«A Month 6 Artists and a Book»
SoFoBoMo completed today. Its done!

The intent was to photograph 6 artists [Saidul Haque Juise, Fareha Zeba, Smita Srivastava, Ujwala Prabhu, Rokeya Sultana,  Jamal Ahmed] at work, with the least amount of «set-up». Some people are less conscious of the camera than others, so I had to use a different approach for each. I tried to capture the persona and essence of the personality rather than make pretty photos. I hope that I was able to convey this and some of the intimacy that develops between photographer and «photographee!».

The finishing touches to the text assisted by Jyoti today. Many thanks! Thanks to both Jyoti and Ujwala who supported me from day-one, gave suggestions and assisted in the design. Ujwala, sorry for making your mailbox overflow with those 100's [or was it 1000's?] of emails! 

1. A downloadable PDF [around 18MB] is online → SoFoBoMo - «A Month 6 Artists and a Book» [It might be quicker to right-click this link and save the file to your PC for offline viewing].
   The suggested viewing settings in Adobe Acrobat are:
   View->Page Display->Two Up.
   View->Page Display->Show Cover Page During Two-up.
   Alternatively, set the viewing option in Acrobat to «Full Screen» for a full page by page slide show.
2. View the book online at → ISSUU [Requires FLASH].
3. View it at → SCRIBD

Preview the book:

SoFoBoMo day 6 - a bit of expansion.

I'd started out the SoFoBoMo project creating a profile of just 2 Bangladeshi artists - Zeba & Juise.  I'm now expanding it to include a few other artists as well. Rokeya Sultana, a Bangladeshi artist; and 2 an Indian artists living in Bangladesh: Ujwala Prabhu and  Smita Srivastava, all just said yes they would be happy to be featured. GREAT! I am waiting confirmation from a couple of other artists..... hopefully they too will consent. With the addition and expansion, time required to complete this SoFoBoMo is shrinking! I have only until May 20th to get it all done. The actual shooting is the easy part, the final editing and selecting of images; the post-processing and then the formatting of the Scribus book etc takes up a lot of time.

SoFoBoMo Day-4:

Juise's workbench. We had a power outage [one of several that we have every day], and I had just stepped into his small «office» and setup 2 SB800s to take some photos of the workspace. It went completely dark in there when the power went out, I was able to focus on something, cant remember what, and took 4 frames in quick succession. This one was fairly in-focus.

Zeba had a bunch of students doing still-life work in the other room.... I wanted to get a portrait of Juise against one of his paper and sand sculptures which were hanging in that room. Juise could not keep a straight face and we had a lot of laughs trying to set-up the lights and get him into position. He kept looking «skyward» and joked about how artists are supposed to have a vacant far-away look in their eyes for portraits. LOL! I gave up. But am posting one, on the SoFoBoMo Log page anyway. Shall try again, on Sunday next.

The set-up portrait session for Zeba went pretty much the same way. She was very conscious of the camera and I could not distract her enough to make her relax. Juise tried, and had us in splits mostly. End of session.

So much for Day 4.

SoFoBoMo re-take day-4 will happen on SoFoBoMo Day-5 which will be Sunday 4/27/08 as it is the weekend here [Friday and Saturday]....and everyone wants a day or two off. Gives me time to consolidate the images so far taken and do the edits and drop the tentative final ones into the book format. Oh, and I have an early morning photo trip to Old Dhaka and maybe also Sonargaon Village on Saturday at 4:45 AM with a friend to try and get some images of the old buildings and «Havalis» at dawn....

Juise was painting up the 2 massive «muppets» made of paper, cloth, foam and various other materials.... they are really big. One is around 7 feet tall.... the colors were fantastic - yellows and greens. The articulated limbs are incredible! They work by pulling on strings and each joint works separately... images follow asap.

Got some great images.

BUT, my PC crashed just after I'd finished processing the batch and was going to start uploading them to the server. A stupid mistake actually, I should have seen it faster when a virus on a flash-drive autoloaded and I clicked «OK» instead of «Exit»....seems that the HDD is wiped clean and the operating system cannot load. Oh well.....

Am working on a dinosaur of a desktop now - the monitor is uncalibrated and the processor is so bloody slow that I gave up after trying to process these 2 images...I cannot even tell if the contrast etc is ok! Will have to do for now, until I get the other PC back working again.

The links are on the LOG page, as usual.

............... bye for now.

SoFoBoMoSTART!

I've been procrastinatingbut finally have begun photographing for the SoFoBoMo project. I'll be photographing 2 Bangladeshi artists, Fareha Zeba who is a painter and her husband Saidul Haque Juise a paper sculptor and mask/puppet maker. I spent the afternoon at their home studio, talking over endless cigarettes cups of black tea and chilled beer.... I'd take a photo or two and we'd resume our banter.

A Black Hooded Oriole perched on one of the shrubs in their garden so we all went out quietly to watch and I got a few frames of the bird and a few of the plants in the garden.  There is a bush of [apparently] very hot chili pepperswhich are almost white in color - Juise refuses to let these be plucked because there are some tiny birds who come to feed on these. Don't touch! The peppers are for the birds, only!

The plan is, to photograph and record their daily life, casually, while they work and go about doing what they do.... creating works of art....and they do it beautifully. This project will [eventually, hopefully] turn into a small book with a collection of photographs, some background information about the artist pair, and some excerpts from our conversations...

The first few processed images of Zeba and Juise are posted in the SoFoBoMo Log file.