Ordinary Pictures

Main Street, Minneapolis

I have used various types of Polaroid film off-and-on over the past ten years or so and alternately grow fond of it or am driven crazy by it. The crazy part is dealing with the wonderful Type 55 black & white sheet film which also produces a negative. I’ve been driven to distraction at times with the oddities of processing this film. I used to get huge areas of undeveloped film mostly due to pulling it out of the holder incorrectly. At $3-$4 a sheet it hurts to get one wrong. I think my frustrations with Type 55 are over, however, since the supply is gone, or at least Polaroid is out of it and probably won’t produce any more.

In the past year or so I have taken a liking to the consumer grade 600 color film. It produces a fairly warm-toned rendition of the scene that has an other-worldly quality I love. The attached photo above is on 600 film taken last year. I believe this film will be the last to go, but I bought a few packs recently to stock up. I currently plan to use it for my SoFoBoMo project, though that might change depending on circumstances.

Ice in the Mississippi River, Upper Falls lock & dam, Minneapolis

Not only has it been quite cold here for the past few weeks, but it’s that time of the winter when I start getting somewhat tired of it. I think the latter might be due to the lack of snow during February, so everything looks rather old and worn out.

March is typically the snowiest month here in Minnesota, and usually a bit warmer, so that might improve things a bit. Still, I am starting to look forward to seeing the snow go away and see some green. I only hope that when May rolls around and it’s time to begin my SoFoBoMo project, it will be spring here, but our last average frost date is May 15.

I ran across an few interesting blog posts about the book creation part of SoFoBoMo at Martin Doonan’s blog. It’s apparent that I’d better get to work on this book business. I really like Martin’s idea of a dry run with prints.

I’ve been working on-and-off for the past three months on getting all my black & white grain elevator images re/scanned and made ready for putting in a book. I have been roughing things out using Blurb’s Booksmart software and one of their canned templates. I haven’t seen a sample of Blurb’s output and have no idea what the quality is, so the decision whether to go with them for the final product, or just do it myself, hasn’t been made. I have found the Booksmart program a useful tool to get an idea of how photos will look in book form without actually having to print it or create templates myself. I thought it worth mentioning in case others are looking for a book program. BTW, you can print from Booksmart, but they add watermarks so it’s only useful for testing. I’d be interested to know if there are other similar or better tools out there like this that work out-of-the-box.

One thing the grain elevator project has taught me is that deciding on the order of images is the hardest part. Having the physical prints to shuffle would make ordering and re-ordering much easier and will give a better idea what the final product will look like. I’ll have to give it a try, but I’m also prepared to discover that even subtle changes in an image’s look in print might affect the final order.

Anyway, following Martin’s idea of a dry run, I think I’ll pick some related photos and try it out. The 2nd Street North set I have on Flickr would be adequate. If I can’t find the original scans, or those scans aren’t good enough for print, I’ll pick something else from the digital archives. At any rate, playing with the layout tools and the physical prints will help prepare my mind and hands for the real time crunch in May.

Wait a minute. I had decided on an electronic book, but I think I’m gravitating more toward a hard copy… More on this later.

Welcome to my new home!

I’ve finished moving everything, fixing the links and what not. If you notice anything not working, leave a comment here and I’ll see if I can fix it.

I was rooting around in Paul Butzi’s web site last week looking for some Jobo development times. Having found what I wanted, I eventually ended up at his excellent blog where I discovered SoFoBoMo, or Solo Photo Book Month. What’s that, you ask? Well, see the full rules here, but basically you get a month to take pictures, pick at least 35 and produce a photo book—either hard copy or electronic. It sounded to me like a great idea so I signed up. I chose May 1-31, the last possible time slot according to the rules.

I have a few ideas floating around in my mind about this project. One is to do it all using Polaroid 600 film or possibly Type 55 in honor of the recent announcement that Polaroid was ceasing manufacture of instant films in the next few months. If I did this, I would scan the original images and produce an electronic book (pdf). Another idea was to take a trip early in May, and try to get 35 good photos on location. My feeling is that I’ll likely stick closer to home.

The prospect of producing 35 decent photographs in about 3 weeks–leaving one week for book production–is daunting to me. I’m not what you’d call a prolific photographer. I’d guess I produce about at most a dozen what I consider “good” photos in a year. I’ll give it my best shot, but expect that the mediocre photos will be elevated a bit by proximity to hopefully better ones. It will definitely be interesting working under such tight constraints.

Anyway, I encourage everyone to go to Paul’s site and sign up: http://photomusings.wordpress.com/2008/01/18/solo-photo-book-month