Crazy But Able

I ordered my SoFoBoMo book from MyPublisher over the weekend after I was able to create an account. When you go to upload the book, it asks you if you previewed all of the pages first. Unfortunately, there is an option it asks you when you upload it, something along the lines of “you have blank pages, do you want to remove the blank pages from your layout?” Well, the way I had it laid out, I had a final blank page. And I thought about it some, and I’m paying by the page, dammit, so yes, I do want you to remove that page. However, the software’s interpretation of that question was “do you want to remove any page surface which has no printing on it from your layout”, which means that since I started my book with a single photo on the right hand page and nothing on the right, it SHIFTED ALL OF MY PHOTOS ONE SPOT TO THE LEFT. This is a complete disaster, since I relied so much on pairing the photos on the facing pages. It’s amazing how much of a mess the new layout looks like. With shipping this is going to cost over 50 bucks.

Yes, I know I can’t get my money back and I can only cancel an order if I cancel the order within the first hour. I get it, I’ve been on the unfortunate side of a customer service call and yes I read their policies and agreed to them before I ordered. I understand all of that but there should be an option in their software to re-preview the book AFTER they take pages out of it, for goodness sake. I guess it isn’t a complete disaster, since I can at least use the book to see how well the cover looks, how well the photos look individually, and how the couple of text pages look. Still, dammit.

Lessons learned: Make a softcover book first. After you get everything figured out with the softcover book, then spend the effort on designing a book jacket for the hardcover version.

UPDATE: I put in a support ticket to MyPublisher at the same time I posted this entry. I said the same thing in my support ticket as I said here: I made a mistake with the layout; I know according to the policy it’s my fault, but I think the software is misleading to the point of almost being a bug, and it should be fixed. I was only trying to report my confusion in using their software (according to my definition of bugs, if you confuse your user, it’s a bug) and I was expecting a “Yeah, that sucks but there’s nothing we can do about it” kind of reply.

I was happily surprised with their response: a coupon code for a free reprint! They said they normally offer a lesser discount on reprints but since it was my first book with them and since this was a serious layout error, they wanted to make me happy. To quote their e-mail: “We want you to be completely satisfied with your book. I’m very sorry if the book you received does not reflect the highest quality, and would like to make it up to you.”

Sweet! When the first book arrives I’ll proofread all of the text and make sure the pictures each look okay individually before fixing the layout issue and re-uploading. It’s so nice to have an interaction with customer service that’s not an adversarial relationship from the start (and here I’m thinking of you, Best Buy, Comp USA and Circuit City). Also note I actually got the support response yesterday or the day before I think, I’ve just been slow to update because I’ve been so busy with work and with the Barfing Sickness going through the household (current victims: child and cat. Peggy and I remain unscathed.) So, kudos to MyPublisher.

I finished it, albeit 2 hours late. My daughter needed a couple extra hours of Daddy time tonight, which ate into my planned SoFoBoMo wrapup time. If that disqualifies me from the Grand Prize, so be it.

At any rate, I’m glad it’s done. I’m really excited about it. If only I could upload my book to MyPublisher. They are having some issue and I can’t create an account at the moment. So, in lieu of a bright shiny browsable flash version, you’ll have to make do with this screenshot (click to embiggen):

When they get the glitch sorted out and I can create an account, I’ll update this post.

First off, sorry for the lack of updates. The quintuple whammy of computer issues, family sickness, visiting relatives, World Wide Pinhole Photography Day, and ridiculous work deadlines (entirely my fault for majorly underestimating and overpromising, but now I have to deliver on my promises) all conspired to eat away all of my free time these past couple weeks. I figured I could let the weblog slip (better to be out doing than yapping about it), but even so I didn’t get out nearly enough. Yesterday I didn’t even think I was going to be able to finish my book with the original theme under the original constraints (spring; every picture taken with the Coolpix 4500). Fortunately today I got a good five pictures, and although they are a little rough, and normally I’d go back to the same site and retake them obsessively until I got exactly what I wanted, I think they can stand on their own. In fact, a couple of them are among the best photos of the book.

