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With my SoFoBoMo deadline approaching tomorrow, I made the final push to finish my book. In the end I decided to title it "Everyday Beauty." The process of taking these photos has taught me something - that beauty can be found everywhere, and that I just needed to look for it rather than longing to be somewhere else. There are more of my thoughts on that in the introduction inside the book.

view a PDF of the book (4.5 MB)

I feel pretty good about the book overall. Some of the photos may not quite live up to the thoughts I've presented in the title and introduction, but I think I did pretty well given the short period of time. For the layout, I ended up just using Aperture's built-in book creation software. That did limit my layout choices somewhat - but saved me quite a bit of time over doing a completely custom layout in Adobe InDesign, or using something like Blurb.com's layout application. I do look forward to trying out Blurb soon, but even then I'll probably still use Aperture to create a quick rough draft of a book - to easily see how various photos look next to each other and create a basic layout guideline.

The other thing I didn't do was properly color proof my photos. I don't currently own a hardware monitor calibrator, and without that I didn't see much point in it. Even if I got the photos to look great on my mediocre laptop screen, there's no guarantee that they would have looked the same once printed since my screen might be way off. So, I have a few things on my shopping list for upcoming projects.

Upcoming projects? Yes, SoFoBoMo has motivated me to do more. The small accomplishment of creating a book has gotten me excited about exploring other types of photography, and generally thinking about what it is I want to create. I'm not sure where that will lead just yet, but I'm looking forward to the journey.

SoFoBoMo officially kicked off on April 1 - and I had hoped to at least have a theme for my book chosen by then, but other priorities got in the way. So, I'll be delaying my start for at least another day or two.

Here are the ideas I have so far:

• Make a series of abstract photos with large areas of solid color, that you might think were paintings at first glance. There are a few photos by Amanda George in the book "How To Look At Photographs" that inspired this idea. I'd love to see more of her work, but unfortunately can't find anything she's done online. This is the closest thing I could find in my photo library as an example, but it's not quite abstract enough:

• There are no expansive landscapes where I live - only far too many strip malls, billboards and gas stations. I could produce a series of photos that are a commentary on the visual clutter we're bombarded with in our cities.

• Make a series of photos of naturally occurring letters of the alphabet. Not letters that appear on a sign, but instead are formed by other objects - such as the branches of a tree forming the shape of the letter "A", or an "H" that's part of a chair. I'd also add in the numbers 0 - 9, for a total of 36 photos. I had read about a photography instructor giving this as an assignment to his students, and it seems like an interesting (but time consuming) challenge.
• Buy some film for the Voigtlander Vitomatic IIb camera a relative gave to me as a gift and use it to take a series of photos around town. It would be my first time using film since I became seriously interested in photography, and I'd like to see what kind of pictures come out of that old thing.

Of course, while I'm out and about I could very well end up working on two or more of those ideas at the same time - depending on what I see and how I feel about it.

I find it hard to free up time for photography.

I work a full time job from 9am to 5pm, then head straight home to help make dinner, spend a bit of time with the family, then help clean up and get my daughter to bed. My free time starts around 9pm, and I usually push myself to accomplish some personal goal before I pass out around midnight. Sometimes it seems like an accomplishment just taking some time for myself to not think about anything and simply relax.

So, one of the first thoughts that came across my mind when discovering SoFoBoMo was, "would I have enough time to do that? to create my own photo book in just one month?"

It's taken me three years to come up with the 21 photos that I feel worthy of posting online in my "Beginnings" series - and even then, I know that many of those images could be improved by taking more time in Photoshop. Of course, that never really solidified into a project until I started this website a few months ago. Up until then, they were just part of a large collection of raw photos sitting on my hard drive. My photography had no direction.

SoFoBoMo will be different though - my first real photography project with tangible goals. I'll be held accountable to produce good work within a set time - especially since it's something I'll be blogging about publicly.

For my project, I'll need to pick a series of photos that can be taken within my time constraints - which means either in my house at night or while out and about over a couple of weekends. Or, do I use this as an opportunity to take a vacation to some exotic locale for one week in April? Hmm ...

Now that I think about it, the first sentence I wrote isn't quite right (so I'll cross it out). It should be:

I need to pick specific goals in my photography, so that I can plan my time accordingly.

It's time to stop making excuses and start taking pictures.

Yesterday I came across something that has gotten me very excited about photography again. Started by Paul Butzi, SoFoBoMo (Solo Photo Book Month) is simply, in his words:

"for photographers who want to take a crack at putting together a solo photo book in one month"

The idea that Paul has presented, is that you make a commitment to take 35 or more photos within a month, and then create a book with them. The book can just be a nicely formatted PDF file - there's no need for a printed hard copy (although, you can do that if you like). You can start anytime from April 1, 2008 to May 1, 2008.

One of my favorite photo bloggers, Gordon McGregor, wrote an excellent post about SoFoBoMo. I like this part:

"Along the way you'll learn about editing your images - making those final painful choices on what to include or not. You'll probably learn a bit about book layout, design and what goes in to making a book. You'll find out how good you are at working to a deadline - or not. You'll actually finish something. That in particular is powerful stuff. It forces you to make decisions and live with them."

That's what this challenge is about. Learning and self-discovery. Not only will you learn through the very act of doing the work, but also by being engaged in a community of photographers who are all working towards the same goal: 1 book with 35 photos in 1 month.

Sign me up! I've needed something - a goal to work toward, some outside motivation - to help me push my photography to another level. So, I'll be participating and blogging about my experiences.

Here's a list of other SoFoBoMo bloggers.

Or, rather - it's begun. Pixpeep.com is at a point where I think it's good enough to share with the public - so, this posting marks the launch of the website.

Things I've learned in the process of building Pixpeep.com:

• A lot of geeky web stuff that can be done with Movable Type and Lightbox.
• I really need to get a decent monitor, along with a hardware colorimeter.
• Organizing photos into specific projects is extremely helpful - I now have ideas of photos I want to take, projects I want to start and places I want to go. There's some direction in what I want to do that wasn't there before.
• Writing and journaling is helpful, for the same reasons.
• Wild berry cheescake ice cream at 3 in the morning is the best thing ever - the lack of sleep is not.