Sleeplessness from the series Insomnia – Hotel Noir photographs by Douglas Stockdale
At the moment, I am working my way through the series as I concurrently develop my book dummy, estentially editing the storyline. At this point in time, I have approximately 50 photograhs that I am considering. Now I am testing each photograph as to my feelings as I react to it, its ability to support the series, if it creates enough ambuguity, where it should be in the sequence of the storyline.
Seems that I arrived at this place in a real roundabout way. I have come to expect that the development of a series to be messy, start and stops and going sidewides too, just not a linear progression. Well anyhow, not a linear straight forward path for me.
So now I am in that difficult zone of editing. But I compensate that by moving slowly through the progression of testing and building the book dummy, enjoying and savoring each photograph and each step of this progress. Because isn’t that a big part of what this is all about?
As a business guy, I know that I get toooo goal oriented, as new products need to be developed, validated, get approval and then launched. And the business milestones don’t take into account that product development is also a messy process, as things never seem to go as planned. Although my business gets evaluated as to how well we hit those milestones. So it is nice to not be as obsesed about meeting specific milestones and just enjoy the day and the process.
So I did finish the photograph above, making the tweaks to the tonal range, balance of the light, contrast the relative relationships within the picture. nice.
And I loaded this photograph into what I think should be the sequential location within the book dummy. In this case I have two concurrent book dummies, the Blurb Booksmart virtual dummy, as well as my printed physical dummy.
I have now started to build this series on my web site, with a goal of ten images from the series. I felt comfortable enough now to open the link on the web site to allow access to the details of the series, even though it is not complete yet.
BTW as to this photograh, indeed a sleepless night in the Eastern part of China, due to a lot of changes and just trying to get my body time re-adjusted to the 9 hour difference with home in SoCal. So amazing sometimes how much activity is still occuring in the middle of the night. sigh.
Best regards, Doug
