A journey of 100 miles, but still no book.

 Photography  7 Responses »
Jul 022010
 

PDL_20100702_36086.jpg
Great vistas, though

According to my recollection and loose accounting, Hobbs and I have walked just over 100 miles in the past 6 weeks. As I mentioned earlier, I had an idea for a book called: A Journey of 100 miles, well, that’s not going to happen for a few reasons. One, I just really enjoyed the journey and took precious few photos, somewhere around 40 or 50, and it took us 6 weeks to do it. :-) Further, not that there is anything wrong with it, all of the photos are cell phone photos, my camera of choice on the walk.

This morning we took advantage of the cool temperatures that have come to the Charlotte area. It was about 68 degrees, 20 C, when we went for our walk. That temperature makes for a very nice walk, indeed.

In the above photo, I paused to take in the rays coming from the tops of the clouds and to look at the sun, just above the trees. Anyway, if I do a book, it won’t be this one, but boy am I enjoying the morning walks … I think that Hobbs is, too. :-)

 Posted by Paul at 8:11 am  Tagged with: , ,

Vision-driven photography.

 Photography  18 Responses »
Apr 222009
 

The starting line for SoFoBoMo is nearly upon us. When it was announced with a May 1 start date, some months ago, I thought that that was a long way off. Now, it seems very near. 8 days. I find myself making more frequent trips to David DuChemin’s website, Pixelated Image, reading the articles that he has written, and thinking about my own photographic vision.

I can say, with a great deal of honesty, that I’ve never been taken with any particular photographer. That is, I’ve admired the works of others such as Alain Briot, Moose Peterson, Joe McNally, Freeman Patterson and, of course, Ansel Adams; however, I don’t own a single print from any of these artists. David’s work is different, or perhaps it is his writing. I feel that he is writing from the soul and it resonates with me, seriously.

He talks almost exclusively about vision. Vision driven photography; Vision-driven workflow, etc. It’s an idea that I’d never really considered before, but it makes a great deal of sense to me. His vision driven photography works a bit like this:

  • Decide what it is that you want to say. Perhaps you’ve received it as an assignment from a client, or made it up yourself.
  • Create a possible shot list that will help to realize this vision.
  • Choose the tools (camera, lenses, filters, flashes, etc) that will help you to attain this vision.
  • Scout the location, if possible, looking at light, angles, etc. Again, with your vision in mind. Do you need to have an overall warm feel, cool, bright, subdued, glowing, etc? What are you trying to say with this body of work?
  • After you’ve taken the shots, continue with your vision in Lightroom or Photoshop all the way through post processing.

This certainly has given me lots of thought cycles about what it is that I want to say during my SoFoBoMo project. I think that I need to go sit in my field and ponder it. I have a vague idea, but not a clear vision of it. After reading his articles, I want to get a clear vision of what I want to say before I actually start to say it, which may cause a slight delay in my start date … which is what the fuzzy month allows, anyway. Having this vision ahead of time will make things easier, more cohesive, I think.

Perhaps this sounds like I’m over complicating things and taking this too seriously. I don’t think so. I think that it is just the first brick in a path that I wish to continue to walk upon. Perhaps this is my first step in my journey of 1000 miles.

 Posted by Paul at 5:57 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Story elements

 Photography  15 Responses »
Apr 142009
 


Springtime in Summerville, SC

I love to read fiction, especially good fiction. Also, if I happen to see a movie that contains all of the elements of good story telling, then I tend to remember that movie for some time.

The elements of storytelling are, in no particular order:

  • Setting: Where the story takes place, time, location
  • Point of view: Who’s telling the story
  • Plot: How the story is told. The steps, or sequence of events
  • Theme: The underlying message of what the story is about.
  • Character: The main participant
  • Conflict: some type of struggle, either internal or external

My wife’s all time favorite movie is Seven years in Tibet. This movie, may or may not appeal to you. It depends, I think, on where you are in your life.

