Secrets

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I am working on a project, but I can't talk about it because the wrong person might read this post and find out about it too early. Drat. I'm not very good at keeping secrets—my own that is. If you tell me something and ask me to keep it private, my lips are sealed. I mean wild horses couldn't drag it out of me. But, if it's something I am up to, I'm worse than a kid before Christmas. Okay, I just have to give a hint. It's not another SoFoBoMo project—although I am sorely tempted, but it is somewhat related. Now, don't ask me again. Honestly, I could cave in and blow the whole thing.

Laying Low

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Another voice from the recovery ward. I thought Paul Butzi phrased it perfectly when stating that a couple of days ago he was “in the post-SoFoBoMo recovery”. While there was a flurry of activity on the blogs throughout April, I have noticed that many of the participants in the project have been quieter than usual since books were completed. I suppose the dialogue will pick up again once the May group gets rolling, but apparently I am not the only one moving rather slowly for a while.

I am a bit overwhelmed with some things that aren’t nearly as much fun and not nearly as exciting as another photo book. But, this won’t last forever.

Synchronicity

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(I don't know what happened to this post and how it got lost, but I have re-published it. I may have the date wrong, but it went up sometime in early May.)

Today, I awoke in a reflective mood and began to draft some notes in an attempt to state some thoughts and feelings about the place of art projects in my everyday life. After getting close to what I was trying to say, I detoured to read the posts on some of my favorite blogs. I normally do that first with my breakfast, but decided to get really rebellious this morning and shake things up a bit. What a surprise. I found others talking about similar issues, and far more effectively than what I had scribbled and set aside for a moment (those notes still languinsh unfinished). It appears the synchronicity of experiences produced by the SoFoBoMo project may not yet have run its course.

Okay, Folks—That’s a SoFoBoMo Wrap

The book is done.

Here is the link: http://www.framinglightphotography.com/one_last_look.pdf
[Note: Designed to view “two-up” (View—Page Display—Two-Up, Show Gaps, Show Cover Page During Two-Up)]

It’s too late to make any more changes. It is what it is. Whew! What a trip. Ups and downs, chug-holes, bridges out, signals not working, detours, and dead ends—and all in all splendid, priceless, and unforgettable.

When I was growing up, I begged my mother to tell me this story more than once. Mom grew up on a farm in Texas and one day, her grandfather took her out with him in the wagon behind a fresh team. Some portion or other of the rigging broke, spooking the horses, and they took off across the rough terrain out of control and with plenty of energy to burn. My great-grandfather was holding on to the useless reins for dear life and trying to be certain that his tiny, screeching granddaughter was staying put on the seat beside him. After what was for the driver a hair-raising, out-of-control race, up and down gullies, scraping rocks, and bouncing off logs, the horses finally tired, and the poor man dared to take a breath. When the team slowed to a walk, he turned pale and shaken, to the tyke next to him and before he could offer any comfort she blurted through a big grin, “That was fun, Grandpa. Do it again.”

I'm with that little girl on the wagon seat. Let’s do it again.

SoFoBoMo Final Stretch

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As I make my way through the final stages on my book, I am shaking my head over some of the discoveries.

1. This isn’t the book I intended to make. When I signed up for SoFoBoMo, I was looking forward to trying my hand at producing an elegant book with a small number of images (close to the required limit) that would somewhat accurately represent the best work I am capable of at this point in my life and still stay within the time limits. I thought I was making a book to learn about producing a photo book and get past the fears of tackling such a mammoth project, so I would be encouraged to later produce such a book without the time constraints. I intended to be shrewd and disciplined by including little text—to make it a photo book in the purest sense of the term. That decision would allow me to focus exclusively on the images and the layout thus saving valuable time. Instead, I ended up making something that met almost none of my initial objectives.

2. The book has turned out to be bulky (plenty of text, after all), and a much bigger mess than I thought I could tolerate, but each time I have tried to make it fit into anything vaguely resembling that elegant image in my mind, the whole thing fell apart and became so utterly meaningless that I couldn’t bear to finish it.

