July 30, 2009
July 29, 2009
Status Update
A status update for loyal readers.
On Chickens:
Some folks have asked how the chickens are doing. The answer is very, very well. They have grown almost to a size where I don’t really worry about the common predators that we have around here–good and bad, really, that Hawaii has so few. All 8 have survived to adulthood and they have really become integrated into the family life and daily routine. Our dog gets along well with them and we have no qualms anymore about leaving her alone with them. They are really a lot of fun and so far it has been a very enjoyable experience.
On Photography:
My favorite camera has just quit on me. This time it is completely dead–unresponsive to any attempts to revive it. I suspect that it got a little rattled going up to 14,000 feet the other day. I often take it with me to the summit of Mauna Kea and it has generally handled it well. I note that this is the third time that I have had major problems requiring repair (twice before under warranty). Even though I love this camera more than any other I have owned (with the possible exception of the Pentax MX), I am growing tired of this sort of brittleness. Although I love the Ricoh size and ergonomics I daresay I will be hard pressed to buy another Ricoh. The good news is that I have a Panasonic GH1 on order. The bad news is that it has been on order since May! In the meantime I’ve had to pick up some old cameras to fill the gap, and shooting with them has reminded me of why I upgraded. I’ll have to decide if I want to repair this one, and if not, I will likely need to pick up another serious compact, because I won’t want to lug the GH1 around absolutely everywhere.
Oh, and I lost my $%*)(&%@ brand new eyeglasses!
July 25, 2009
July 18, 2009
SoFoBoMo 2009: Final thoughts
So long to Solo Photo Book Month 2009… or aufwiedersehen shall I say rather? Now I can enjoy perusing the books the others made over the next few months. Some wrap up thoughts:
- I don’t think doing the PDF is enough. There are some good lessons to be learned in getting the thing published and since the focus is a book, I recommend seeing it all the way through. There is real satisfaction in holding the thing in your hands and sharing with others.
- Blurb seems to be the current Internet fave for self-published photo books. Their new PDF to Book process is pretty nifty, and came along just at the right time for me (I tried, but was not a fan of their Booksmart software). The photo quality of my Blurb book is still well below what I would call excellent (ink jet print), but it’s good enough to make a nice looking book.
- This was my second year doing this, and I had a bit more trouble latching on to a theme that would fit in the time allotted. I started one project, floundered, sat on it for a couple weeks, then restarted with a new idea. In the end I followed the old sage advice to shoot something you are interested in. I was interested in raising some free-range laying hens, and it dovetailed nicely with the book project.
- I’m struck again by how the project parameters: one fuzzy month, 35 pictures, a PDF, combine to make a really attainable, flexible and worthwhile exercise. It makes you cut to the essence and learn the nuts and bolts of making a photo book. And it was good to have the lesson reinforced this year, and to learn some new things (like making a book using a markup language is a really good idea).
- Although personally I enjoyed the project as much as last year, the size of the group participating made the “communal” aspect diminish considerably. I suppose that is to be expected. It would be kind of fun to have a variation on it where we would collaboratively make a book in small groups, or something else to foster a little more sharing.
July 17, 2009
On printing via Blurb’s PDF to Book: Part 4
As I mentioned previously, I redid my SoFoBoMo 2009 book, Chickens, Anyone? in LaTeX (it was originally done using Scribus for the layout). From this I generated a PDF using pdftex and uploaded it to Blurb for their PDF to Book process. The book arrived a couple of days ago and of course I immediately compared it to the earlier version I’d done in Scribus (and also had printed by Blurb)
The book itself is of the same size and type as the one I’d ordered previously. That is to say that the images looked good, a little less dynamic than the monitor (to be expected, natch) and identical to the other book. Again, the binding was fair. Like the other book, the image alignment wasn’t perfectly registered between the two images on the two sides: the right side images were all a hair higher. This is interesting because I wanted to confirm that it was not some mistake I had made in the guides on the master pages of Scribus; LaTeX uses a completely different mechanism to layout the book, and it would not show any such manual positioning errors. So this is a byproduct of Blurb’s cutting or binding process. Not too annoying, but it looks a bit unprofessional.
I was curious to see how the text came out. In the past I’ve not been a big fan of the Computer Modern font (the default in TeX), but it was actually much more readable at the same point size than the Garamond I had used in the other version. I know that it is possible to use other fonts in TeX, but most of the information that I have found on this suggests that its a bit of a pain to prepare the fonts for use. If this is any experience however, I won’t feel too bad if I have to use CM again–it looked pretty good. One thing that I flubbed a bit in this version was getting the page numbers just a touch too low on the page; easily fixed with a simple change to the top of the LaTeX file.
Which brings me to my final thoughts about this exercise: namely, that LaTeX was a great way to go for the photo book and I will definitely be considering it strongly for the next book before I revert to using Scribus or any other GUI-based DTP program (and yes, I have experience with some commercial ones as well, including Adobe Pagemaker and MS Publisher). I know LaTeX pretty well, having written a number of papers in it, and even a previous book (my dissertation, way back when), but it didn’t occur to me at first to use it for a photography book. I think a lot of people who are leery of using a markup language would pull their hair out trying to get the book done this way, but the overwhelming ease of being able to simply edit text in a good text editor and simply set a few parameters in markup and have a PDF generated a second later made fine tuning the book a snap, and without a whole lot of time-consuming GUI work to lay out guides, drop in images, make adjustments and so forth. I was only half serious when I first suggested that I should try redoing the book in LaTex, but one night the curiosity got the better of me and I started in on it, expecting it to take a long time. I was astounded by how little time it took to get the same looking PDF out!
If you know LaTeX, or are the adventurous sort that doesn’t blanch when presented with an unfamiliar markup language, I would strongly recommend taking a look at my .tex files for this book. This one will make the 10×8 landscape Blurb book. Just tweak the parameters to get a different size. I’ve tried to comment the file liberally to show what parameters affect what, but I do admit that TeX is somewhat arcane, and the parameters and layout algorithm are not always clear. Hopefully I (or someone more versed in LaTeX), will be able to take this (or something similar) and make style (template) files for LaTeX to do Blurb books in the other offered sizes. I would certainly appreciate hearing about that!
