Surrounded by 9 juice bottles with garden hoses attached.

To those waiting for their books of Balcombe Heights I ask you to please bare with me, my printer is not enjoying this paper.

Printing the SoFoBoMo book has been an interesting learning curve. My thought was that double sided paper would be a problem in regards to orientation and also having facing pages correctly numbers may be troublesome. Seems these were the easy hurdles to get over.
There is more time spent in feeding a printer which does not like to pick new sheets correctly than in shooting the project, editing, laying out a sequence and writing text.
No wonder so many other people have gone down the path of POD (Publish On Demand).

The paper chosen for printing is Ilford Gallerie Smooth Heavyweight Matte Paper, quite a mouth full. At 200gsm it is also quite heavy for bookpaper and has been a challenge to fold and trim with the guillotine. The guillotine is rated for 25 sheets of 80gsm which is equivalent to 10 sheets of 200gsm but I still feel it will not live long at this load.

The last few days of putting this sofobomo book together has been hectic but it is nice to have completed the project within the 31 days.

Click on this link Balcombe Heights to download the pdf version. You can also see the gallery of pictures without the small amount of text here.

Rushing along now trying to get my pictures together before the Friday 16th deadline for my SoFoBoMo. There have been 27 across the finish line already with some wonderful work done, the question is how many of those that signed up will post on www.sofobomo.org ?
The big question for me is will I actually finish since no layout work has been done yet. Here is a quick gallery of pictures that made my SoFoBoMo.

There is less than 2 weeks left on my SoFoBoMo project and the editing has begun. My lesson today, there have not been enough pictures shot. Over almost 3 weeks only 4 hours of shooting (on this project) and 214 pictures made of which 16 are accceptable.

So many more pictures to be taken and my next available morning is 3 days away.

Editing the pictures I have taken for my sofobomo project is going to be difficult, I'm not sure I will have a set that feel like they are cohesive.

Several of the early starters have completed their projects and they can be seen on the official www.sofobomo.org website here.

Splitting up the book into themes can make the editing more simple as a whole body of work no longer has to represent one idea but it can have several threads, like chapters I guess. Sixteen pictures of people using an area, another sixteen or so of details within the area and a few general views.

To many chapters and this idea falls apart.

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Half way in respect to time but shooting is not complete let alone editing my sofobomo project. This mornings shoot was freezing. The temperature as the sun rose was about 4C, not a wonderful time to get on a push bike to go to a photographic destination. The fingers were fine, nice and numb, it was when they thawed once back home that the pain begun.
contacts after the break...

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This morning it was raining, that usually does not stop me making pictures or walking about in general. The reason for not going out in the rain is beacuse my sofobomo destination is only a short bike ride away and I refuse to start the car for such a short distance, riding a bike in the wet is not much fun. Walking would have taken me to long this morning, there is work to be done, so today may just be used for editing.

Just more excuses.

So this morning was the beginning of the sofobomo for me, it feels great to have actually begun something, something you could call a project instead of my usual wandering capturing singular pictures.

On my pushbike at 7am, a late start, I headed off to Balcombe Heights knowing I was going to start with the buildings at the northern end of the area. The next 45 minutes (96 frames) was spent limbering up, trying to get a feel for what was going to work here, at this stage it looks like pipes, windows and rooftops (always had a thing for roofing).

The idea of following through someones project via contact sheets is so very interesting for me, seeing how a photographer worked and what the final edit looked like makes the journey as compelling as a short story. So the contacts for this project will be popping up here every now and again. Laugh, cry, wince along with me.

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