SoFoBoMo: Choosing, Editing, Sequence.

Many years ago, I was talking with my Uncle Mark. I've always loved this man. We were discussing travel trailers. At the time I had a very small and very old travel trailer while he had a brand new one that was bigger than the house I had at the time. I had made some mention about my trailer being humble, nothing next to his. Then he said something that has stuck with me. He said, “It's not what you have, it's what you do with it.”

It's not what you have, but what you do with it. This statement is applicable to just about everything in life, I think. It's true. I feel this way about everything I do. I was once in a bar talking with someone who had a great idea for a screenplay but she was unable to write it because she didn't have a Mac. If it had been my idea for the screenplay I would have written it on beverage napkins. But that's who I am.

As I began to take images for my Solo Photo Book Month creative challenge, I went with what I knew. I knew my little Casio camera. I knew my town. I also knew that was where my knowledge ended.

Taking inventory of what I had, I didn't have much. Everything that I have is old. The camera is old. My laptop is old. My laptop is so old that it does not have a mirco card reader. I also use Windows XP. I would have to figure out how I would work my images into a PDF.

I had never edited a digital image. I had never made a PDF for pictures either. As far as I could tell as the project began, I would have to learn some new applications to finish my project. I also would have to get creative with it too as I was using older technology and I am generally resistant to buying software.

As I took the images on my camera, I knew how I wanted the final pictures to look. I wanted them to look old-timey, I wanted them to be square. I wanted them to look how the pictures looked in the 1970s.

I landed up with Flickr.com as my editing suite. It's not the most advanced system for image editing, but it was well more than I needed. I uploaded approximate 130 of the 400 pictures I took. Of the 130, I edited and manipulated about 60. Of the 60 I used 37 in my book. I used less than ten percent of the initial set of images.

Since I had a title and a theme, it was easy, or fairly easy to sequence them. It was Red Blue Grey, after all. The first third of the images were “morning” pictures in my neighborhood or around my house. The “afternoon” pictures were at the bookstore, the county fair and the streets of Ft. Collins. The “night” pictures were inside bars, The Pumphouse in Longmont and at Surfside 7 in Ft Collins where we watched our dear old friends of The Living Deads play. I hoped the group as a whole, as a book, conveyed a story. After all Red Blue Grey just seems more fun than Morning Noon Night.

The last step was to put the whole thing in a book format. Like I said, I had no idea how to do this beforehand. I looked at dozens of SoFoBoMo PDFs and I looked at various open source programs that I might use. The real problem with all of this was that I really wasn't ready to get into something new.

Ultimately, I used Open Office Draw. Even though I had never used Draw before, its interface is not very different from Writer which I know very well.

I purposely chose not to write anything for the book. I have less than 50 words in the whole book. Since my name is on it three times, I have less than 40 words in all reality. I did not name the images, I did not have a preamble. I just wanted to let the photos speak for themselves.