Child like#2

Just staying creative ....

SoFoBoMo quick review: Our Robot Overlords Revealed

Link: Our Robot Overlords Revealed, by Matt Alofs

The thing is, these pictures are mundane and ordinary. There is no redeeming quality about them at all ... but then you factor in the name of the project.

Then, all of a sudden, there is life and meaning. It's not 3 air vents, it's a group of sentries standing guard. It's not a vacuum and a garbage can and a box, it's a nuclear family standing in the yard.

This is precisely the thing I love most about photography, and project oriented photography in particular. The context can change the meaning of what you see, sometimes drastically. Sometimes it's the title of the photograph, other times it's just the juxtaposition of several photos. I now see our overlords all over.

This is my favorite (So far) SoFoBoMo book.

Matt: Make a second edition, finish it!

Going down

Down down down down.....

Child like

This is a photograph of my daughters artwork hanging on the fridge, long exposure with camera motion and out of focus.

It is one of the 200 shots I took on sunday, of which none were very successful. The ones that worked were the family snaps. Family snaps are easy to make work, the audience is small and easy to please.

On the other hand, pleasing myself is a far more dificult a task.

I only shot 50 frames yesterday, and skipped the studio altogether. However, in a glass half full view, I shot 50 frames and got some rest.

I listened to the Radiant Vista podcast on "The myth of talent", the basic premise is that there is no such thing as a gifted person, just a person that has put the work in and has the passion and focus to sustain interest in a subject long enough to engage the conscious and sub conscious mind in the act of performing the task.

I agree, more over I can attest to the fact that it is true. I invested many hours of my teen years into playing guitar and now have a connection with it that is quite deep. Now I'm trying to get to a similar connection with photography.

Practice, practice and practice.....

Help! I'm stuck in a rut, and I can't get out!

I know I can get out. It's just that when you are in a rut, it feels like all your creative efforts are for naught.

I know what I need to do, I just need to do it... that is:

Do it....

Yesterday I took 200 photos they may all fall on their face, or there may be 4 or 5 keepers, and perhaps one gem. Or none, we shall see.

Today I resolve to do the same, and hit the recording studio for a few hours of solo recording work.

SoFoBoMo wrapup: Creating the PDF with Aperture

Using Aperture to create my SoFoBoMo PDF was a natural, it's my photo workflow tool of choice. Hidden among it's asset management and photo editing prowess, it also has powerful book layout tool set.

Just as in iPhoto, you can create photo books using Aperture and get print on demand copies with just a few clicks all without ever leaving the application. Just as with many print on demand books you can only order from several pre-determined sizes. The aspect ratio I chose was non standard so I had to dig deeper.

I decided early on that I was not going to print a book, my project would live on screen in PDF form only. None of the books sizes provided by default in Aperture are the aspect ratio of a Apple Cinema display, so I had to make my own book template. Templates can be created in any size with any number of photos on each page.


I created a custom book template with the aspect ratio of my screen. I then created several page layouts, one, two and three up with a mix of portrait and landscape pages. After creating the layout all I needed to do was place the images in the appropriate places.

You can select an asset view in Aperture that will hide images that have been placed in a layout. This asset view came in quite handy for sequencing. I had many shots that were related, that may have been shot on different days. I was able to scan all of the assets in thumbnail view to drag them into the layout in a logical order, all the while winnowing down the visible set of images.

Generating the PDF was as simple, just print to PDF and viola!

The major bump in the road was the text. I just did not take the time to learn text layout and design in Aperture. Instead, I opened the text pages of the book in Illustrator and added the text selections from there.

The last part of the process was compressing the file. I opened the PDF in Acrobat Pro, and saved it out in compressed form.

All tolled, from the start of book layout to finished PDF it took me about 5 hours, split over 2 days. Aperture made PDF creation simple and painless!

Link to the finished book blog posting

The muse is dead

The muse is dead, originally uploaded by dbwalker.

I've been so drained of late. Hardly photographing at all. I had been tripping the shutter about 200 times a day just last month.

Now, I only hit it about 10 times a day... It just seem s like I've stopped seeing.... weird!