Insomnia – book almost complete

SideGate from the series Insomnia: Hotel Noir

It looks like I should be able to make the July 15th deadline for my Blurb book submission, as I just loaded this photograph, SideGate, as a full bleed image into my Booksmart page.

That leaves just one more photograph to go, and I have already completed most of the fine tune tweaking for it. And I just may have to let the photobook reviews drift a little bit, having just published Roger Ballen’s Boarding House on The PhotoBook. Next photobook review in line is David Maisel’s Library of Dust.

So now I need to get into the final editing in preparation of uploading it to Blurb. Also thinking that Insomnia will be available on the Blurb bookstore both as softcover and hardcover in the large 11 x 13″ size. At this point, it is probably getting to  where I need to convert the reporting of this project to the blog that I set up for Insomnia, at www.insomniahotelnoir.wordpress.com

Now, I set this book specific blog up, trying to follow my own advice on what to do in order to promote your own book. So I will soon seems what happens, eh?

Okay, then what do I write about here? Probably the other odds and ends stuff that comes up, and guess what? Once I complete this project, clear the decks, it is time to start working on my next project!

Wish I knew which one that will be…..but I still have a couple of weeks, eh?

Best regards, Doug

AwayStation revised

AwayStation from the series Insomnia: Hotel Noir

Well after a little too long of a hiatus, I have found my Insomnia files that seemed to have been crawling around in the garage during the studio re-model. Well, I could not find them, and I certainly would know where I had stored them, eh?

I think the kick in the pants to sort through the piles of boxes (yes, the studio is still in a bit of chaos) was the interview I in the middle of with Darius Himes, the lead judge for Blurb’s Photography.Book.Now, that I will be publishing on The PhotoBook in the next couple days.  The submission deadline of July 16th is rapidly approaching. Yikes.

And I still have five images to finish prepping. sigh.

So where did I leave off? The photograph of the AwayStation (above) when I initially prepared it for the Blurb software template as a full bleed image, had some edge content that was at risk for Blurb’s 1/8″ possible trimmingprocess. I had some alternatives to make the neccessary adjustment, but decided on adding some canvas with Photoshop for the sky in the original file.  Since the sky is an inky black, this just seemed the easiest fix. So more sky, similar crop and now I have preserved some edge details that I would like to keep. nice.

So I am making some progress. The question is, am I going to finish the development of Insomnia in time to have one copied ordered & delivered for a final press check before I submit to Blurb’s book contest? I think that it will be very tight, as I should order it this coming weekend, which is the 4th of July holiday.

Best regards, Doug

Blurb news: PDF to Book available

In a nice, but unanticipated move by Blurb, one of the big Print on Demand (POD) self-publishing services, they now have provided the capability of using Adobe InDesign to create your book and then upload the PDF to Blurb for publishing. The full details are here.

Here are some features:

Use Blurb InDesign templates or create your own InDesign templates following their guidelines

Use CYMK color space from deisgn to print and avoid the use of sRGB color space

Now I am not an InDesign user, but I know that many are, and the fact that you could not use a PDF to Book workflow was a big issue with not using Blurb. So I am not the one who is going to be able to evaluate this option. In fact, I don’t even own the Adobe InDesign software. So maybe this software will go back on my buy list.

And of course, this is announced just as SoFoBoMo 2009 is coming to an end. So an option for SoFoBoMo 2010, eh?

Best regards, Doug

The PhotoBook on Facebook

Andy Adams of Flak Photo has kept recommending that I set up a Facebook page for The PhotoBook, which I finally did today. So I am going to try this and see what happens. So if you would like to become a “fan”, please follow the link (hope it works) and sign up. There will definitely be a little trial and error phase to this, but probably not unlike when I started Singular Images a couple of years ago.

Best regards, Doug

The PhotoBook

First, interesting week. Having the new flooring laid in the studio was a one day job,and it looks great. But that was followed by the carpet in the house, only one day, eh? BUT with moving everything out to get the new stuff down, getting everything back in place is a slooooow pain in the hinny. Yeah, it is still not done yet, but we are making progress.

Meanwhile, early last week Miguel Garcai-Guzman had some nice stuff to say about my photo book review blog, The Photo Book on his blog, Exposure Compensation. Nice! Then a couple of days later, a nice follow on article was written on APhotoEditor and later that same day another article on Jen Bekman’s HeyHotShot! blog. All of a sudden, I found out how nice it is be the center of a small blog-buzz, and a good one at that. 

And today I have just published my 45th photo book review, Eiji Ina’s Emperor of Japan.

