Day 3 of SoFoBoMo

Nothing much happening on the photo taking front today. Had spent the entire night fixing and bringing a crashed Laptop back to life. Succeeded just before sunrise, then an hour of sleep before the daily chores begun. Woke depressed and thought about what I'd done on the SoFoBoMo thing so far and I wanted to quit and post a message here saying: «Sorry, but I cant finish it. Sincerely - The Chicken».  But then I hit the sack again and selpt a couple of hours, woke and pulled a nice [perfect?] shot of Espresso [accompanied with a handful of Oreo cookies]. Ah, life is good again, and I am not quitting! A bit later in the morning, reassurance from a friend helped solidify my resolve. Thanks, Ujwala!

Started to do the final edits for the Day-1 and Day-2 images. Many that I had processed and had earlier liked, now didnot look so hot and desperately needed reprocessing. I can now see areas that need a bit of slashdodging and burn[ing]... a few that need adjustments in levels and contrast. Did those. Saved them as PSDs, TIFFs and JPGs. The full-resolution TIFF files are mainly for use in the Scribus book format that I selected.  Tried one go of having all images exactly in the same relative position on every page..... hmmmm this definitely was not so good and the page format needed a lot of working on and tweaking.... so each image now has been either justified left, center or right depending on the content of each image. It makes for better viewing when I look at the Adobe PDF file on the PC monitor. Not sure how this will work if I do print the book though. Might have to do a test print to determine this, before I set the book in stone.

Ah, and then there is a lot of text to insert! Started to write up some excerpts and ideas and have not gotten very far.... shall wait for Jyoti to get back since she is the resident expert writer and can turn a simple [dull?] paragraph into something that makes interesting reading.

Looking forward to tomorrow - Day-4 of shooting again.

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.