I Can See it For You Wholesale

So, I recently signed up to do SoFoBoMo. You can click through and read about it there, if you aren’t already familiar with it, but the short version is, it’s like NaNoWriMo for photography. I think it’s a great idea, although I don’t feel so positively about the name. It makes me think of someone trying to cuss me out while eating a peanut butter sandwich.

I signed up in part because I’m a sucker for stuff like this, but mostly because I have yet to do the sort of project where you conceive, execute, and output a bunch of images on a single subject in a delimited time window. And that seems like something I ought to be able to do, and ought to have practice doing.

I’ve debated a bit with myself on the topic. I was considering using my translation of Chapter 18 of the Mūlamadhyamikakārikāḥ (a Buddhist philosophical treatise in verse), but I think I should save that — I don’t think it would be best served by a rigid constraint on time and number of images.

So, I think I’m going to revisit a photograph (at right) I made some time ago, and with which I was never fully satisfied. The subject is a tree which is growing around a metal pole, and if allowed to continue growing, may at some point fully engulf the pole within itself. I plan to return to this subject, and to others like it, which embody the conflict of nature and civilization in small ways.

We’ll see how that works out for me. I plan to use my RB67 and shoot the whole thing on Portra 800, a film I know fairly well and from which I believe I can get good results in a wide variety of conditions. This will have the advantage of giving me high-quality output I know how to work with, along with a degree of built-in consistency. This is good, because consistency between images is not something I’ve previously worked to achieve; normally, I treat every image as a task unto itself. I don’t generally try to match the look of one image to another.

The downside is that this means shooting 35 images on 120 film (minimum four rolls; with any degree of redundancy, more like six-eight), and getting them developed and scanned, which adds overhead in the chronology.

Well, we’ll see.

Right now what I’m doing is scouting potential subjects. I may do a few still life images at home (likely with vegetables), but for the most part, this is going to be about things found in the “wild,” as it were. I normally just wait and shoot subjects as I come across them, but for this, I’ll need to make a lot of images in a comparatively short period of time in order to have the time needed to develop, scan, process, and design. Thus the need to plan ahead.

To do this, I’ve been using the combination of my Peek email device and Remember the Milk, an online todo list service with particularly good email integration. When I pass by something that I particularly like, I send an email to RTM, along with a reminder date (shooting for sofobomo won’t start for a while) and an instruction to file it in a separate sofobomo list.

I could, of course, keep a paper list, but the metadata aspect is really appealing, and paper doesn’t remind you when to do something. And while paper is great for some things (like taking notes while I’m shooting), I find it doesn’t work well for me when I’m aggregating lots of little notes over time. Either I make the notes in a fixed-page journal, in which case I have trouble finding them all later in the midst of the other text, or else I make them on a removable-page notepad, in which case I tend to lose the pages.

So, yay for technology….

It’s nice that Kodak isn’t just gradually eliminating film types from its lineup. They’re also adding some. Ektar 100 — available now in 35mm and soon in 120 (a particularly good sign), this is a super-fine-grain, super-saturated, high-contrast film. It appears to look best somewhat overexposed, which — unfortunately for handholders — means shooting it at ISO 50.

It’s not really my cup of tea — I prefer Portra 800, with its more neutral colors, and its lovely grain. Not to mention its high speed But the Ektar definitely has its own charms. And working with the slower shutter speeds and wider apertures dictated by working with Ektar handheld can lead to some interesting results…

This is a slight edit of a flickrmail I just sent someone discussing photography podcasts. It seemed worth making a note of, so I’m posting it here:

And both there and in most other photography podcasts, and a lot of the photography blogs, there’s a general sense that the most any of us are supposed to want to achieve is a career as a commercial or wedding photographer. I’m not sure I want to drop the A-word (art) but if there isn’t more to photography than getting someone to pay you to take pictures, I think I need to go back to knitting.

A major source of cognitive dissonance for me when it comes to photography is that I don’t have any background in art history or criticism. (My educational background is rather…scattered, to say the least, but it skews towards religious studies, philosophy, and some bits of sociology and psychology related to the study of education.) This makes it hard for me to identify with the perspective of the art-photography bloggers.

At the same time, I don’t much care about the commercial side of photography and the huge body of amateur photographers who would like to make a part- or full-time transition to doing commercial/portrait/wedding/stock photography.

Hell, maybe I should go back to knitting…