Category — Photo

I’m officially behind a month on publishing my Project 365 photos. They are all shot and EXIF will validate the dates they were shot, I’ve just been busy with work and some other projects around the house. Oh, and the Brewers are playing again.

I’m hoping to plow through the backlog over the course of the next two weeks.

In other news, I may have found my publishing vehicle for creating a print version of this and the 2008 project. Instead of a book, I may go with a quarterly magazine, published via HP’s MagCloud. Stay tuned for more information.

It’s late, but I wanted to post some shots I did tonight (I’m way behind on project 365 – they are there, just had to move this along quickly) I got to photograph the John Mayer concert at Milwaukee’s Bradley Center tonight. I got the opportunity from my music writer friend, Cal Roach who was covering the concert for Jam Base.

Say what you want about John Mayer. I will say this, he put on an amazing show.

And, yeah, I now know why people like shooting rock concerts.

So far, 14 days into the new year, I’m happy to be making photos everyday. I know at some point during this year it will feel like a chore, but it really does force you to look at the world around you more objectively. I’m constantly trying to “see” what is around me, thinking, “if I had to capture it as a still frame, how would I?”

This morning, I came across a link to a blog post by Toronto based Freelance Art Buyer, Heather Morton. Written by a  consumer of photograhy, it is a great read on why as a photographer you should be out there snappin’ every day. It’s best summarized in this quote:

Let’s have a quick look at two very different photographers who shoot a lot. And you know what, some of what they shoot likely sucks but it doesn’t matter. They’re shooting and they’re getting better. Shot that shit!

So with camera in hand, I’m out there, shooting that shit. I know not everyone is going to be amazing, but hopefully it is better than the last one.

So I’m back from vacation and have internet access to upload photos again*, and Project 365 is under way. I’ve got the first five photos up, and low and behold the WordPress plugin I wrote to automagically import my photos from Flickr into the blog work, so if you aren’t a Flickr person, you can still follow along.

*technically, our hotel in Vegas had WiFi, but I wasn’t going to pay $15/day

I finally re-vamped my photography site and got it to a point where I’m happy with it.  If you’re in the Milwaukee Area and need some photography, hit me up.

Despite the gorgeous weather on Saturday, we had a great turnout for PhotoCamp Milwaukee. I haven’t checked out the final numbers, but we had 75 for the opening session.  I’ve got a few photos from the event I threw up on Flickr quickly, but will have a few to post here once I have sometime to process them a little more critically.

We’re already getting asked when the next PhotoCamp is, and while it probably won’t be for another year, there is definately an interest in setting up a monthly meeting ala Web414. Stay tuned, and if you’re interested in helping out with something like that, definately get a hold of me.

Somewhere back in December I had the idea that it would be cool to host a big, free to attend, photography event, ala BarCamp but focused only on photography (nice pun, eh?).  Around the same time (quite litterally), fellow Web414 member Raster posted something on Twitter about it.  A few direct messages later and I was the defacto organizer of the event.

Fast forward to today, we’ve set the date and have a site up will all the details at photocampmilwaukee.org.  If you’re a photographer in the greater Milwaukee area (and I’d include Madison and north Chicagoland in that), save Saturday, May 2, 2009.

We’ll have sign up information soon, but right now we are looking for sponsors.  If you’re interested contact all of the organizer of the event on the sponsor information page, or hit me up directly on my about page.

It hit me the other day that my photo project will be ending this week.  As of this writing, I have three more frames to make for Project 365 and I’ll have a photo for all 366 days this year.  Also as of this writing, I do have a ton of photos to process and post.  I’m setting a goal of having them all up by the end of the year.  (They’ll all be backdated to the date on the photo, so if you’re reading this a few months into the future that might not make sense).

What is next?

I guess the obvious question is what is next. While I will probably write up an account of the whole experience in a post later in January, one thing that I have had in mind from the start is making a book of the whole project and I still plan to do that.  I’ve promised copies to my folks, my brother, and the in-laws, but I’ll open it to you fair readers.  If you’ve enjoyed following along this year and want a hard copy of all the photos, let me know, either in the comments below or via the contact form on the about page.

Timeframe

Doing the layout for the book is not going to be trivial.  After all it is 366 photos to layout. Also this is something that is going to be done in my spare time, so my current goal is to at least have the layout completed by the end of February. After that there is the time of actual publishing which I’m also guess is not long, but not trivial.  I’d hope to have the books in hand by no later than the end of March, hopefully sooner.

Cost

I don’t know the cost yet as I’m still considering who I’m going to use as a publisher.  I’m not going to be marking these up in some sort of money making effort.  My plan is to sell these at cost plus shipping. Once I know more, I’ll post the details, but the plan is to do it as a hardcover book with premium paper. I do know most publishers give volume discounts, so if there is enough of an interest, the price may go down.

Chime In

So chime in if you want one.  Even if it’s dependant on the price, I’d like to get a gauge of interest. If there is enough interest I could be persuaded to do a soft cover as well to keep the price down.

If you subscribe to the feed you probably just saw a ton of new posts comes through.  Since I back date all of my Project 365 posts to corespond to the date they were taken on, they might now show up on the front page. I haven’t had a ton of time to process photos lately and fought with Photoshop most of the day.  For some reason, my color management got screwed up as such, pure red was showing as orange.  No amount of clicking through adjustments to my working space and proof setup got things the way they should be.  Someone gave me the tip that I have have a corrupt monitor profile (and made the comment without skipping a beat that Photoshop was comparing apples to oranges), so I went into the Vista control panel for color management and deleted the profile created by my color calibrater (a Pantone Huey).  I then re-ran the calibration, ensuring the lighting in the room was consistent through the whole measuring process, and bingo, red was red again and I was back to comparing apples to apples.

I finally had a chance to read a longer post by photographer Joe McNally. If you’ve read his book The Moment it Clicks, you get a sense that he’s been around the block a few times (and has the pictures to prove it). There is a great quote at the end of his article that I took a few seconds put on the less than flattering image of his also near the end of the post.

While I still can’t call my self a full time photographer, this still speaks to what I love so much about it.

Image & Text © Joe McNally