spring2life take2

Krk, Croatia

Just in time I managed to finish and upload my SoFoBoMo 2011 photobook, aptly titled Conditioned Krk for the countless air condition units it features. Those creepers have been subjects of a number of pictures I posted from Krk, and this year I’ve used the opportunity of SoFoBoMo’s fuzzy month and my summer holidays to build a book of these visual contaminants.

Oh well, I shouldn’t complain that much, living in a moderate climate most of times. Maybe some people of Krk take my visual notes and draw their own conclusion about how to devise their environment.

My special thanks go to Eric Jeschke for providing the LaTex sources of his own 2009 photo book under a Gnu Public License, which allowed me to achieve a compact web pdf in a very fast way, and at the same time creating a blurbable high-res pdf as well.

Update: The pdf is now available from the books section of this website as well.

yesterday i received the printed version of my sofobomo book from print. i had been really curious about the quality, especially the rendering of the difficult, so i thought, darker regions. in this respect there is hardly a fault to find. problems however arise in two other aspects: colors, especially red and blue, come out definitely more vivid than on my calibrated monitor, and fine structures like sand on the beach or a fishing net suffer from the printing resolution. sometimes even in fine nuanced bright areas it seems that compression artifacts become visible. now i stop nitpicking, because i know only too well that i can definitely not expect steidl quality for a print-on-demand book in that price class. we always get what we pay for.

the positive experience of the first self-made book, where i did not resort to the pre-fabricated layouts of photobook making software, is simply unbeatable. and in this sense i have learned a lot in this year’s sofobomo, and i guess i’ll be in next year again. the image above was taken on the beach of batticaloa and is the back title of my book.

the wet weather here in bavaria was not only in the headlines of the yellow press. even serious newspapers ask meteorologists for scientific explanations and/or longer-term forecasts – which are impossible to give for our geographic situation. the only reliable trends are for higher average temperatures, but this is not so surprising. and for local weather in the next 2 weeks it doesn’t determine anything. and umbrellas keep being accessoire du jour.

but the bad weather makes it easier to set aside some time to read sofobomo books. i started to read the books of photographers whom i already knew from their blogs but quite soon got hooked and peeped into other books – only to the effect that i have a reading list now and am quite determined to read all of them. i hope i can finish before next sofobomo starts…

what an amount of books sofobomo yielded this year! i did go through only a small part up to now and already found quite a number of really precious, extraordinary ones. so on top of the personal success of having really created my book, analyzed in part what it meant to me and what it taught me, there is so much food for reading, seeing, reflecting that i am truly overwhelmed. a lot of my free time the next days i will spend going through those books.

the image above, taken in the newly built house of a tsunami victim in batticaloa, left me somewhat speechless in its tight vicinity of the lord of mercy and a war instrument. strange, in many aspects.

nice synonym for the catch i sometimes find on my flash cards. but sometimes those emblematic empty bottles just hide their merits (or less sugarcoated: they have to wait for a more clear-sighted moment). carl weese hinted in a comment he made yesterday on the value of an archive and the necessity of a 2nd look, and of course he is right. especially the rejected images deserve this re-evaluation, and in this way i found my empty bottles.

postscriptum: i have uploaded the book to issuu, too, and am astonished how hassle-free this was. so if you want to see it more book-style in a nifty flash version, klick here: Batticaloa Fishermen on issuu.

reviewing my selection process for the images to be included into the book, i made an interesting observation, for which today’s lead shot can serve as an example. during the first review of the pictures within days after their creation, i had a very different attitude towards their qualities. the image above came out only 2nd, the lower image, already posted on 2009/05/20, won.

now creating a set for the sofobomo book, the criteria changed. the silhouette of the man in the lead image won over the more interesting structure of the water. and suddenly i realized that for too long a time i had tried to carefully avoid people in my images of situations and sceneries. for a reason unknown to myself even now i did not want humans in the photographs. only now i felt the added value that men/women and their interaction bring even into such scenes.

