My wife has a laser level. It has little sharp retractable spikes to stick into a board or drywall to hold it in place. Every couple of years I pick it up and say “Oh cool, a laser level, I didn’t know we had one of those. What does that button do?” and press a little button which sends little sharp spikes directly into the palm of my hand.
Every. Single. Time. Only then do I remember that yes, we have a laser level, and it hates me.
I finished my SoFoBoMo book. It’s done. It stands on it’s own and is complete. It’s all about do it yourself macro lenses, with examples.
Unfortunately since I am using Blurb I don’t know how to export a PDF copy of my book. I used Lightroom to generate one though, and you can check out the book’s page at sofobomo.org and download a PDF of 35 images. Also unfortunately the images in the PDF are in the order I took them, not the order they are in in the book. Oh well, I think I’ll live.
And… after thinking about it for a day or two, I decided to add another chapter with detailed steps on how to build your own macro lens using a magnifying glass. So this is like, SoFoBoMo overtime, I guess.
Last night C woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep so I worked on my SoFoBoMo book. I’m done with most of the photography, so now I’m working on the text pages. There is rather a lot more text in this book. At least, that’s the current plan, I may cut pages to meet deadline, or I might say screw the deadline, I’m doing this book right; I’m on the fence and could go either way.
Blurb’s text pages are… meh. I’m not terribly happy with their restrictive layout choices. I’m going with teeny little columns (teeny because I want to set the book at 12 pt. type), three of them across the page, with photos interspersed as needed.
Having recently read a graphic design text book, I decided to try justifying the text, hyphenating as needed to keep the spaces between words from getting out of hand. This did not go as planned.
The columns are too small! Frequently I’d have to make word/sentence changes, and that combined with the almost constant hyphenation caused all my copy to read like… bad newspaper-ese. Looking at columns of text in a real newspaper today I noticed that the columns in the newspaper aren’t nearly as narrow as the Blurb book. Yeah, it looks nice if you hold it away from your face and squint, but what good is it looking good if it doesn’t read good?
So screw the pretentious graphic design, I’m running my copy ragged right, damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
Oh, one more thing, having to layout the book while writing for the first time is… time consuming. I spent 3-4 hours writing, editing, and laying out two pages. If I take an honest estimate of how many 3-4 hour blocks of free time I’m going to have in my immediate future, at this rate I’ll finish the book in October.
I’m editing a couple of books at once (I know I said I’d never do that again, just shoot me). I mean photo books, of course. At this point I’m still in the layout stage, just trying to pick the photos to go in the books and arrange the photos on the page.
It’s really exhausting. I have to take it two pages at a time, trying this photo with that one, that one with the other. Full bleed? Margins? How big are the margins? Should I contrast this photo with another one by changing the subject? The type of photo? Colors, or color vs. black and white? Portrait or landscape, and do those margins clash?
The SoFoBoMo book is really coming together and I’m only a few pages away from being done. I got a lot of good shots over Memorial Day. The remaining shots I want to do are concept/studio shots that will take a certain amount of setup and testing and tripods and lighting and general nonsense. If that doesn’t work I can always go out and shoot more pictures of ants.
The other book is more like, I was sitting around thinking “I have a lot of good stuff I should put it in a book.” So I decided to make a book with just my best stuff. All of the best photos, none of the not-so-best.
Problem is, I have too many best photos. I mean, I’m not being egotistical here, that’s not my point. My point is I have way too many photos that I think are really good only because of emotional attachment to the subject matter or circumstances of the shoot, or because one of my friends really likes a certain picture. Of course, being the photographer I sure as hell can’t tell the difference between a great photo and a mediocre one that reminds me of a good time. I feel compelled to put them all in, and of course I know the result would be a mess.
Many years ago John decided that it would be cool to watch every James Bond movie. I’m not sure what he was thinking, but I went along with it. We only made it about halfway through them. I’m something of a finisher, so I felt I needed to finish the job even though massive amounts of brain cells poured out of my ears and onto the floor every time I watched one. I just watched the last one tonight. I was rating these movies as I watched them, so I now have a rated list for you all that will hopefully scare you away from the worst of them. I rated them 1-5 with 5 being pretty good for a James Bond movie, 3 being watchable, and 1 being just plain terrible. So, here’s the list: Read the rest of this entry »
I decided that with a new kid on the scene, I wasn’t going to do SoFoBoMo this year. But then I came up with a pretty cool idea that I liked… yeah, I’m doing it again.
