After browsing around Flickr the other night looking at samples taken with my newest purchase (more on that later) I turned to my own photo archive and got an attack of nostalgia. For the time when I had nothing but a 3.2 megapixel Canon Powershot, high technology that it was back then, to upgrading to the Canon 20D and on and on and the cycle of upgrading never seems to end!

So at the risk of ignoring my sense of nostalgia and suffering an even larger attack down the line somewhere I’m going to do the honorable thing and give into it. From September the 1st to the 17th (ish), I’ll be plucking an image from each flickr set and allowing it to breath fresh air for a mere 24 hours before it’s sealed back into it’s photo archive grave forever*.

From memory, I’ve used a Sony Mavica 2mp, Canon Powershot S30, a Sony camcorder (digital stills on memory stick!), Canon 20D and the 30D is probably in there somewhere.. I keep meaning to get that mavica back to life, if I can find the battery charger and some floppy disks to use. In the days before compact flash there was… floppy disk!

Some people might call that lazy photoblogging and I’d be among those people.. Enjoy.

In reverse chronological order (because I’m that bored) I’m going to be bringing you;

1. Inchidoney Surf School, Sept 2005
2. Victor Frankenstein, June 2005
3. Custom & Classic Show, May 2005
4. Castlefreake, April 2005
5. Charlesfort, April 2005
6. The Constellation, April 2005
7. France on a Bike, August 2004
8. The Bubblegum Run, July 2004
9. Purple Helmet, February 2004
10. Kenmare Uncovered, July 2003
11. Cork Fire Brigade, June 2003
12. Solstice Sojourn, June 2003
13. Fota’s Lemurs, April 2003
14. Sausalito Ferry, February 2003
15. Canadian Powder, February 2003
16. Sherkin, September 2002
17. Snowy Pooves, December 2000

*I cannot be held responsible for anyone bearing witness to their past self and questioning their own existence because they look X number of years older now.

This cheery piece of news flopped into my inbox this morning. C’mon Blurb, don’t you know there’s a recession happening?!?

To Our Friends in the UK and Europe:

As many of you may know, in the last year Blurb has made a significant investment in our UK and European business operations. We now employ a small team in our London office, house one of our customer support folks in Amsterdam, and we also print and fulfill our UK and European orders from a print operation on the continent. The good news is that we are definitely full-fledged, tax-paying employers in the UK and Europe (support the local economies!), but of course the bad
news is that we are therefore subject to the cost structures and currency fluctuations of the same economies.

And the economic news has not been so pretty in the past few months (as you well know). So, fellow Blurberati, we find ourselves in a spot where we must increase our prices so as to stay abreast of increasing costs. We have always had the goal of being fantastic value for money, and we are confident that that will still be the case – even with the new increases. Many prices will move very modestly, and some a bit more so.

All the new prices will be effective 27 August, so that should give you a couple of weeks to place an order prior to the new increases should you have interest to do so. For those of you who utilize our Set Your Price feature, you will want to update your book detail pages to reflect the new pricing on or before 27 August when the new pricing goes into effect.Finally, I wanted to take a moment to thank each of you for being a Blurb customer. We started this company with a vision to enable everyone in the world who had something to say, whether in pictures or words, to produce affordable books
of uncommon beauty. The fact that you are already doing so, in such great numbers, is both astonishing and gratifying.

Many thanks and all best,

But wait, what about the ‘magic calculator’? Blurb seem to have gotten some retail advice from the slew of other retailers and suppliers using sterling as a tool to beat the rest of us with euros in our pockets. As an example from their revised price sheet, take the following;

10 x 8 softcover book with 20-40 pages. £10.95 if the queens head is on your cash. If you’re not so lucky, it’ll be €16.95. Sorry Blurb, but £10.95 is not €16.95. Using frequently updated exchange rates from xe.com, £10.95 is actually €12.72. Where did that extra €4 come from?

At the other end of the scale, a 12 x 12 hardcover imagewrap book with up to 440 pages is £105.95. But no, it’s actually €156.95. Or if you’re using the actual exchange rates, just a cent or two over €123. Nearly €34 extra in Blurbs back pocket, all thanks to the magic calculator.