and here lies for me the added benefit of sofobomo: i had to re-evaluate my images, thoroughly weighing there merits plus their function in a sequence, something i wouldn’t have done without this project. and i think this improved my vision.

finished. after some intensive hours my sofobomo 09 book is ready. it is available from the sofobomo website here: batticaloa fishermen. scribus proofed to be a reliable tool for this work, it can only be recommended. the resulting pdf is 7 mb for more than 40 images with 150dpi, so compression works reasonably well. plans are to get it printed by blurb, the layout was carefully crafted for the small square book that blurb offers.

and having completed it gives a good feeling, i can tell you!

using the evening hours for sofobomo work, i learn to master scribus more and more. it turns out that the first framework i had prepared did not make proper use of the templating functionalities, so modifying fonts and text colors turned out to be more tedious then necessary. as i prefer the systematic approach, i first did the necessary refactoring and then only started to fill the frames with pictures, cherishing very much the drag-and-drop possibilities of the digikam asset management software and scribus under ubuntu linux.

what works amazingly well with scribus is the creation of pdfs. i now have 13 images in the book, and limiting the output resolution to 150dpi, scribus makes a 1.7mb pdf file out of this. sounds and looks reasonable, but i still want to check the quality on a better monitor than my laptop’s.

oh, and the girl: she’s happily using a pump provided by our project and locally built with available material and techniques.

finally my sofobomo 09 theme has found me: the fishermen of batticaloa. since 2005 i try to spend the early morning hours of my missions to batticaloa on the beach, and over the time i got more and more acquainted with them. since quite some time i planned either a small exhibition or a pod-book on this topic, so using it for sofobomo is just natural.

the next evenings i will spend with bibble5 – the preview 2.1a really rocks – and scribus. my laptop is not too well suited for heavy image editing, this is one more reason to use bibble instead of lightzone. to compile the book should be not too difficult, as the framework is ready: a blurb book is going to be the print target. now it’s high time for doing the final selection.

a big advantage of the (pre-)alpine region i am dwelling in is the long duration of spring you can get by moving just a little bit. whilst the petals of the apple trees now lay in the street of my hometown, washed down by the rainfall of the last 3 days, just 10km to the south spring is still in its early stages. here in weißbach canyon the intensive green of a beech tree is still sensational as the other vegetation is still more in the pale and brown stadium.

and the rusty red of the lichens on the lime rock is just now extraordinary as there is not to much red to be found in the surroundings. in a week the scenery will have changed with blossoms and flowers everywhere.

for sofobomo, which has it’s first day of the fuzzy month today, weißbach canyon is one of my options. the flow of water there is a continuous fascination, and if my other options don’t work (or if i feel bold and want to make two books) i will surely come back there.

having been on the brink already last year and in the end procrastinated for too long, i had already decided to participate in 2009 sofobomo when there were the first rumors on paul butzi’s blog and now i have registered online.

the book’s topic is not yet decided as the fuzzy month from may 1st to june 30th is crisscrossed by several events: a business trip to sri lanka connected with a number of obligations but also possible photographic opportunities, school holidays myy ladies want to spend at the seaside…

whilst the topic needs some decision making (always good to have plan a and b, that keeps you flexible to follow plan f if necessary), the publishing tool is clear: scribus is available on my linux platform. i have used it already for 2 photobooks, and now on the ubuntu platform with color management available and lightzone and/or bibble 5 as high class raw converters/image editors, the basic kit is clear.

on the printing/publishing side i am still undecided: issu is optically very nice – i still do admire andreas manessingers tscheppaschlucht – where it runs, but last year it did not run on too many computers i tried. scribd looked promising, but on linux i was not able to enlarge a presented document up to legibility, blurb i have not tried. so there is still some research to do.

for me, there is however no doubt that it will be a positive experience to accept the challenge and make an intensive month out of it: designing, photographing, editing and finalising should be a real reward in themselves.