SoFoBoMo Finale

Employee Recycle Bin

This is one of my favorite pictures from my SoFoBoMo effort. It’s just my current fear / expectation / mindset at work showing through.

And of course this one….

Nick and Norah

Could be because I’m biased, but so be it.

I was fortunate enough to have an old friend review my PDF. He provided some excellent critique, telling me what I did right, what he thought was off, suggestions for improvements, etc. If I learned nothing else (though I did) that feedback was worth the effort.

After my crazy week of printing in the darkroom I’m pretty content skipping out on shooting for a few days. But, I sort of already want to take the feedback I’ve received and somehow work it in. Right now I’m a bit thin on ideas so I’ll have to work on that.

I need to take some time to go through the other SoFoBoMo projects. While I’ll probably just get jealous and wish I was a better shooter, I’m sure it will be educational and help me see what I could improve.

Technorati Tags: photography, sofobomo, black, and, white, employee, recycle, bin

SoFoBoMo — Done!

I made it! I’m done with SoFoBoMo.

You can find my e-book here. If you take a moment to look at it, I’d appreciate any constructive criticism.

As this is my first project like this, it’s probably worthwhile to start a “lessons learned” list.

So, my lessons learned

1. While my “general” idea of shadows was okay, I might have done a mid-way review to make sure that I was going to have cohesive material. This would also allow me to re-evaluate my theme and see if I’ve narrowed it by my shooting, or if I need to narrow it.
2. If I’m going to print the pictures, I should do so right away and not wait for the final week. I’m sure this seems obvious to someone with lots of darkroom experience but for me, it was a lesson learned.
3. Although I was warned about this, I still should have left more time for the layout work. I used Aperture’s book capability. It is okay. It’s really limited in fairly arbitrary ways though. So I should have been a bit more prepared with either trial runs or a backup plan.

A big hiccup (that I’d read about in passing) was the file size limit on the upload. Aperture wrote out a 36 Mbyte PDF. I could not find a way to work around this limitation within Aperture, though it’s probably an OSX limitation. My solution was to use the “Save PDF as TIFF” option. This saved all pages as individual TIFF files. Then I used Photoshop to create a “PDF Presentation” with the TIFF files created. Using a “High” value on the JPEG compression resulted in a PDF of only 6 Mbyte or so.

Anyhow, it’s done and so am I.

Technorati Tags: photography, sofobomo, efke, film, 100, black, and, white

SoFoBoMo Update

Flowers in the Morning

My personal SoFoBoMo started on May 8th. I’m 10 days into it and I’m not convinced that I’ll be able to make something cohesive out of my theme. I just developed 2 rolls of film tonight and will scan them tomorrow to see what I’ve got. I think that I managed to eek 7 or 8 possibles from the first roll. I’m definitely going to need all 6 rolls of film. In fact, I might have to supplement with digital (gasp!).

I guess that I’m just moving to a “pre-freak out” mind set. In another 10 days I’m sure that I’ll be right at the “freak out” mind set.

Technorati Tags: photography, sofobomo, efke, 100, black, and, white, rodinal

Norah, Efke, and SoFoBoMo

From Norah’s Birth

Norah in the hospital

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. We just had baby Norah, our 4th child. She’s doing well and we’re all adjusting to having a new baby in the house.

Stella
Dang that droopy eye!

I finally got some more film too. I decided to follow I Heart Film’s lead and try some Efke 100. He is using Efke 25, but I just can’t do that. ISO 25 would drive me crazy! I already notice the speed hit going from using Tri-X to Efke.

The picture above is my first developed roll. I developed in Rodinal 1:50 using semi-stand at 15 minutes. It seems a bit grainy compared to what I used to with Tri-X. But since this is a negative scan (as opposed to a print scan), that could be the reason. I’ve not (wet) printed any of these pictures yet so I can’t really judge my exposure or development time.

Finally, I’m participating in the SoFoBoMo. I hope that anyone interested in photography challenges themselves with this project. My theme (subject to change without notice, of course) is shadows. I’ve gotten some promising pictures on the first roll of Efke. I need a bit more cohesion to pull the whole theme together though.

Technorati Tags: photography, efke, 100, sofobomo, film, black, and, white

SoFoBoMo Theme

I’ve signed up for SoFoBoMo (the Solo Photo Book Month) project. I’m not sure of the theme though. Since I’ll have a new born daughter, perhaps a new life theme? Or a juxtaposition type theme (big/small, young/old, etc).

I had thought about doing a theme on chiaroscuro.

Chair legs in morning (scan of print)

I’m not sure. We have a piano with lots of little detail that just lights up when the evening sun hits it. I guess that I’ll keep running with this idea, at least for a bit.

Maybe I’ll be able to convince the financial committee that with the new baby, we need a set of lights and non-crappy remotes. Mmmmm, lights….

Technorati Tags: photography, tri-x, rodinal, sofobomo, black, and, white