Travel plans now interfere with my original SoFoBoMo start-date of April/1/08 if I shoot the topics/themes that are local. Will either shift the start-date to April/13/08 or pick a new theme.

Decisions decisions decisions....

Narrowing in on the various Print On Demand services online,  Blurp is OUT, MyPublisher is IN. SharedInk seems to be top-notch but a bit beyond my current needs. Downloaded MyPublisher BookMaker 2.0 and tested it out. Easy. Not the 100's of page and layout options as the software from Blurp, but more than enough to satisfy my requirements for the SoFoBoMo project.

2.24.08 update:
Issues with MyPublisher.com
Making a book was a breeze. Trying out their services online ended quickly when one tries to create an account online. They cater only to a few countries [where they currently ship-to] and if one lives in a country other than those few countries one CANNOT create an account because you need to provide a full street address and phone number in those countries only! Strange....

So, my search for another P.O.D. starts once again!
Or, maybe I'll just output the photos to a PDF from PSCS3 for now.

OK. I did a small test PDF with a few low-rez JPG's output from PSCS3 to a PDF. These are images done with a LensBaby 2.0 during a rehearsal at my daughter's school. Will try a high-rez go of it later, with some text etc. The test file is about 3.5MB. You can view/download it.

Further update:
MyPublisher customer service responded promptly to my email and assures me I can create an account online as long as I have a billing address for a credit card in any of the countries they service, regardless that I live there or not..... will give it a shot.

Options: What to photograph as a theme for SoFoBoMo? Narrowed it down to
Life on the Turag. We took a drive out on the road to Ashulia today and I looked at some places where there is quite a bit of intersting activity, people crossing the river by small boats, over a bamboo bridge, there are boats collecting and trasnporting river sand, fishermen, children playing in the river, small barges.... could be a good theme to do.
From Gulshan Circle I. Pick a vantage point and a time of day, and then photograph the going-ons as viewed from there over a period of 3 weeks at the same time of day everytime.
Street Vendors [and street food?].
Rickshaws.

Book size:8x10 portrait or 10x8 landscape? Or, a larger format like 13x11? Will probably have to do the images [or a set or test ones] and print them out on various sizes to see what I like best. Hard bound or soft? Soft bound is definitely preferable I think. I have not yet figured out the optimum image size but it points to something like 2884x2471 pixels for the 10x8; 2363x3000 pixels for the 8x10 page sizes; and 3788x3263 pixels for 13x11 at 300 DPI . This means I will be cropping the original image ratio of 1:1.5 to something quite different. Will need to, therefore, definitely decide the page layout before I start photographing and allow for the cropping. Not quite sure how to plan this! The framing in the viewfinder, I mean. Or, one would need to scale-down the images to fit the space in the page? Hmmm.. need to test this out.

Software: Downloaded and tried BookSmart. Seems to be a pretty straight-forward and easy one to use. then upload the book to their server for storage and get a «purchase online» option after ordering just one copy. Scribus is another option.
Any suggestions and pointers from people who already have experience with either or both would be most helpful. Thanks. You can post a reply here or use the Contact page on the right to send me a message.

Color or B&W: This will be dictated by the subject matter and cannot be decided prior to shooting. From some information at Colin Jago's blog I understand that B&W or monotoned prints are very disappointing from online P.O.D. services. Maybe I'll stick to color for this one and try find a better Print On Demand service for later B&W projects.

Trial Run: Time is slipping, fast. Need to decide a start date, and also do a trial run before that - of a different photo theme to test and iron out the various kinks that I already know of [see above: cropping, etc] and to «discover» others and find solutions to these.

------------------------------

One of Mannat, from yesterday out on the balcony during a blustery afternoon huddled under a blanket. The challenge was, that she would duck under or out of the blanket and I had to try be quick enough to get a photo of her face.... errr the speed of the D2Hs continuous shooting made this easy. LOL!

Having subscribed to Paul Butzi's RSS feed and reading his daily postings for months now, and continually re-reading the posts on SoFoBoMo which started back on 18th Jan - I finally accepted that I actually did want to to participate, share, learn and hopefully create [publish?] a photo book. Some other known participants are listed here and here.

So, what is SoFoBoMo all about anyway? Here is a direct quote from Paul Butzi's page:

«Why is it called SoFoBoMo and not NaSoPhoBoMo?

It's called SoFoBoMo because it's fun to say, and because it's easier to type than NaSoPhoBoMo. I dropped the Na part because it's clear at the outset that it's involving photographers from around the world, and thus it really ought to be InSoFoBoMo, but again that's just too much. SoFoBoMo is just right.

When is Solo Photo Book Month?

Because we're just getting started, we're doing a fuzzy month. You should pick a 31 day period that starts no earlier than April 1, 2008, and ends no later than May 31, 2008. In other words, if you start on April 1, your month ends on May 1. If you start on April 15, your month ends on May 15. Having everyone do it exactly at the same time would be nice, because it would allow for maximum sense of camaraderie, but everyone has different schedules and this fuzzy month start/finish plan buys some of that without the inflexibility.

How many photos do I need for the book?

35 - large enough that it can't be flung together from a single afternoon's photography, short enough to be doable. I understand that for some folks 35 is big number. For the folks who have been running photo-a-day photoblogs, it's child's play. 35 is a reasonable compromise. It's the number of photos in the book «The Gift of the Commonplace», a book of photographs by Ruth Bernhard. If it's long enough for Ruth Bernhard, it's long enough for us. UPDATE: You can have more that 35 photos if you like.
PAUL BUTZI»

You can read the full details here.

Early-morning sounds were a bit muffled and muted today.... made me sleep-in a half hour longer. Looked out and saw the Indian Mahogany trees all shrouded in fog. Mannat looked out and said «Hey, its all lavenderish outside!».  So looked, and I took a few photographs too, but it was not 'lavender' in hue like Mannat saw it.... maybe faintly tinted lilac but not obviously 'lavender'. Probably children can see color quite differently to our [preconceived] perceptions....?
Soon the seed pods will start bursting and the 'whirlybird' seeds will come twirling down for the kids to collect before the school bus arrives.
Apparently, the name Mahogany comes from a combo of 2 Sanskrit words «Maha» [Great] and «Gunn» [Quality].