The full list of new prices is here; Blurb’s new pricing

So really, when I ordered my first test book from Blurb and thought it was expensive, I should have been counting my blessings. Thankfully, there are a few other print on demand companies I can try out. I just fancied having a bitch about it, thats all.

I’ve finally followed through on my near constant threats to move from Register 365 and have now taken up residence on Digiweb’s server farm; Possibly spurred on by the offer of half price hosting for life. But why? Well, my reasons were two-fold.

1. I need SSH access to complete some of my everyday tasks. I don’t use FTP and rarely use the web control panel for managing the daily/weekly upkeep of my sites (backups and so on) so I needed a host that would come in at an affordable price, be Irish and have the features I needed. I was lusting after a Blacknight VPS for a few months but the admin overhead and the price kinda put me off. It’s overkill for what I’m doing.

2. The performance of the mySQL servers on Register365 took a serious dive in the last 12 months or so. Every so often I’d find my blogs slowed to a crawl. I went as far as to measure the time it took to load a page and that made up my mind to move. A bit over 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Or, about 3 minutes and 26 seconds longer than what I’d consider acceptable. After asking for a resolution, I was moved to a new SQL server where everything was hunky dory for a few months. Then, the same thing started to happen again. Seems the Reg365 mySQL servers are just majorly bogged down.

I was considering moving my site out of Ireland and back to the likes of Dreamhost but given my stats telling me that the majority of my visitors originate from Ireland, UK or Europe, I was understandably slow to move back to an oversold US based host.

Digiweb came in at a fantastic price, with three times the amount of disk space I used to have and a bandwidth limit I’ll never reach. They are missing AW Stats I was running last time, so I’m back to basics on that front.

Instead of being an advert for all things Digiweb, this post is a plea to my visitors. Given how complicated and possibly awkward I’ve made my site since it’s birth, I may have missed something in the move. I don’t think I have, but in case you notice anything odd or not as it should be send me a quick email. Or ring me. Or get me on twitter. Thanks!

No, not a popular music genre, or a description of a slightly spongy pus filled sore on one’s leg, rather the sorry situation a photographer (or possibly practicioner of other ‘arty’ things) finds themself in now and then. The complete inability to produce anything meaninful to either yourself or others. A self-perpetuating condition, in that the longer it goes on, the worse it feels so the longer it continues. In other words “meh”.

Perhaps the worst time to be living with a fellow photographer, Julie and I have apparently been feeding off eachother’s ‘meh’ for several weeks now. I feel absolutely no inclination to create or attempt to create and kind of imagery or even process the stack of exposed film waiting in the wings. In the last six or seven weeks, I estimate that I have picked up the camera possibly twice. One of those times was to move it so the couch was available to be sat on.

As such, I’ve been completely unmotivated to do even the simplest of things, like updating the blog every day. Possibly the first apparent casualty of “The Funk”. There has been severe bouts of digging through the archives, looking for recent shots and I stopped short last night of resurrecting a few dozen jpegs from 2007. Nobody wants to see that shit…

This weekend, I’m going to force myself out with the camera. Be that either digitally or through the purchase of a couple of rolls of Velvia. Digital is possibly the soft option here, because at least I know once the photos are taken the hard work is done. Procesing Velvia, while hugely rewarding, is a pain in the ass.

I don’t want to force myself out to shoot anything because a vital yet largely overlooked fact was pointed out to me several days ago. If you’re in a funk and force yourself to get out with the camera and end up shooting a load of shit, you’ll end up in a bigger funk than where you started. Quite true. Guess it’s a matter of going out and taking the chance.

As far as change of scenery to lighten the spirit is concerned, I’m hoping that a late next week trip to Holland is still going to come off as planned. Work pending of course. Anyway, enough of the rambling of mindless bullshit. I need beer in some form. Keep an eye over on the blog and if you see something new posted over the weekend, I might just be on the funkless road to recovery. If I post more old crap, I’m probably still in a woeful mood so stay away.

So today, the 26th of May, marks one week until my sofobomo book has to be completed and submitted. Thankfully, I’m nearly there.