3. Choosing a very personal focus for my book ended up being a double-edged sword. The hunger to capture images that would later serve as a bittersweet reminder of the home I have loved for twenty years provided the emotional heat that powered me through the long hours, but perhaps melted my brain. The book is a mass of contradictions and examples of a project gone berserk. For example, there are far too many images in the book for the project I wanted to produce and only about half enough to satisfy the hunger that drove the work. Furthermore, while I envisioned something simple and elegant, the final product is sprawling, decidedly untidy, and as much in need of pruning as the locations that I photographed.

4. Ultimately, this is a reminder that all creative endeavors are a messy business and filled with unpredictability—indeed, for many of us that is part of its joy. I am pretty much spent and have left for myself this one day for proofing text and finding assorted gremlins.

5. The journey has been frustrating, exhausting, inspiring, and I have crammed more new information into my head in the two months of preparation and execution than I dreamed possible. Still, I am grateful that I lost my head and signed up to be part of this madness.

Bitter in Los Angeles

Once again, the bad guys have ruined something the rest of us treasured. The gang that recently converged on Gabrieleno Park leaving their garbage behind after firing their weapons (either at one another or in the air, who knows) have shut down the park for evenings. Effective immediately, the entire area will close at sunset. Still another example of why so many of us flee what were so few years ago vibrant, family-friendly neighborhoods. While we don’t live in the area adjacent to the park, many of our friends do and the park and the surrounding area—including the arena, have been favorite places for us. If I were staying here, I would be fighting mad. As it is, it just makes me terribly, terribly sad that we stand by and cede our cities to outlaws, while a law-abiding citizen must risk a fine—or something far worse, for wanting to stay out on Haul Road long enough to drink in moments like the one above.

I know it’s not smart to write about such a hot topic when overtired and steaming mad. But, this kind of stuff keeps chipping away at our lives and it’s infuriating.

SoFoBoMo Mirage

Would you post a blowup of this shot? I didn't think so. Now that I think about it, I am embarrassed I put my name on it. I was just desperate to find something for this post.

No, I didn’t move to the desert and change my name. But, I thought about it. More than once. For now, I’m hangin’ on ‘cuz I can see that finish line way over yonder, if I squint my eyes real tight. I think I can even see two or three fellers standing there wavin’ this direction. I’m just gonna keep on headin’ that way, and I reckon I’ll be there come Wednesday or Thursday—if this rig’ll hold up and the mules don’t croak.

But, I’m not getting punchy or anything.

P.S. I changed the title of this post this morning because silly as this is, it does relate to SoFoBoMo.

Inching Along

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Bear Valley business all day yesterday—no layout, no pictures, no editing—just the four hours of driving chews up a big chunk of the day. (Thank goodness we enjoy the drive and the opportunity to celebrate yet again the beauty of the landscape.) The day before, I got a minimum done on SoFoBoMo. That means today is a major catch-up day. Overall, I am inching my way along—putting photos in the layout and doing it, I’m afraid, in the most haphazard, unconventional manner—just winging it at this point, working with Pagemaker and taking advantage of the layout space around my pages and planning to shuffle things about as I go. I can't tell you how radical that is for me. With a project such as this one, my first language is planning. This is a big part of this exercise for me—letting go of old work habits and experimenting with new possibilities.

So far, I am hanging on to my determination to let go and just do it. I have officially given up regaining confidence in what I have to work with so far. The best part is that I can look at pictures I don’t much like anymore and accept them as where I was at the time, and each day I am moving forward. So far, I would have to say that the SoFoBoMo project has been one of my most favorite ever exercises. My purpose was to deal with exactly these issues.
Periodically, I have come perilously close to falling for the temptation to put the idea away and wait until I am better prepared, have better photos, get the layout just right, and on and on. I signed up to see if I could break some barriers and I am shattering them with glee.

In the meantime, the prodigies, Gordon M and Paul L have posted their beautiful books and they are truly inspiring. I will return to their sites for a boost of energy several times over the next few days, as I huff and puff toward the end—I suppose a little like those marathoners who shuffle across the finish line at the end looking bedraggled with feet dragging and glazed eyes.

