- Buddy is recovering from his evening at the vets. He came back pretty groggy and shook up, but he seems to be getting back to normal, though his right eye is still messed up (the inner eyelid thing). I’m waiting for blood tests which will tell whether the eye is the result of an infection, or a genetic abnormality. If it is a genetic abnormality, I don’t know whether that is serious or not, though if his eye stays like that for the rest of his life, it will be irritating for him.
I managed to give him eye drops once so far today without a problem. One more time a little later. (Twice a day).
- There’s a sort of internet land grab going on with the new .co domain. It’s really Colombia, but it looks like Company, and it’s shorter than .com – so I decided to swap up two names which at the time of this writing haven’t propagated yet, i.e. not working yet. But here’s what I came up with:
blackwhitephotos.co and blackwhitephoto.co
Tons of stuff is still available with the ‘co’ extension.
- I got through a pretty large order (20 12 x 18′s) without a single (knock wood) printer issue. I’m always pretty superstitious about the printer(s) – because the second you say everything is fine – you just know something will happen. Although I’m at a point where I have workarounds for anything that’s happened so far.
- I have about 20 more prints to get printed and packaged; and I have a bunch of things I want to do… though not sure what order.
The documentary about Helen Levitt is taking shape, and I even got to see a small clip with me in it from Halloween last year. They need high-res shots from me for the movie, and I’m talking with the director about what pictures I might bring if there’s a showing / gallery event in New York. Anyway – this isn’t the movie that interests me the most. I’m much more curious to see how I turned out in the Weber-centric documentary. I haven’t seen anything from that one yet. It’s a much larger project, but I have been assured that I haven’t ended up on the cutting room floor.
- I’m at that point of summer where everyone (family-wise) is gone. I can tell you that there’s no doubt that Buddy is filling a pretty big role as my companion, because while he was at the vets, and I was walking around the house doing the usual whatever – I missed having him constantly underfoot.
- Still with the cigars. I look back and see that I made the switch July 1. I also know that it’s just this sort of thing with Buddy that would normally have sent me downstairs to get a pack of cigarettes no matter the price; and this time it didn’t. I calmed my nerves by going downstairs, sitting by the construction site, and lighting up a half-corona. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I was calm and ready for whatever was going to happen next. The other thing, is that I’m beginning to run into other outcast cigar smokers; well one so far; who also found the construction site a good place to relax with a stogy.
- I’m getting the air-conditioner problem fixed, finally. It started acting up again – dripping. Wrong sleeve. The guys that put it in wanted to charge me a few hundred dollars to put the correct sleeve in. That was three years ago. Now, somehow, I managed to get the landlord to take care of it. It’s not done yet – but they know it’s their responsibility.
- I am planning to get together with Lester and do a series of inexpensive photography books through Blurb. I haven’t been crazy about the Blurb black and white production quality – but I’m going for price point this time. And rather than having one large nicely produced book (SharedInk or MyPublisher have done excellent jobs in the past) I’m going to go for a series, oh – I said that already. But the books will be in the $20 – $25 range (paperback), and available for purchase at Blurb.
And of course at this point, after a lifetime, of this, I already have a list of ten books to do.
- I also want (I know this is going on too long) to get my movie collection organized and add things to it, on YouTube. The quality of YT really improved since the last time I was there, including the user interface.
- Okay. I apologize for this shopping list of things on my mind, but since I’ve written it out already, I’ll leave it… and I won’t tell you what I plan to buy in the supermarket, though I am still vegetarian (which also began on July 1)…
Glad to hear you got Buddy back Dave and I hope everythings okay for him.
It’s interesting and timely to read your comments on photobooks. I did a similar thing through Blurb a while back. Went through them to get a cheap one done just to see what it would look like; almost as a test run. I was pretty happy with the result actually. The black and white tonality seemed pretty good. Images were sharp and clear.
I then had a much bigger and more expensive book printed through an Australian company that touted itself as much more “professional” than somewhere like Blurb. Well I got the book back the other day and I was completely disappointed with the results. All the black and white images have a distinct blue tone, some images have been printed into the spiral binding area and some images are quite obviously crooked on the page. Really poor considering the amount I paid for it. I’ve complained to the company but have yet to hear back.
Upshot is, based on my limited experience of two book printing companies; Blurb are looking pretty solid.
Thanks. Bud sends his regards.
I did an extensive series of tests with the major POD companies in 2008. Blurb was the worst, or close to the worst at that time in terms of black and white.
However, I don’t really care anymore, since I made a very beautiful book that cost me about $150 per book, and sold about ten of them.
I’d rather go for something that is a stocking stuffer this time, no matter how crappy the b&w tonality is.
Blurb may have improved it’s technology by now. Or maybe people just don’t mind color shifts with b&w; or maybe it depends on which production plant did the book.
But here’s a link to the very time-consuming tests I did back then:
http://www.beckermanphoto.com/blog/print-on-demand-photo-books/
Hi Dave,
Did you/will you get ISBN’s for your books?
Thanks for the link Dave. I think the POD industry is still relatively young and the quality is still a bit hit and miss. The Australian company, I went with has won several awards, and the parent company certainly has an excellent reputation as a printer, so maybe mine was just a Friday afternoon book. It will be interesting to see what they say.
Dave – I’m kinda concerned that you don’t have enough on your plate at the moment.