Paul Lester Photo

Last year, my approach to SoFoBoMo was rather haphazard. I chose my theme at the last minute, then I went and did my shooting, learned the tool (Scribus) while putting the book together, and just meandered about until I had a finished product. Certainly, this methodology, if you could call it that, has some serious drawbacks.

This year’s project will be different. Last year, I didn’t even read the instructions on how to use Scribus. This made my work even more difficult. Desktop publishing software is so much different than a word processor. There are terms to learn and understand. What the heck is a Drop Cap? How can I get those big initial capital letters in my text like I see in the books? Oh! Those are Drop Caps?!!! Who knew?!

There is a completely different way of doing things. This year, I’ve already started reading the instructions, following online tutorials, and have started a practice book, tentatively entitled: In praise of spring. This practice book will illustrate the joys of shooting in the rain. I’ve taken to it, as they say, like a duck takes to water! I hope to finish it in the coming days. No. Make that I will finish by Sunday, April 5th! Gotta have a hard deadline to work towards!

In doing the upfront work, in other words, understanding my tool and how a publishing work flow works, I am learning how to make a production ready book. Last year, I used fairly low resolution JPEG images. This year, I’ll use 300 DPI TIFF images, just in case I really want to have the book printed. Last year, I didn’t choose my fonts and styles ahead of time. This year I will. Last year, as mentioned, I meandered about as I put the book together. This year, I will sketch the story / layout first, take the pictures, write/spell check/proof read the text, then I will use the tool to assemble all of them. Scribus, by design, encourages you to use text files and import your already marked-up, proofed text into the editor. There is no spell checking or grammar checking built in. It’s built, I think, to allow different parties to do different things, such as photography, graphics, writing text, doing layout, and then having someone assemble all of those pieces into a finished product. It helps to understand that.

By doing a lot of upfront work with fonts and styles, etc. It should shave a lot of time off of the finished product. Also, by having a road map, knowing where I’m going, it will help to avoid those dead-ends that I encountered at times.

I’m still collecting ideas for a theme and soon I’ll have to decide.

One of the books that I’ve not finished reading is Twyla Tharp’s: The Creative Habit. Learn it and use it for life. I’m nearly half way through and find it interesting reading. Throughout the books she has small sections called Exercises. These are creativity exercises that you can do for yourself. Some have to do with memory, movement, observation, etc. There are a few that I would like to try for myself, one in particular tickles my fancy. Actually, two of them do, but I don’t think that I’ll write about the second one until after I do it.

Sometimes an idea will present itself. This idea may occur at any time and is often fleeting. It may be as light as gossamer, other times the proverbial, A ha!, anvil to the head moment. No matter the type, they seem to be ephemeral, having a definite shelf life. With regards to this year’s SoFoBoMo and last, I’ve had many, many ideas pass though, tossed across the paths of my mind like so much tumbleweed rolling across the Texas prairies. I need a fence to catch them, lest they blow away.

While reading her book, Twlya mentions her box, or boxes that she keeps her ideas in. When she is about to start a project, she creates a box with the name of the project written in magic marker right on the front of the box. Whenever she has an idea, or sees something inspirational with regards to that project, she puts it into the box. It could be a scrap of paper that she has written an idea upon, a music CD, video tape, photograph, child’s toy, whatever. It can be a reminder to: “Keep it simple and meaningful”. Later, when she is about to start putting her project together, she comes back to the box and starts digging through. These items serve as reminders of the ideas for the project. Mind you, this box could be a regular cardboard box, like she uses, or a collection of items stored on the computer including links to websites, photos, etc. that may have, for some reason, inspired you.

So, I’ve started my own box and it has a few things in it already.

• “Keep it simple”
• “Make it matter to you”
• “Portraits! People!
• Observations
• Haiku
• A picture of “Amy” from Joe McNally’s blog. I love the simple lighting.
• Young/Old? Dogs – inspired by this book.

Right now, these are disjointed pieces, seemingly, but they are what has popped up and been written down. It’ll be interesting to see how much stuff is in the box by about mid April when I try to gel those thoughts into something that I can produce.