One of the outcomes of all of this was Miguel’s identifying my blog by the name PhotoBook, which everyone continued to use. hmmmm, it did not sound bad at all. Since it did not require any changes to the WordPress address, I just morphed the change from The Photo Book to The PhotoBook. Who knows, maybe I might just make it ThePhotoBook, but for now, The PhotoBook looks fine. This requires a little housekeeping for my internal links, but not that much work involved.

Very nice, and big thanks to Miguel for improving the look with a little more contemporary name.

Best regards, Doug

New Studio flooring

Not much to write about at the moment. I am in the middle of installing new flooring in the studio, in preperation for the larger format printer that I have been considering. And as one thing leads to another, this little wood flooring project is being immediately followed up with carpets for the house, because now the carpets are looking tired.

Meanwhile with all of this going on, the desktop computer is down, the Epson 4800 is off in a side room and it is begining to appear that I will not be completing my SoFoBoMo project this month. In as I still have my project Insomnia in progress and I am trying to finish it by the end of this month, that really is my current priority for creating a photo book. Since I created a how-to techie photo book over two days last year during last year’s SoFoBoMo, I am not completly writing off a 2009 SoFoBoMo. But at the moment, I don’t really have my heart in it so far this year. We’ll see…

Best regards, Doug

Blurb – BookSmart 2.0 & 12×12″

I received a heads-up from the Blurb PR folks that they were going to announce a new update on their free book-making software BookSmart. From the press release, it appears to have some of the attributes of InDesign, with added customization capabilities.

Wish I could say more, but the Blurb site is a bit slow in running for the download, as it usually stalls out at 80% download for me. So after three failed attempts, I’ll try again later tonight, or wait for the Lakers & Magic game on Thursday evening.

Blurb now has a new book format, a 12 x 12″ which might be of interest to the Hasselblad shooters or anyone else using the 6 x 6 cm square film format (not exactlly a digital format, eh?). I was kinda hoping for a larger horizontal than their current 11 x 13″, perhaps stretching it out to 11 x 14″, so it might fit in some standard size folio cases, etc. That would make a heck of a lot more sense to ME, but nobody was asking. Okay, a 12 x 12″ format is NOT exciting for me. Unless I dust off the Hasselblad and buy that 50mm lens that I feel that I need to create those open spacial relationships that I have been leaning towards lately.

But this updated BookSmart version may be of interest especially to those working their SoFoBoMo book projects. Unless of course you completed yourSoFoBoMo in May, then the groanner of re-doing it on the new software, but it very well may worth the effort. Okay, they must HAVE known about SoFoBoMo, so why did they wait to release it for only those June procrastinators get to use it??

I hope to get it downloaded and perhaps share some thoughts, sometime soon I hope.

Best regards, Doug

Slide Shows

Slide Show copyright 2009 Sports Illustrated

When I was asked to review this book Slide Show for Sports Illustrated, my immediate thoughts went back to my own experiences with slides (or transparencies or chromes). Those 35-mm slides when exposed properly were awesome, but if the exposure was off, some really bad news. Thus the days of bracketing exposures, even when using a spot meter, or a good internal light meter, you could never be absolutely sure, and film was still considered ”cheap” even then, so bracket a few extra exposures.

When I first started to photograph in color, the economic rationale was to photograph making slides, then decided which prints to make later. I don’t know about you, but there were a lot of slides which never made it to a print, even with the best intentions. In some ways, that seems to be the case with digital now, make prints later, which does not seem to happen as much as we would like to think.

With transparency film, we also learned that Kodachrome was idea for reds and warm tones. Later Fujichrome became better known for representing greens, thus a lot of landscape photographers drifted to using it. Unless they had a sunset to shoot, then back to the Kodachrome.  Etkachrome seemed softer and muted in comparison to either of the other two chromes, but you could process it quicker. Kodachrome required that Nitrogen burst processing and it seemed that the Kodak labs did it best, but it took time.  It seemed that Kodachrome 25 was the inital King of film for those who wanted the very the highest resolution film, but that eventually was taken off the shelves, then it was Kodachrome 64.

I must of had at least two slide projectors, one of which was the Bell & Howell “Cube”, but sometime those slide shows did wear thin for your friends. I must have endured my share of these by friends as well. Dorthy and kids at the waterfall, Dorthy and kids at the beach, Dorthy and kids by the cow, etc, etc. What we endured for our friends!

For those who are interested in sports photography, sports trivia or photographs published in the magazine Sports Illustrated (aka SI), you will probably find the Sports Illustrated book Slide Show to be a delightful and entertaining book. How ever, be warned this is NOT a how-to book on photographing sports events, although by carefully examining the photographs that illustrate this book, there is still much than can be learned. My review of this book is here.

