A Book Project To Be

I want to make a book!

In the past I've dabbled in making print-on-demand books (I did a few for me and my beloved travel companion for holiday trips years ago and one for a finished book project that I printed and gave to two of my First Readers), but that was quite some time ago. I've thought of making another book or two through the years, but haven't really found a project that would fit in a book (or rather a project at all. I'm more of a single picture photographer). At least not until now when I'm in the middle of my 365 project. That's an obvious book in the making; there's a built in chronology, so I don't have to worry about the sequence of pictures, and all the pictures will be the same size and format, so layout-wise it is pretty easy...should I choose to do it the easy (and potentially boring) way.

Easier to do

Thanks to the fact that I'm now on a new PC using Lightroom CC rather than Lightroom 3 on my old machine, I can also do a book project right there in one of the modules, without having to go through Blurb's software BookWright, which frankly has some flaws, or Adobe InDesign, which I don't have even own.

All up to me

So....the obstacles are no longer there, which makes the creation of a book all up to me. Yay! That's also part of the problem...it's all up to me. Sadly, since I may very well be in the regional final for the procrastination championships! Anyway, I've begun to put my 365 images (by now I'm up to 51 images out of the 366 that'll make up this year's batch) into a book layout just to see if it'll be worth it or not. I've not decided on that yet, but at least there is a concrete folder and project file on the machine now that I can fiddle with as the year progresses, and maybe by the time our calendars say 2017 there could be a physical object that shows this year's effort in a nice way!

At a Wintery Beach

Starting the new photo year

We’re just over a week into the new year and I’ve taken my DSLR out once so far. I can’t say that I am happy with that amount of photography, but it just hasn’t felt that interesting to be out there with it yet. So it rests comfortably in its backpack for the time being. No doubt it’ll see plenty of action soon enough though...once the weather improves just a bit.

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The photos in this post are from the beach at Ribersborg in Malmö on a pretty cold January morning, but before we got the recent dusting of snow. The winds were pretty fierce so my dad and I didn’t stay very long. It’s hard to operate a camera when your hands feel like they turn into icicles! We took a brief walk over to the dog park area nearby and saw a few little critters who weren’t bothered at all by the ice cold winds. They were too busy having a good time with their other four-legged friends, old and new.

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On the Instagram 365 project

I am now on day 10 of my Instagram 365 project and I’ve updated the page here on the site with photos from the first week, with many more to come as the year progresses. I am pretty content with the photos so far, but it feels like I’ve not been experimental enough with the cell phone camera yet. It can handle much poorer lighting conditions than my previous phone could, so I am not as limited in what I can do with it. Hopefully as the year progresses I can explore that more! I’ve got 356 more opportunities to do so before December 31st, so that ought to be enough! :-)

New Year, New Start!

After quite an hiatus again from this blog it is now the first day of 2016. I type these words after a 2015 that had a few ups and quite a lot of downs and it feels nice to say that it is a new, "clean" slate as far as photography goes. Sure, I can tell myself that I'll improve all the things I'm not good at as far as photography goes this year - I'll master this or that, but I am not going to do that. That smells too much of New Year resolutions. Instead I'm going to try to keep things much, much more realistic.

There are two things I want to get better at/try this year as far as photography and that is analog photography/darkroom work and my restarted Instagram 365 project. That may seem like very weak goals, but these are thing I hope to stick with throughout the upcoming year.

Shooting film/developing

The analog/darkroom stuff will be an interesting experience, but one that I've been wanting to learn more about for many years, ever since learning about it via Ted Forbes' The Art of Photography podcast. I've been telling myself that I "should get into that" but without doing anything about it. Now though, with my photo club getting a brand new darkroom with lots of space, it should be much easier to learn and get into. We'll see how that ends up functioning in the end, but at least I will try it! The fun stuff will be picking what camera to have a go with. I do have an old 35 mm Chinon camera that my dad bought in 1979, but I also want to have a go at using a Holga and 120 film, because of the size of the negative. So many choices! :-)

The Instagram 365 Project

The 365 project is one that is "easier", since it's something I've tried before. My plan is simple: to shoot, edit and post one photo a day for the whole year via my LG G4. The camera in that thing is so good that I think it'll do justice to such a project in a way that my previous phone (an HTC One M7) didn't. I had a go at this two years ago, but ran out of steam after 7 months. This year I hope to go the distance, since in hindsight it was pretty  foolish to stop after reaching well beyond the halfway point! I won't be doing a blog post for every day's post, but rather summaries, either every week or every month. If you want to follow along on a daily basis, go to my Instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/tomasnilssonfoto/ or the Flickr album where they will be displayed as well (https://flic.kr/s/aHskrRACGm).

Photo Time Out

This week I don’t have any new pictures to show you (beyond the cell phone camera one above which is rather out of focus, but hey, it did have nice rays in it so there it goes). It appears that I’ve taken a break from photographing the world around me, just like I did last year over Christmas and New Year’s. It wasn’t an intentional break this time, but I think it’s fitting, especially since the light conditions during November and now December in Sweden are...at best...well, abysmal. Also, last month was NaNoWriMo, when I busied myself with writing rather than photographing the world around me, which made for a nice break from triggering the shutter.

November this year was REALLY gray and drab, to the point where you look out your window and think...naaaah, I’ll take this day off from photographing. It’s been like that all month really, and now the first week of December as well. Hopefully the weather will clear up at least a bit (he says as the winds howl outside and the sideways rain stream down the windows) so I can go out and shoot some of the Christmas decorations put up in the city. That’s always nice at this time of year...that and observing the increasingly haggard look of the Christmas shoppers looking for that elusive gift they have yet to find!

Sure, I've read photographers’ suggestions to shoot in inclement weather, because that’s when people don’t expect photographers to be out, and yes that may be true, but since my camera isn’t weather sealed like the more professional models, I don’t want to drown the electronics or optics inside! :-D It can stand the occasional rain drop falling on it, but not the downpour we've had lately, so best to not risk it. ("Captain Cautious" at the keyboard!)

Okay, back to the timeout on photography. If I had had this long a break from photography without last year’s timeout (which I wrote about on the blog at the time)...I think I’d be worried that I was losing my “touch”. Now though, I know it is a good way to recharge the urge to be out there, camera in hand. I think at certain points during my photographic endeavors in the past I’ve gone out there more out of habit than out of actual desire, and that’s not exactly a good way to land good photographs! Now though I am eager to go out there (weather providing of course) to land photographs that are worth keeping! Regaining that urge can’t be a bad thing!