SoFoBoMo Maps

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The more satisfaction (along with frustration and doubt) I face in the pursuit of this SoFoBoMo brass ring the more grateful I am for doing this as part of a group. I have long been fascinated by the component of the human psyche that frequently convinces each of us that whatever we are going through no one else is suffering it, or anything like it. Indeed, at our lowest and least enlightened moments (especially when we are younger) we tend to think that no one—ever in the history of mankind—has gone through whatever trial it is we are asked to endure. We are social animals and most of us take comfort in knowing that we aren’t alone in a trial.

Hey, that certainly describes my experience in the pursuit of my photo book. But now, when I lose my way, I can, with a couple of clicks of the mouse, read someone else’s report of a struggle eerily similar to my own. Invariably, I find an answer to a perplexing question, a question I should be asking myself, inspiration to stay with it, or just the comfort of knowing someone else is going through this, too. At any rate, I don’t so much waste valuable time fretting and flailing about. After all, to the right and the left of me, there are others whacking away at the brush having also lost their way.

All this got me thinking some wicked thoughts. For a few seconds one morning, I thought wouldn’t it be great if Paul Butzi declared a SoFoBoMo season at least four times a year? That would mean that pretty much whenever you found yourself with a block of time you could devote to this madness, you would find a community of photographers going through the process along with you. The more I thought about that the more I doubted its efficacy. Compressing the activity into a shorter period and creating a larger group of participants almost certainly results in greater diversity of personalities and levels of expertise, thus more current material available on the subject at a given point. More seasons would likely dilute the impact of the challenge.

Perhaps each time I tackle this photo book challenge, I will have to return to the blogs from the most recent SoFoBoMo season and re-read the wealth of material. I think re-visiting all the posts put up so far would make a great read. The pipes that Gordon and Paul L have set up make a big difference now. (I am enjoying my Google Alert set-up. This offers another easy way of keeping up. I am not certain at this point which I prefer.) Still, when the information is no longer current, I don’t want to lose easy access to it. It seems that everyone is tagging all their related posts to facilitate searches. I hope so. Later, those of us in need of inspiration can easily track down all the information. I find myself wishing that one of the web-savvy, software geniuses would just put together some terrific online encyclopedia that would gather up all this wealth of material. (Hey, I can dream, can’t I?) In the meantime, I acted on impulse a couple of days ago and ordered a book by Stephen Johnson called, Making a Digital Book. I don’t expect it to be nearly as useful as the posts by the SoFoBoMo-ers.

Messy Business

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Yesterday, I set up a Google Alert to notify me about postings on SoFoBoMo. Those e-mails have offered a welcome relief from what has been a hellish day so far—brought to us by the nut job of a guy who was negotiating to buy The Husband’s business. (Fortunately, there is another deal in the works with what appears to be a sane person.) So, this first guy backed out of the deal, whining about how he didn’t like the terms of the deal he had agreed to, and now he is tossing around warnings about imminent phone calls from his lawyer and screaming about how we tried to “railroad” him and we are "ungrateful". Honest to goodness, it’s black helicopter time for this guy. Still, his phone calls, e-mails, and irrational demands have put a major kink in our day by creating a great deal of work that hadn't been scheduled into the plan.

Other than that, the day has centered around the personal confusion brought on by working on my photo book. Of course, as soon as I started dropping photos and text into my layout, I began to see the flaws in the design. Suddenly, the layout I had been so content with looked far too staid for my content. Furthermore, I had to face the fact that if I stuck with the design I had, either I would have to omit a number of photos that I really want in this very personal book, or I would have to spend a fortune printing the book. Decision time.

After going back and forth on the layout until I was dizzy, I found a fresh approach. The new layout is more complex than the original one—that means more layout work, more processing, and many more decisions per page, not to mention more photographs to suit it. How could that be?! Still it seems to the right direction. At least, for now.

As if that weren’t enough, all the photos have, overnight, turned to dreck. I can’t remember why I ever wanted to put any of them in a book. Okay, that’s too crazy even for me. I must have seen something that appealed to me.

For over two weeks, I was having way too much fun to give the deadline a thought. As of today, I am officially starting to get nervous. How did it get to be the 21st?