BTW, I still have a number of poly pages filled with my slides, I just ought to pull those out and print a few, eh?

Best regards, Doug

Photo Exhibit & The Photo Book

Last year was interesting in that I found myself a little overwhelmed with maintaining my web-journals and other photo-groups and then pulled back. Then one thing led to another.

I then jumped back into the thick of things by startinga blog for our monthly photo group called The Photo Exchange. And I realized that I needed to get to more photographic exhibits than I had, so I started to write about the local exhibits on The Photo Exchange. And that led to the idea of a blog just about photo exhibits, so I started a new blog, Photo Exhibit, concentrating on SoCal photo exhibits. If that was not enough, I started writing reviews about photobooks from my collection, which then morphed into The Photo Book. All I was overextended again. sigh.

But then I had what I thought was a clever idea, take The Photo Exhibit, open it up to a collaborative blog and invite photographers from all over to contribute. So after almost five months, perhaps it was not as clever as I thought.  In retrospect, I found myself in the same place as most of the other contributors, I already had too much on my plate and I was not getting to exhibits as often as I wanted. Although I live in Southern CA where there are a ton of exhibits, I am actually in South Orange County and the majority of exhibits are in West LA, about an hour plus when there is no traffic. And when is there no traffic on the 405?? So that means I am really about two to two and a half hours away, each way. Yuck!

Second, I also found that my exhibition review process is a bit long.  I like to look at the exhibit, then head home and  think about what I saw and how I felt about it, then return and study it again, then try to write a coherent review. If I am still not sure, then I want to go back again. Sheeese. I have tried to take voluminous notes about my thoughts and reactions at the initial exhibit viewing, but that just did not seem to work well for ME. But I will say that with reviewing more exhibits, I seem to be able to get to the core of what I see more on the first viewing and on return, I am now doing more confirming my first thoughts.

Nevertheless, I along with the other contributors were not getting to the photo exhibitions very often, and sometimes even if someone was able to attend an exhibition, they may not have the time to post a review. So after recently polling the contributors to Photo Exhibit, the consensus is to let this blog trickle off to a slow death sometime this summer.

Meanwhile, my review process works much better with the photobooks, in as I have the books in hand and I am able to look at them repeatibly while collecting my thoughts and then subsequently try to write a succinct review. Which seem to be getting a slight bit better as I compare the recent reviews to my earliest. So I am continuing to forge ahead with The Photo Book, as I enjoy the photobooks and the challenage of writing a good review. This is a keeper;- )

So if you have previously linked-up Photo Exhibit, I would not mind if you deleted it now off your blogroll. Like wise if you have not linked-up The Photo Bookyet and you like what I am posting, I would really appreciate it if you would link it up on your blogroll.

Best regards, Doug

Designing Full Bleed PhotoBook pages

Yesterday, I had provided a very brief overview about my earlier bias against full bleed photographs in a photobook and some reasons why my opinion about full bleed photographs have  now changed.  I am actively designing my photobooks with the intent of using full bleed photographs. As Martin pointed out in his comment yesterday, after I decide to use a full bleed, then comes the publishing details to make it effectively look like I intended.

Case in point was my example of the cropped photograph that was created for a full bleed in the book I am developing. Specificily understanding just what is going to get lost on the edges of page when the full bleed is printed and the subsquent trimed during the binding operation.  Martin was right on when identifying the potential issues with my image Away Station in that I had some content close to the edge before the trimming action and I could lose some of it. I had made a mental note of that exact same thing and I had already figured that I was not done with that image yet.

The practice design issue is, how do you know what you might lose, eh? The answer ought to be the book publishers specifications.  Specificly what do they state you will lose in the triming operation, a 1/8″ or 1/16″  or 1/32″ and the tolerance stack on that triming process, thus the 1/16″ with a +/- of 1/32″ means you need to allow a maximum loss of the image of 3/32″. My problem with Blurb, is that for real results, I have lost almost 1/8″ due to sloppy triming, and when you want page numbers and they get trimmed off, you know that something is not right.

With the Blurb Booksmart software, all you will see for a full bleed is an alert that you will lose something with the triming process, but no visual indication of what you will lose. So the better solution for me is to open the image up in Photoshop and use the cropping indicators with the rule bars showing. If I use the Blurb trim spec and move the crop lines into place, I will have a closer indication of just what I should expect. And then I can make an informed decision on what I need to do next in order to get the photograph printed like I need in the photobook.

 Best regards, Doug