This year I’m only taking pictures with my homemade macro lens. Oh yeah, it’s even more ghetto than it sounds. I’m trying to arrange for someone to take a picture of it because I can’t take a picture of it with my camera. Since it’s basically a surplus lens assembly from Axman shoved into a piece of cardboard, I liberally taped it to my camera body with paper tape. This means I have no idea when I’m going to attach my regular lens to my camera again. It’s getting frustrating not being able to take pictures of Henry and Caroline. But taking the lens on and off is a major undertaking which requires much tape. So I’m kind of motivated to get this thing done with.
I was going to do contact sheets again, but I just imported my photos and realized I took over 400 photos yesterday alone. For context, last year I took a little over 1000 total shots, for the entire month. Phew, 400 shots a day; that’s too much, and mostly it’s because the homemade macro lens doesn’t auto focus, and it has razor thin depth of field, and that wind blowing everything around is a real pain, so I find myself taking 10, 15, 20 shots of one scene just to try to get one that’s in focus.
I’ll try to think of something to post about and maybe get an example up or an experiment that didn’t work. In the meantime, here are the three photos that got me thinking about it:
Looks kind of like a bunny rabbit.
This is actually an experimental edit; it’s far too dark. I think Meriska’s eye needs to be lighter. I just forgot to reset and re-edit before I exported. (And now I’m too lazy because it’s not that great of a composition anyway).
Leaning toward including this one in the book. (GASP — I’m telling you editorial decisions ALREADY, gosh, this openness is scary).
I mean, more annoying than usual. See, today is my birthday, and I’m… 2^5 years old. I can’t wait to fill out my age on some forms! I get to be 2^5 years old for an entire year which is more fun than it probably should be. So if you’re wondering how old I am… 2^5!
I’m working on a new book of my photography. I want it to be a collection of most of the best stuff I’ve done in recent years (some of the best stuff I’ve done is on film, which I’m setting aside for the moment and will tackle in a future project). I’m not going for any particular theme, but I need your help.
First, if there are any photos on 8 eyes (the group photolog I post to with Corey and Keir) or Flickr that you feel simply MUST make it into the book, let me know. For 8 eyes the best place to start is probably my archive, just page through it if you need to find something and you haven’t saved the URL. Flickr is here but I let my pro account lapse so you can only see the most recent 200 images.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, if I have given you a photo over the past few years that you really really like, let me know what it is. I confess I haven’t been very stringent about organizing my photos in lightroom, and for quite some time my working method would be to import them, pick a few to print, hand them to friends, and so on. I never marked those as being different from the rest of the photos I took, so I’m pretty sure there were some good ones, I just don’t know where they are or what they were of. And if you think I’m going to wade through all 60,873 photos (at current count) to find them then… well, you’ve got a pretty high estimate of how much free time I have. :)
I’m currently in the process of laying out the book. It’s taking quite a bit longer to lay out this book than previous ones, and I think this is in part because I do not have a theme. Also it is probably due in part to the fact that my photos cover a wide range of styles (I’m very much a fan of “try something new and see if it works”). If everything was black and white it would be easier. And finally, I don’t have as many raw photos to start from. When I did the Caroline book I started from about 6 or 7 thousand photos, picked the best 400-500 photos and pared that down even more during the layout phase. For my sofobomo book I started with a little over a thousand, but I only needed 35 photos.
I’ve been thinking about how to lay out the book for a while, but haven’t gotten any farther than vague mental handwaving. Last night I picked my “best” 100 photos, (I have a category for these in Lightroom) and actually imported them into the Blurb book making software. And… nothing. Very little creative spark. I have two photos laid out, but only provisionally, I might change my mind about it. Most of what I came up with was “Nah, that doesn’t go with that one. That doesn’t go with that one. That doesn’t go with anything!”
I suspect this is because my “best” category in Lightroom is perhaps better described as “photos I either know or strongly suspect will be totally awesome if I printed them out really big and stuck it on the wall”; maybe these photos all have too much personality to share a page with another! One thing I might do is go down to my second tier photos and pick a few of those so the standouts have room to show off. Hmm…. it’s a lot to think about.