I decided, for some reason that has evaded me since I began the project, to do it the ‘interesting way’. Perhaps a bit of an old school method. Yep, decided to do the whole thing on film. *Sigh*

I’ve all but finished the processing now. Well, I say processing when what I actually mean is dust & misc crap removal. Much of it anyway. I don’t have the time, patience or inclination to remove all of it as I’m sure anyone that’s scanned film in the past will understand. It’s only now, that I’m done with the actual photos and beginning to work on the layout, that I can look back at the last couple of weeks and almost smile. Almost…

I shot five (if I remember correctly) rolls of film. Ilford Pan F+ 50. I bought a whole load of it before the project started in anticipation that I might do something sofobomoish with it. Perhaps read the previous post to understand in some way why I chose to complete the project on film instead of choosing the much easier digital route. I even got it developed in a timely manner. Something was bound to go wrong. I got it scanned a week or so later. Yes, procrastination won out again. Then, a couple of days after that, I dropped my laptop. Wait, did I say something had to go wrong?

Screwed the screen right up and still haven’t got it fixed. Thankfully Julie had a monitor hanging around that I was able to connect to the laptop so I could complete the work in lightroom. It looks like I’m not going to be getting the screen fixed for another 2/3 weeks so that wonderful monitor will allow me to complete the entire thing. Laptops are great, until they go wrong. Apple laptops with ridiculously expensive parts are great too, but have a way of going very wrong, very quickly. Especially when you allow them to take a dive off the couch when you get up to make toast. Next time, I’m building a compact desktop machine instead.

So one week to go and thirty something pages to layout before wrapping it up all in a PDF file and submitting it. Need to come up with a name. Hell, need to come up with a format, an image order and just about everything else. It helps immensely that I completed my first book only a month or so before beginning this one. Otherwise I’d have been freaking out for the last week or so. Also helps greatly that there’s no printing involved in this one. Getting everything right and proofing for print was a big part of what I did last time around. Time consuming. I may well print this time too, but at least it’s not a requirement of sofobomo itself.

Last but not least, I’m happy with the images. I left that part out didn’t I? With all the fecking around, dev’ing, scanning, processing and whatnot, it helps to be actually pleased with what you got out of the camera. I can see how I’ll do a few things differently next time around (I didn’t just say that, did I?) but overall and with now a bit less than one week to go, I’m ready for the finish. If that’ll still be the case in five or six days time remains to be seen however.

The neglect. My poor 5D. Since buying the Bronica and going all medium format ‘retro’ film again, the digital gathered dust. In fact  I only really used it again on a recent trip to Cork. Even then I didn’t manage to leave the Bronica in the bag all weekend as I had planned.

It started out in black & white with the curious “I wonder if I shoot a roll of film and develop it myself, will I actually get anything out of it?” and once I grasped the concept of doing that, the whole thing has grown legs and put on running shoes. A few weeks ago, I even regarded my digital body with disdain, the variety of which I normally reserve for Microsoft Windows PC’s.  It’s taken on a life of it’s own…

But we moved on from the simplicities of black & white. Not happy with the basics. We started with the Velvia’s and after yet more expense, we’ve all but perfected the black art of E-6 processing. It has been commented that I’ve ‘gone backwards’. Most toil and scrape enough together for their next digital purchase. The new body that gives X or Y more megapixels. The bigger frame, the faster lenses. I think the last five or six things I bought were all film related. That includes the 25 or so rolls of film I bought that currently lives in my fridge, just to have stock in case I need a roll in a photography related emergency.

It feels like an upcoming photography slump, but I know it’s something different. Like those times when we look at our cameras, look at the brilliantly sunny summers day outside the window, look back at the camera bag begging to be thrown in the car and think “meh“. When it’s not so much that motivation is lacking, it’s that we can’t imagine ever having any motivation for anything photographic ever again.

I have an absolute mountain of film to scan for sofobomo. I have about 10 days to finish the entire project. In some ways, I’m glad I decided to do the whole thing on film because given my recent moods, I’m more inclined to actually finish the thing out if I have to go balls to the wall and work at it rather than just load files from a memory card. Yes, I know I’m still converting the thing to digital when I’m scanning it, but shut up.