I’ll get the contacts out maybe tomorrow or the day after, I hope. In the meantime, a word about process. Unlike Paul Butzi and others, I did not opt for the “take a crapload of pictures and edit them all at once at the end of the month” route. I’ve been editing and picking selects as I went. Every day I downloaded my pictures from my camera, I would go through and make my picks, print out the best, and arrange the prints how I wanted the book done.

This means I’ve been staring at the same 20 pics since the 15th, and ever despairing how I was going to get the remaining 15.

I was originally hoping for a strictly chronological book, but choice of subject matter on different days, and color vs. black and white considerations led me to vary it up a bit. It’s mostly chronological, starting out with several inches of snow, and ending with… well, I don’t know how it ends yet. I need to take two more pictures (no pressure!) tomorrow. Four, if you count the pics I’m going to need for the title and cover page.

As for the final form of the book, I’m going with MyPublisher and using their software. Since they don’t have an export PDF function, and since my book is all full bleed photos with no text, I’m going to export a Lightroom slideshow as my uploadable book to sofobomo.org.

It’s kind of a bummer because I want to talk about some of the photos in the book but I love the full bleed aesthetic. Maybe I’ll talk about some of them here. One of them is great, I used the coolpix to take the picture through the viewfinder of a 70’s German pocket camera. When I post the final book, see if you can guess which one it is.

I was going to do a second sofobomo book right after this one, but I picked an even more constrictive set of constraints for the theme. I like the idea and may do something with it in the future, but realistically I’m not going to have the time to finish that one in a month. If I can come up with a good theme by May 1st, I may do a second sofobomo book yet.

Today I went out with a fellow photographer and we managed to catch some great light and have a great hike in the great outdoors. Too bad I didn’t take any great photos. I did manage to invent some fun new curse words for the coolpix. I took three cameras with me and I have a new rule. One camera, one lens, one film type per hike. Not that I’m going to follow that rule, not in the least.

Also, I’d like to note that I haven’t actually processed or looked at anything I’ve taken after about day 4 or so. So I’m getting behind in the processing of the images.

Contact sheet, as usual, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the contact sheet for days 9 through 11. As you can see, I didn’t shoot much.

Read the rest of this entry »

You guys will get more contact sheets when I download more images on to my computer. Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. I’ve been working 12 hour days all this week, and in this part of the country, that means I’m not even outside when it is daylight. I’ve been in the studio all week, so I don’t even have a window. I think today was the first day I actually went without taking a picture (with the coolpix, of course. I finished off the first roll in my Argus C3 (more on which later) and I fired off a crapload of 20D pics), but I took at least one picture every day so far. I might go outside and take some long exposures in the snow just for the heck of it. Who knows, maybe something good will come out of it.

I’m hoping to catch up and get back on track next week. This SoFoBoMo thing is like that boulder rolling after Indiana Jones; can’t stop and dawdle or you get rolled over.

Exit of College Lenders Sets Off Scramble To Fill Breach

Most lenders rely on the securitization of debt to generate enough cash to issue student loans. This process turns ordinary loans into securities, just like stocks, so they can be bought and traded on the debt markets. But lenders have been unable to securitize any loan made after Oct. 1, when a cut in federal subsidies to lenders went into effect. A few weeks later, the credit crunch that began among troubled mortgage securities started to ripple across the student loan industry. Both developments dried up investor appetite for student loans.

I’m surprised the level of inflation is not higher than it is, given just how much credit and debt there is rolling around in the economy. Seems like everyone is stretching themselves too thin, like not enough butter on too much toast, to paraphrase Tolkien. All this debt permeating the economy is a real problem, but what is the remedy? Letting large companies and even entire sectors of the economy fail (just try to get a subprime loan these days, it’s impossible) seems distasteful, but wouldn’t it be worse to bail them out? At that point you’re just throwing money at buggy manufacturers when Henry Ford is firing up the assembly line. Let them fail and free up those resources for the rest of the economy.

At least, that’s my inclination. Lots of people that seem to know more about this stuff than me keep telling me that many of these companies can’t fail, because they’re all intertwined with each other, so if one goes down it’s like a big house of cards. And it’s all fine and good to lose the sub-prime mortgage lenders, but if all of the lenders go down then we have some serious issues with liquidity in the economy.

Probably too much at once, but after this I’m caught up.