The general theme of the movie is change, or perhaps self-discovery, or maybe even renewal. This movie had it all, well placed, and in great measure. It’s probably my favorite Brad Pitt movie. My favorite movie series was The Matrix. Wow! It was more than just a special effects orgy. The theme was about discovery, about discovering that we are one with the Universe. It was all about casting off masks, breaking out of the Matrix, discovering reality, etc. When I watched it the first few times, I didn’t connect; however, after a lot of Tao reading, etc. It began to make sense. I could say that perhaps that is not what the author intended, but the story had enough in it to make sense to me in that way. There is a lot of discussion about it around the web. People take different meanings from it.

As we approach the SoFoBoMo starting line, I’m trying to solidify a theme, a setting, and a plot. It might seem a lofty goal for a 30-day project, but I want to give it a go. Last year’s project was haphazard, but I liked it anyway. There was, however, one section that I particularly liked better than the others, that was the Yin/Yang section. It had a theme. Click the image to the right to see last year’s book.

This year, I might do something about the flow of life. I might just do it in the field across the street. After all, everything occurs there. Birth. Death. Struggle. Triumph. Failure. Competition. It’s all there. That could be my setting. My time line would, of course, be the SoFoBoMo month. The characters, whatever I find like plants, insects, etc. The point of view would be from my point of view could be omniscient limited point of view where I move from character to character and put in my thoughts or feelings about what I see. The plot is the interesting part. How do I put it together to be in line with the theme?

Well, it’s food for thought anyway.

 Posted by Paul at 5:09 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

A SoFoBoMo practice book

 Photography, SoFoBoMo 09  8 Responses »
Apr 042009
 


OK, so I did a practice book (992 KB PDF). I thought: Why not? I need to get in touch with Scribus again and learn more about it this year. For this ‘book’, I did no post processing of the images, save for a small amount of color correction. For the real thing, I’ll have to do the color corrections, sharpening, and whatever other post processing that I’ll need to do. I’ve also not decided on color or black and white. It will depend on the final subject. For now, it’s about learning about the tool. I want to establish a workflow for the real thing. Here’s what I took away from this learning experience:


Format:
I still want to decide on a format. I shot a lot of vertical photos, but sometimes horizontal fits. It seems natural that a square book works best if I want to do both; however, I did my practice book in the vertical format just to see what it would look like.

Font
Last year I used Adobe Garamond Pro as my font of choice. I think that I’ll use it again. It is a very clean, easy to read font. It’s nothing fancy, but looks very professional.

Alignment
I need to learn how to align things in Scribus. That is, to make sure that text areas are aligned and that images are aligned, at least as much as I want them to be.

Convenience
Scribus encourages you to use separate text files and then import the text. This became very easy to do as I could write, rewrite, spell check, tag, and then import into Scribus. After I had decided my styles, such as header, footer, basic text, quote text, etc. all that I had to do was tag the first sentence of a paragraph with a tag that I decided, like \q to indicate a quotation, then import that text into my text frame and Scribus would apply the styles. Very easy. This is much more advanced than what I used last year.

Stability
The Mac version has not crashed on my yet! Last year the Windoze version crashed a bit more. The Mac layout, while basically the same, seems a little more user friendly, but Scribus does take some getting used to, but it is $699 less than Adobe Indesign. I guess that you could get a 30 day free trial and try to use it while doing your book, but no thanks! I need to know the software ahead of time. Trying to do both at the same time, like I did last year is a headache.

Deadlines
I need them! That’s why I gave myself until April 4th to finish this. I almost didn’t do it, but felt obligated to myself to do it.

Geekware
Lastly, another person, Billie, talks about her experience trying to learn Scribus. Basically, she said that she was not geeky enough to learn it and that attempting to learn it made it feel like her head was going to explode! :-) It’s not as bad as all that, but it does have a learning curve that you’ll have to climb. Better to start early!

This practice book was a great bit of learning and a nice distraction for the evening. The real deal starts for me in 27 days. I still have no real idea about what I’m going to do! :-)

 Posted by Paul at 10:44 pm  Tagged with: , , ,
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