It’s also been commented that I shoot differently when I’m shooting film. I suppose that’s because I’m more precious about it. If I have 15 shots per roll, I want to make sure at least 15 of them are keepers. I want to be able to look at the negs, still wet from the wash and think “yes, happy with that roll”. Happy despite the as yet unexplained underexposed line down the right side of the frame (in some shots) and despite the water marks and streaks (which thankfully photoflo took care of). Mostly, just happy because I get the distinct feeling sometimes that if I had my digital camera with me at the time I took the shot on film, I wouldn’t have been able to replicate it digitally. Shooting RAW and with lightroom I know that’s most likely complete balls, but I still have the inescapable feeling that film is… better?

I got a weird feeling when I came back from that weekend in Cork and began to import RAW’s from a memory card into lightroom. I shrugged it off as something silly, like possibly being unfamiliar with my 5D because I hadn’t used it in quite a while. Then I got the same feeling last night as I imported a day’s worth of shooting from Donadea. There’s something not quite right here.

Maybe I need to lock everything film related away for a while and put the emphasis back on digital? Re-train myself that newer is better, digital is the way forward and film is just too much bloody hassle. But it’s not really is it? It’s not so much the shooting, getting the exposures spot on and scrutinising your composition to an insane degree before pressing that lovely chrome shutter button with an all too satisfying “ker-clunk”. The best part of it for me is taking the developed roll out of the drum and looking at it for the first time. That life affirming feeling of “I did this” that only a strip of negatives you worked on yourself can give you. That’s one thing you’ll never get from your RAW files. Digital just doesn’t love you as much as film does. Sometimes, when things go wrong, it can be a cruel bitch-dog of a mistress. But it loves you and if you treat it right, it won’t sneak up on you and beat you about the head with a cast iron frying pan while you’re reading a newspaper on the toilet. It just won’t.

Rocks, rocks and more rocks. Insert a “Father Ted” reference or ten. Also, flowers… In the rocks. It could only be one place. Or, maybe two. Three maximum. Got back last night from a few days spent in & around The Burren over the long weekend. Always a fantastic place.

Thankfully, the weather played nicely and it didn’t actually rain (much) until Monday. By then it was time to start the long drive back to Dublin anyway. The reasons for going down were roughly as follows;

1. To see the flowers that are unique to the area
2. To get away from Dublin for the long weekend.
3. To get some content for sofobomo.

Yeah, my book is going to be largely (and by largely, I mean totally) based on the landscape of The Burren. That’d be the book that doesn’t current exist. That book. All shot on my most favourite (currently) of black & white films, Ilford PanF Plus 50. It’s lovely.

Saw the place with new eyes and got some feckin great foreground rock photos. Well, I assume I did. Going to have to wait until the film is out of the chemicals later on to see the actual results. Then it’s down to a few possibly hectic weeks of scanning and laying out pages before the deadline. My deadline. 2nd June.

The idea of produce an (albeit smaller) book in one month is an interesting undertaking. I’m sure I’ll get it done and submitted in time, I’m just not too sure what kind of state it’ll be in when the final PDF is uploaded.

The previous book I worked on took what seemed an eternity of selecting images, doing layouts, revising those layouts, further revising layouts, coming up with a page order, redoing that page order and well, you get the idea. I’ll have to get off my arse and blog a bit about that first book project too.

But I think my original point was that The Burren is amazing. Go there. While you’re there, look out for that mad house outside Lisdoonvarna with all the crazy concrete animal sculptures in the garden.

I’d been wondering for a while if I should resurrect the old text blog as a sidekick to the photo blog, which over the past year has taken up all my blogging energy. Link the two of them together and call it a website or whatever the current buzzword is. If you had been a visitor to my old blog, you’ll no doubt have noticed the tendency to waffle on random subjects, whatever crossed my mind at the time. It did eventually become more focused (if you’ll excuse the poor pun) on photography and finally I got sick of having to write and just setup glassey alley.

But, as it often happens, I began to miss scribbling down random thoughts. The kind of stuff that strikes you when you’re out taking photos of a particularly interesting bit of wall, an old tyre on a beach or waiting for clouds to pass by to shoot a landscape. Not necessarily all photography related, but I’m sure it’ll gravitate heavily toward that subject.

I was sick of having to write, now I’m sick of not having a place to write. To expand a bit more than my photo captions or my twitter account will allow. Bringing the old blog back from the dead seemed an option, but it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. Or dead dogs. Dead dogs lie quite well too I’m informed.