Once again, after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m taking the Paul Butzi challenge: I’m posting my contact sheets from my SoFoBoMo pics. Now, this is hard for me. I don’t like the idea of just throwing out my images in progress, I like to hold my cards close to my chest. Nevertheless, I’m going for it.

Now, I don’t have Adobe Bridge because I still can’t afford Photoshop. I get by with Lightroom and the Gimp and eventually I’ll reinstall Photoshop Elements 2.0 once I find my install CD. So I faced a dilemma: how to go about creating contact sheets? I couldn’t figure out a method of doing it with Lightroom (1.2, I still haven’t upgraded yet). I couldn’t figure out a method of doing it with the Gimp that didn’t involve actually running the GIMP on Linux (which I don’t). Couldn’t figure out an easy method of scripting it with ImageMagick.

So I figured, what the hell, I guess I’ll put that Comp. Sci. degree to good use. I whipped up a contact sheet generator app in about an hour. I hand-coded a lot of values, and made a lot of assumptions (it will only work with files I get from the coolpix at the moment, because the coolpix doesn’t automatically rotate images based on how you hold the camera, for instance). It looks like my default width of 90 pixels is a smidge too small, but maybe I’ll fix that later.

Images after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m plugging away at it. I’m not too happy about my theme, but I’m stubborn enough to persevere. My theme is Spring (yeah, me and a zillion other people, right?), but I’ve made it harder by adding an additional constraint: I’m only using my Nikon Coolpix 4500. My reasoning was this: I recently spent about a month shooting almost nothing but film, using a variety of weird and quirky cameras. I got used to working with weird constraints. And I sat thinking about my coolpix, yeah, it was slow, but it has an awesome zoom range and a great macro capability! I mean, aperture priority on the coolpix has to be at least as fast as me pulling out a lightmeter, taking a reading, dialing in the settings and shooting, right? Plus I feel like I never took much advantage of the long end of the zoom range with the Coolpix, and I was hoping to rectify that now that I’ve had some experience grooving with the 135mm telephoto lens for my OM-1.

Alas, after getting the first couple days worth of photos back, I have to come to the conclusion that the image quality of the Coolpix completely blows. There, I said it. I used to not care about color noise, but over the past couple of years I’ve really started to care about it and sadly, the Coolpix has a ridiculous amount of color noise, even at iso 100. Plus I just dropped it a couple of days ago and now I have a fresh new crop of hot pixels I have to deal with. So I’m converting almost all of the pics over to black and white, because I cannot handle the color noise, and I’m using lightroom to deal with the hot pixels.

Now that I think of it, I need to be more precise about how I feel about my theme. I like my theme of Spring; I’m having a fun time forcing myself to take a few pictures every day that really connect with the environment and what is going on around me. In fact, just thinking about that connection with nature that I’ve been experiencing is making me happy! The only problem is the fricking camera I’m using. Plus the batteries keep dying, because I still have my original batteries for it, which are rechargables and going on six years old. So I only get about 20 shots off before I have to replace the battery. I find myself regularly carrying around at least three cameras: the Coolpix (and a crapload of crummy batteries), the 20D for when all of the batteries die on the Coolpix, and my Olympus XA, which is nearly always in my pocket these days. That may seem like a lot of cameras, but when I was shooting mainly film, I would carry around at least four: the XA, my OM-1 (with an extra lens), the current quirky toy or project camera I was having fun with, and the 20D just in case I needed to shoot something that I needed immediate output for, and/or in case I ran out of film or had the wrong kind of film in my cameras.

Even with the reduced camera load, SoFoBoMo is a lot of work. Plus it is a whole new photo project to work on, and I’m a little upset that it displaced a number of other photo projects I was in the middle of. I have rolls of film in quirky cameras that I need to finish off and develop, but film is such a different mindset than digital, it’s hard to flip back and forth.

Alright, this post is already long. I’ll have to shorten my Leica fondling story from this weekend: it was a just about mint M3 with 50 cron and 90 cron and oooh, I was salivating. Way, way out of my price range, the thing still had the factory wax seal, so I wouldn’t buy it even if I had the $$, since I’m looking for a Leica I can actually shoot with, but still. Damn sexy. That viewfinder defies the laws of physics.