled under the theme of 'road trip'. I'm sure Colin Pantall has a 'how not to photograph' that addresses that sort of random collecting head on, but it is what I have.

Process while traveling was pretty straight forward. Shoot things that interested me. Drive Amanda crazy. Repeat. Then in the few evenings when we had power, dump the contents of the CF cards to my very small and underpowered linux laptop drive and also to a removable backup drive. These were then stored separate from each other, so that if someone stole my camera bag, or broke into the car, or stole the car, I'd at least have the backups and a story for the insurance company. I did no editing and almost no review all last week. No time, too small a screen, limited power for the camera to even chimp much, particularly when trying to do night shots (long exposure equals quick battery drain). The fun part of that is that a week later I'm now actually hopefully going to start getting to see the images. (when this backup actually finishes) The bad I suppose is that I could well have screwed up many days of things without realising it and it would be about 500 miles for a retake.

The other thing I'm finally getting to grips with, spurred on by SoFoBoMo is calibrating this new Mac and getting things like Adobe Photoshop actually configured again. All things I should have done a few weeks ago when I got the computer, but laziness always finds a way. I shot quite a few images with the thought or potential to make HDR versions of the results, even though I've never tried it with the Mac OS X HDR software options (which I don't currently know much about - any reviews, raves, suggestions there? comments very welcome).

This evening then is mostly book-keeping, fiddling, renaming, filing, sorting and getting ready to start getting ready. All busy work really but essential I suppose, if I'm going to get this random assortment of stuff into some sort of book shape. Should be fun.

The image above was taken in Big Bend National Park, in the Chisos Mountains basin. There was a fair bit of pre-planning involved - picking the right camp site, with the right view of Casa Grande, on the right day that the moon was going to rise over it, as a full moon. The tent was partially pitched with this shot in mind (and mostly pitched with how the ground sloped in mind, too) There was a large helping of luck involved too, I didn't expect the moon to rise quite so perfectly over the corner of the big mountain. That actually was painful because it meant the moon shadow was all around us for a good hour before the light really actually touched our campsite - quite frustrating if you wanted to get some sleep!

For lighting, I put a Canon 580EX II speedlite in the tent, with a full CTO gel over the flash. The tent was already orange and red, but I wanted to use the CTO gel so that I could shoot in Tungsten white balance, to really get the deep, midnight blue into the clear night sky. The CTO gel and Tungsten white balance cancel out for the tent lighting, returning it to the already red/ orange appearance. I used a Canon ST-E2 remote trigger to control the flash in TTL mode and then just waited for the moon to rise and worked out a reasonable exposure, stopped down quite far to give enough depth of field to get the mountain silhouette sharp and the tent in focus. The stopped down aperture also causes the bright moon to create the ray/ star effect.