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.

SoFoBoMo Early Lessons

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In the process of collecting on my free Shutterfly book, I learned a few things. Filling in the provided template is simple. Inserting your own pages created in Photoshop is no fun at all. Working in Blurb, on the other hand, makes inserting those pages produced in Photosop quite doable. I may not make my final decision based on this single piece of information, but for me, it puts Blurb way ahead in the race for POD.

Trying to Get Off the Roller-Coaster

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I have been pretty busy this past week just hanging on through a dizzying ride of ups and downs. Within two and half weeks of our first open house, we had two excellent offers. Pretty amazing for this lousy market. We were giddy. Then we crashed to earth. One offer could still come through, the other may have gone forever. At one point, we had a schedule set up that would have had us here through April—meaning I would have done my SoFoBoMo project here and then dealt with moving in May, but that plan went south and now there are just more question marks. I got a surprise present from good old Shutterfly (I had tested their service a couple of years ago) offering me a free 8x8 photo book. Hooray! A great practice run in case I decided to go that route for printing. My deadline was March 26. Meantime, I pounced on the wonderful information Gordon McGregor posted regarding printing at Blurb and began burning some midnight oil. I collected a batch of images and, with my newly installed profile, I tweaked them to match the profile. Whoa talk about out of gamut colors—not a pretty sight! Of course, it was the perfect time for a glitch in a hard drive. I won’t start talking about how much I lost, because if I do I will cry and we all know that you don’t want to get a keyboard wet. Not a good thing.

Well, on the roller coaster, the thrills never end. Ultimately, I had to look at the realties of the timing on our house sale and the rigors of a 30 day escrow that could start any day. The SoFoBoMo project appears to be out of reach. (For one day, I considered going to Pope Paul (that’s Butzi, of course, whom I have named The Instigator) for special dispensation on the start date, but after reading his post today on “Jumping the Gun”, I’m glad I didn’t. Whew! He’s tough. (Only kidding, Paul) Seriously, I know I can always do this solo once we are finally settled and I know where I will be the following week. However, Paul is so right about the value of doing this along with the group. For today—don’t even ask how many times I have come up with a different scenario—I plan to begin my project April 1 and face the fact that I will likely have to suspend work if we go into escrow. I will almost certainly miss the deadline. At some point when this is all over, I will finish the project. I can limit myself to a total thirty days spent on the project and celebrate the learning experience, then look forward to next year—that is if anyone is left standing and foolish enough to sign up again. Meanwhile, I can work like mad to learn as much as possible, do what I can, and celebrate the efforts of other participants.

It has been an intense week filled with growth opportunities. (Sometimes, don’t you just hate growing?) I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about the vagaries of the real estate game. I threw together a twenty page book for the free Shutterfly offer (hey, it gives me an opportunity to see how my normal editing holds up for their printing process). I experimented with a couple of cover designs and got past some of the intimidation posed by that job. I bought two new 500 gig hard drives and vowed to never trust another drive (I know, I know. It was only a matter of time) and to stop forever using Lightroom as a primary storage system. Details would only put my keyboard at risk. (I can’t say I wasn’t warned about Lightroom’s quirky and proprietary storage either.) I familiarized myself with the frustrations of adjusting to the Blurb profile and survived the shock. On the real estate front, we continue showing the house to a few prospects, while I strip more and more of the things from the house that make it warm, cozy, and mine.

Do they have a merry-go-round at this carnival?

Software Puzzles

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This past week, I celebrated having survived our first Open House and spent some time exploring the possibilities of laying out the photo book in my creaky old Pagemaker. I have an early version of InDesign, but just never could get anywhere with it—not that I had ever become a power user of Pagemaker. To complicate matters, I have seldom opened that program during the last three or four years. Furthermore, I decided that I had better learn to compress a PDF for posting on the web—another new skill. Not surprisingly, I stumbled about quite a bit.

For some reason, I couldn’t remember how to number the blasted pages in Pagemaker and floundered around in Help before finally solving the mystery. I had only ever used Adobe Acrobat for the purpose of creating simple PDF's limited to two or three pages. Up until now, compression hadn’t been an issue. I still don’t know exactly what date I will begin my SoFoBoMo project, but these are the sort of things that I wanted to work out before April 1. I certainly won’t want to devote two out of my thirty allotted days to stumbling about in the Pagemaker and Acrobat Help sections. So far, so good. Pagemaker will never be my favorite program, but horses for courses, as the saying goes.

Sofobomo – The Next Chapter

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Tuesday I was so relieved to have settled on a theme for my SoFoBoMo project that I couldn’t get to my camera fast enough. For most of that day, I shot as though my hair was on fire. Yesterday, I was exhausted from the adrenalin high and only experimented a bit with a different lens. I have spent much of today agonizing over a book cover. Of course all this activity, is the result of my struggle to refine both my theme and my plan for execution.

I have these recurring visions of someone viewing my book and asking, “Why did you make this book? What is it about.” “Because a bunch of other people signed up for a a challenge and I thought I would give it a go” isn’t an acceptable answer. That’s what has had me stewing. Okay, I’m making a photo book. What is it about? Will I produce a collection of thirty-five mediocre images that collectively scream—these photographs were taken for no other reason than to get to the magic number of thirty-five. For at least a week, I felt the title of my book should be “Sharp Images of Fuzzy Concepts”, because I was haunted by the famous Ansel Adams quote. Can I clearly define what this book is about—why it should be made? Am I clear enough about what I want to say? And, just as importantly, can I say it well?

While Paul Butzi has laid claim to “the stupidest idea ever beheld”, I may have to challenge him on that when all is said and done. After much agonizing, I have committed to a theme that has some emotional heat for me; now, I wonder whether I can come close to making pictures that will convey some of the very feelings that have produced the heat. My subject is saying goodbye to a place that has been my home for twenty years. I will make my thirty-five pictures within a radius of about five miles of our home here in the San Fernando Valley in California. This is the very small world where I spend most of my time—our house, the yard, the barn area where the horses are stabled a couple of miles away, and an area along the Little Tujunga Wash, between the stable and our house. So, I finally know what I want to photograph and why. Now, comes the issue of successful execution. Can I bring a viewer into my simple little universe—the places where I spend, by far, most of my time—and put across some of the feelings of melancholy I am already experiencing at the prospect of leaving it behind? Or, will the passion be strong, yet the craft weak?

I confess that I had not wanted to immerse myself in these feelings about another ending. But, here I am plunging into the abyss. There is no easy way out of this. The feelings will supply the energy and inform the work. To deny the feelings is to turn off the energy supply. Best to not snuff out the flame. Predictably, I will waste some time trying to worm my way out of the pain that goes with the experience and rely on the “understanding” of purpose to get the job done. Nope. It doesn’t work that way. Red Smith’s observation on the ease of writing included in William Bronaugh’s book, “Just Open a Vein” says it all. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” If we set out to create—regardless of the medium—there is no getting around the struggle. What SoFoBoMo amounts to is that a whole gang of us have elected to—if I may paraphrase Red Smith—pick up a camera and open a vein. I suppose the only sensible course is to take comfort in the observation made by more than one participant that it won't last forever. They are right, of course. A month will fly by. No, wait. That last part isn't comforting, at all.