Ski Town

Untitled (Vail, Colorado) copyright Douglas Stockdale –

Okay, while nursing a bum knee, which is slowly getting better (ice 20 minutes on, 20 minutes off), I decided to push ahead with my SoFoBoMo (Solo Foto Book Month) test project, now named: (drum roll, please) Ski Town. So this is making lemonade out of lemons, which probably is a good title to a future post ;- )

So instead of a five or six days of photography, I have had three. Not for the full day, but some meaningful occasions worked in with the rest of the vacation. When I did start taking photographs around Vail, it was with a purpose. Rolling into town, I have been thinking about what makes Vail so cool (besides the snowy mountains), but I have since backed off to look at what makes it a ‘ski town’. So I have been looking at and photographing the skiers as well as the mountain town itself.

Where am I at right now? I have 9 pages in my Blurb BookSmart template plus the cover page, while working the hardcover option right now. That has used 7 images, plus a title page, a copyright page and an introduction page. Over the last three days, I have 350 each ‘keeper’ images (e.g. the ones that were not a complete flop and were not deleted) of which I have about 100 potential images. Since the PS3 processing time is so long with this portable, I am completing an initial tweak with ACR and then save the results. It gives me some working knowledge of the image and see some potential.

The Introduction has forced my to work more on getting my concepts, feelings and thoughts about this series on ‘paper’. But for me, it sometimes helps to think about where I want to go, start going there and then write my thoughts. I need a little testing of the idea with my camera first. That’s what seems to work for me.

So far, I have found that setting up the Blurb book in a Portfolio format, keeping it simple (I am using the horizontal 10 x 8 format), that it helps me with driving the process. I can drop images and see how they look paired.  I have been using some low res (72 dpi) images that I created for this blog to create a trial book. The PhotoSmart software did tell me that the resolution was too low (looks good on the screen, but when you see it in print, your gonna hate it), which is pretty cool.

Loading some images in the book format has also given me the chance to work on another issue: black & white, or color or both.  For Ski Town, it will be both black & white (images of people) and color (the town) and I can pair them and see how they work.

Bottom line, from the three days of photographing with a purpose, I think that I have the neccessary images to create a 35 image book. Nice.  You might say, basic mission accomplished. Now I have not completed the entire book with the 35 images, but it gives me a good feel of what it will take.

Cheers!

Doug