What travels a third of a mile an hour?

Sand Dunes - Lindisfarne,

Some days it feels like me but the answer, according to the national treasure and iPad fanboy Stephen Fry, is spring*. I believe this having driven back from the frozen north of England to the relatively balmy East Midlands. One sign that spring is here is the dawn chorus of birds. In Seahouses there was none but back home the birds are on fine form - a joy to wake up to - especially after the long journey.

So I am back home, refreshed and raring to go and what a lot the spring has to offer. Exhibitions to visit, competition to enter and disappointments to get over, historical facts to unearth and who knows what else? So lets start with a disappointment. My book. I have no idea why but the production was a total disaster. Not only was the dust sleeve not produced but also the reproduction of the photographs was appalling. Over the next week or so I am going to work out what went wrong and I am sure I did some things wrong but I am also sure I did a lot of things right. I will not pontificate any further until I have undertaken a full post mortem.

Enough bad news. On a more positive note I got round to producing a couple of photographs last night from the visit to Northumbria and the results are most encouraging - perhaps I might be able to produce a photograph of Lindisfarne which is not a cliché after all - lets hope so.

*I always get my vast amount of useless information from QI - a veritable vat of such things.

Year Book Photos...

As a result of a review of my book I got on Blurb I have put together the following flash presentations:

Long List - These are the 50 photographs I choose for the bok

Actual Photos - These are the photos that made the book and the order they appear in the book.

I hope this makes sense

Ramsdale, Vellum and Blurb...

So there I was standing in the document room of the records office looking at a scroll that was over 230 years old and I started to wonder if anything I have produced in my life would last this long? Who knows, certainly know that if there is then I won't be around to see it. The document in question was the enclosure award for the parish of Ratby. I was trying to locate 'Ramsdale' for the historical research I am working on and after 3 hours of searching I found it. A small triumph for me - I must admit I did feel quite pleased with myself.

I have droned on in the past about the ephemeral nature of digital files, here today but not sure about tomorrow. To address this I have taken my first step in preserving my work by publishing my first book with Blurb. It has the catchy title of 2009. Now this is not printed on vellum so I don't know how long it will last but I fell it may have a better chance than all my digital files. Only time well tell.

Slowly getting there...

Well the book is slowly coming together. As this is the first book I have really tried to produced I have decided to keep things very simple. The Blurb video tutorials give a huge number of examples of what you can do and there are many interesting ideas there. But, and it is a large, elephant size but, just because you can doesn't mean you should. I have always been attracted by clean lines and simple backgrounds and so I see no reason to change this for the book (I no doubt will change this over time but not just now)

The next task is writing the intro -.to puff or not to puff? That is the question... as some one might have said. At the time of writing this I have only a few vague idea as to what this might contain - there is a large section of blog entries so I don't need to write a 1500 word essay. So pithy and to the point. No pressure then! However, this is for another day.

Hard work...

Who'd have thought it was such hard work making a book. In one sense it is not - you just slap a loud of photographs together, add a bit of text and send it off - what could be simpler? Only it's not. I want the project to shine so I am spend a food deal of time working through the design options - they seem to be endless.

Yesterday I seemed to have a handle on what was going where only to realise that the photography wasn't strong enough. So now I am selecting my 50 best rather than the best per month. This makes for much stronger photography but now I am finding it impossible to cut down the selection to 50 images - I'm at 80 at the moment. The problem is each on is like a child to me - I am to committed to each image - perhaps 80 will have to do.

I have started to seriously edit the blog text. Initially I thought the text would form the intro to each month but as this idea fell by the way side I have re-edited the text to reflect my thought process through out the year. This still need some work on it but it is looking in better shape. Then of course I have decide how the text will look in the final book and how to work it into the series of photgraphs - but these are problems for tomorrow.

In short this is hard work and I am going to approach this as serious project rather than the somewhat throw away idea it started out as - hopefully it will be much the better for it.

One final thing - I managed to get a bit of photography in as well.

Interesting project...

I have spent most of the day working on the year book. The original plan was to break it down into months and then select the best per month. I would then use selected blog entries to illustrate what I was doing that month. It had a sense of hanging together. Notice I said had - past tense - because as I worked the problem it became very evident that some months were much stronger than the other - both as far as the blog and the images were concerned. I then tried to correct some of the photographs for CMYK and new problems started to arise - they just wouldn't look that good. In short the plan came unravelled as I came to realise that what I really wanted to do was showcase my work over the last 12 months rather than month by month.

Back to the drawing board.

This is not a bad thing as it should mean that version 2 should be a much stronger book - well that is what I think at the moment -however I am sure that there will be more iterations until I get it right. Such is life. BTW - the photograph has nothing to do with I just like it.

Notes on Blurb photobooks...

This is a note on what I have found out so far about setting up prints for printing in a Blurb book. Whether anyone finds this of any use is not really the point - it helps me:

Tutorial Training Video

Blurb use an in depth video produced by xcite to give you information about how to set your monitor up and ICC profiles etc. One or two points with the video:

1. The video mentions a location where the ICC profile can be downloaded. This location does not exist;
2. '...Blurb does not technically honor color/ICC profiles...' is the starting statement from the Blurb support site. This probably explains why No 1. does not work. The info on producing a PDF file for Blurb also provide some information around the whole ICC profile question.
3. An independent user has produced a ICC profile which mirrors the one that Blurb uses. This is mentioned in Blurb's official blog - however when you go to the blog site it is covered in so many legal get outs that you have to wonder if it is worth using. Note: This was published in 2007 so how up to date this is really has to be questioned.

So from all of this I think the best way forward would be to use the standard CMYK profile in photoshop and then soft proof using this. According to the Xcite tutorial you loose about 10 % of the gamut compared to the Blurb profiles - however, as Blurb do not state what their profile is then this is a bit difficult to varify.

I was in such a bad place....

God I was in such a bad place in the early part of this year. I really let the MA course get on top of me and it distorted my whole perspective on life and photography. I have been rereading my blog entries and editing them for inclusion in my photobook of the year and I realise that I was getting quite ill. I suspect some small part of this was a fear as to what the future may hold if I dropped out of the course - well almost 12 months on I now know that the future is nothing to be feared but rather to be embraced as you truly do not know what is going to happen - this is a very valuable lesson to learn especially when you read so much tripe written about what to expect in the next 6 months/year/10 years and so on. No one knows - you just have to figure it out as you go along.

Perhaps this is most important things I have learnt over the last 12 months - oh and having an MA in photography doesn't really mean anything other than the satisfaction of completing the course. Not completing the course doesn't make you a bad person - nor does it make you a bad photographer. It is just one of a infinite number of ways forward. If only I had realised this at the start of the course. Ah well - ce la vie.

2009 Year Book...

With the new year fast approaching I have decided to take stock and produce a year book for the last 12 months. I have been thinking about this for some time - may be a year or so after it was suggested to me by my good friend Diane. However, I have put this of and put this off but now I am going to to do it.

I am in the process of designing the layout but one thing I want to include is a selection of the entries for each month from this blog. I am going to do this for two reasons. The first it gives a good feel and flavour as to what I was thinking at the time the photographs were made. The second is to provide a permanent record of this blog. I am becoming more concerned that with digital age comes no guarantee of preservation - this blog is provided, free of service by Google - but what if they didn't do that any more? What if they turned it off or deleted it? Where is the record then? At least this way I will have some record. So let the work commence and hopefully by the end of January I should be the proud owner of my first year book - can't wait.