A friend of mine just got back from Phoenix and posted a bunch of photos on Flickr, including this picture of a hummingbird:
The caption of the hummingbird says “We spent hours practicing taking pictures of hummingbirds. How did we do?”
My first thought is, wow, that’s many more hours experience than I have of taking pictures of hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are hard and I have zero good shots of one.
I think this photo is a good start, it needs a little lightening in p-shop but mainly because the flowers and sky behind it are distracting.
Remember that the eye is drawn to the lightest part of the photo first; if your main subject is darker than the background then you are working against the monkey brain and you ought to have a good reason to do so!
Weird subject, unrepeatable facial expression, interesting contrast, “hey I decided to break this rule because it’s a stupid rule” — those are all good reasons to break the rule (it’s more of a guideline). Just don’t break the rule blindly or unthinkingly. Don’t follow it blindly either. Keep it in mind.
Making your main subject darker than the background is like rowing a canoe upstream, you can do it but you need a reason.
The hummingbird itself is nicely in focus and I like the blurring of the wings. I would be more aggressive in cropping — if you’re going to have something in the middle of the frame make it the exact middle, otherwise push it out to the edge.
Alright, I wrote all of the above without doing anything. I opened my mouth and words fell out of it. I decided to open it up in Lightroom and actually edit it to see if I could put some of what I said into practice. I mostly wound up frustrated!
Note in my explanation below that I keep changing tenses, that’s how you know I wrote this when I was very tired (up with the baby and can’t get back to sleep).
I’m using Lightroom 1.4, not sure what version you have.
My first impression upon opening up the full sized image in Lightroom is that I liked the cropping better than I expected. The “weird” position of the hummingbird is offset by that swooping branch in the corner. Another lesson I frequently forget: sometimes I need to crop images differently if they are going to be displayed at different sizes, even if they are displayed at the same aspect ratio.
First thing I did was convert it to black and white to get it out of my system and then I played around with it a bit in black and white. I just had a brief idea, and didn’t give it the full black and white treatment. Then I reset the settings.
My first thought is fill light because I only want to brighten the hummingbird and I don’t have localized edits with Lightroom 1.4. But fill light makes the background foliage too HDR weird. So I slid the exposure slider back and forth and settled on +.85, and I set the Fill Light slider to 3.
Yikes, now those flowers are really bright. My next instinct is to slide the blacks slider back from 5 to 0 to give myself a little more room in the shadows (since the whole bird is in shadow), but I forgot you shot this in JPG.
Now I’m pissed because I’m denied one of my favorite tricks (bump the black slider from 5 to 0 and then bump up the contrast, it’s subtle but a very nice effect, especially with underexposed images) and I’m going to try something different. First I’ll bring the exposure up to +1.50 (that’s the actual setting, not the delta.) (I briefly thought of going even higher and blowing out the flowers entirely but I didn’t like how those flower colors washed out.)
Next I’m going to the HSL box and bringing down the red luminance to -17 and the orange luminance to -23 (I clicked on the circle thing and then clicked on the flowers and dragged the mouse up and down to find the right spot).
Now I really like that hummingbird and the foreground flower. But those flowers behind the hummingbird are screaming at me and I still don’t like where this is going.
I reset the settings to zero and went back to exposure +.85 and fill light 3. Then I tried experimenting with the tone curve: dark tones up +14 (remember I slid the slider back and forth and back and forth, I’m just telling you what I settled on, I didn’t go down there and think “Hmmm, this looks like a 14!”) and I bumped the light tones down to 30 or 40 or so.
I still don’t like this and I’m about ready to give up. With localized corrections a person could spend an hour or more correcting the lighting issues but I feel like there’s got to be a better way and that I’m failing somehow.
I’m going to the presets sidebar and I’m going to try some of the default presets out for inspiration. After looking at several of them (Cold Tone + greyscale conversion was briefly interesting) I was wowed by Sepia — hey, I can blow out the background flowers and bring the hummingbird up without the oranges getting too goofy-pink!
Alright, exposure up to .45, then .50, then contrast up to 50, too much, down to 34. Exposure back down to .33, then back to .45. Quick crop. Clarity to 100 percent just to get it out of my system (ugh that’s ugly) and back down to 2.
Played with converting it back to color with these settings and its unusable for various reasons (can’t set white balance properly, ugh, JPG!)
Time to turn off the sepia effect so I’ll disable split toning. Oh, and bump up color noise reduction to 100 percent to get rid of some noise; it does the color noise reduction before the B&W conversion to get rid of a little extra noise.
And the final result is… meh. I’m still not happy with it.
I mean, I love the hummingbird. Zoomed in 100 percent in B&W he’s great. So I’m going to crop it really really aggressively:
Look at those little feet! And in color (exposure 1.5, fill light 3, contrast +20, color noise reduction 100 percent, clarity 2):
I got up with the baby and haven’t gotten back to sleep yet. Stupid internet, heck, stupid electric light bulbs. I should only light candles when I get up at 3:00 in the morning with the baby so that I’m encouraged to blow them out again when I calm the baby down and hand him back to my wife.
On the other hand, sleep deprived + normal forgetfulness + candles is perhaps not such a good idea.
So I’m up, I’ve read the entire internet, by which I mean that sliver of the Internet Venn Diagram that is shaded both “I know about” and “I care about”. Time to start closing browser tabs (I think the ratio is 1/2 an hour web surfing == 8 hours worth of closing browser tabs).
One tab that I had opened but had lost in the forest of tabs is a recent weblog post by a friend of mine, in the middle of which he says
I had a realization earlier today: being spiritual but not religious is kinda like being intelligent but uneducated.
To which one of my other friends replied in the comments:
Not really sure how to respond to that. It bothers me, though I haven’t been able to pin down why.
It bothers me a bit too, and I think it’s because I think it has too many interpretations. Normally I’m a big fan of multiple interpretations but that line seems like it’s designed to make someone feel bad about themselves. Raised my hackles without me knowing why. I think it just sounds slightly mean taken out of context.
It took me about 20 minutes of thinking about it but I did come up with a positive, nay, a strongly positive interpretation that I rather like, even if it has little to do with my friend’s original intention (I have no doubt he was coming from it in a strictly positive manner and wasn’t trying to put anyone down or anything.)
The best explanation for my positive interpretation I can come up with comes from the other direction, the education side of things. Here are a few things I believe:
The second most important thing I needed to learn from my college degree: how to look things up and find out information about subjects I know nothing about. All those facts I learned in college are helpful, but not essential to life in the same way this is. The most important thing I needed to learn was true, visceral understanding and acceptance that it’s really okay that I don’t know everything.
If I believe this, and if I have the skills to look up anything I need to know, then everything is cool. I need to know something, it’s okay, I’ll just go look it up. Many uneducated people feel shame that they don’t know how to do a lot of things, so they put themselves down as being “dumb” when nothing could be further from the truth.
But look: I just gave you the secret to a college education! Don’t bother going tens of thousands of dollars into debt!
My point: there’s no shame in being intelligent but uneducated. Yes an education is important but can be dangerous if you wind up learning the wrong set of facts (like, for instance, if you go thousands and thousands of dollars into debt learning a bunch of sociology facts and then decide when you graduate what you really need are some facts about marketing, or technical writing. Career changes are not easy with student loans!)
By using the magic of analogy we work backwards to the phrase “spiritual but not religious”. I can think of several ways of doing this that are all mellow and cool for the most part; I’ll leave it up to you to pick one. If you pick an interpretation that’s at all mean or nasty it’s not what I meant.
Now, I strongly suspect that many people who use the phrase “spiritual but not religious” do not mean it in any of the senses I’ve been thinking about here. It’s been my experience that most people who say “spiritual but not religious” are really saying “Oh Jesus, anything but Christianity!”[1] Christianity the religion is often times quite a bit more of a bummer than Christianity the spirituality. This should come as no surprise, when Jesus was on earth he saved his strongest and harshest criticisms for the religious leaders of the day, and many of our current religious leaders deserve equally harsh rebuke. There’s nothing on Heaven or Earth that men can’t figure out how to fuck up somehow. The Bible is all too often twisted and skewed to support the prejudices and biases of whomever is reading it.
But now I’m rambling off my original topic.
[1] Starting from this point, I couldn’t think of an interpretation of Geof’s quote that didn’t lead to some bad vibes.
