SoFoBoMo: DONE!

I finished my book!

True, the layout is very simple, and there aren't any nifty interactive features, video, music, or that sort of thing, but since it's my first book, I don't mind that.

I may go back and create another version that includes actual photo essays, but for a first book, I'm pretty happy with this effort, because I succeeded, a day early.

For those of you who take the time to check my book out, I hope you enjoy it!

SoFoBoMo: Point of the Arches

My first SoFoBoMo photo safari was quite succesful.

My friend and I went out to Neah Bay, 

and hiked out to Shi Shi. We

walked along the beach and found 

a camp site near Point of the Arches.

After setting up camp, we spent some time 

wandering about the tide pools

while the tide was nice and low, which 

kept us busy until the sun set.

The haze kept us from seeing the moon rise, 

so we just went to bed and

awoke at 4am hoping to see the moonset. 

The overcast took care of that

though, so we couldn't see the moon in the morning, either.

The rising sun burned off enough of the 

cloud cover to give us some nice soft

morning light, so we got some good 

photo opportunities during that

period. The morning tide was very low, so we 

were able to explore the tide pools

some more, and also get some alternate 

views of the sea stacks from

close up.

We found that little crab early in the morning after the sunrise.

Naturally, I'd left my macro lens back at the tent, so I used

the lens I had on the camera, which was my wide angle. It

worked out better than I hoped.

The waves were picturesque, and the fog layer on the

mountains was beautiful.

This hermit crab was feasting on this, as far as I can

tell. 

This ended up being one of my favorite shots from the trip.

That tree made its way into quite a few of my images, both at

sunset and at sunrise.

So my SoFoBoMo month has begun. It is on :)

SoFoBoMo: Update... starting soon

Now that SoFoBoMo has officially begun, it's about time I got mine started. I'm not going to worry about upgrading my copy of InDesign, CS3 will do the job just fine.

I've been thinking about the scope of my project a bit. I realized that I may not be able to make it out to eastern Washington during the specified time period... and I'm going to Victoria next weekend.

That means that it won't be a full portrait of Washington, not that one could do justice to Washington in a month!

This weekend I'm heading to the Pacific Coast, specifically to Point of the Arches, and so I'm going to start my project with that trip. Next weekend's trip to Victoria should yield some interesting new images, and for Memorial Day Weekend, I'm planning to be at Mount Saint Helens. The first week in June, I'm going to the Enchanted Valley, and on the first weekend in June, I'll be attending a Feeding Crane Kung-Fu seminar with Liu Chang. I probably won't get to do much photography there, but you never know.

Rounding out my photography trips, I'm going to take a few dawn and possibly dusk trips to the Washington Park Arboretum, and I'll probably pay a visit to Kubota Gardens as well.

These are from the grounds at my condo complex. We have a pretty nice display of flowers in bloom at the moment. It just goes to show, you don't have to go far to find worthwhile subjects to photograph!

SoFoBoMo: Thoughts

Since it's nearly time for SoFoBoMo 2009 to start, I suppose I should start thinking about what I'm going to do... 

As far as software goes, I'm using InDesign. I used it to create the one edition that I handled of the newsletter for the North Bethesda Camera Club in Maryland (I ended up moving to Seattle shortly after publishing it), so I've been through the learning curve already.

I would like to have a physical book as well as a PDF, so I'll probably get some prints done; since I'm most likely going to be hosting my web site on SmugMug, or at least using SmugMug as my back-end, I'll give their partner a try to see how they do.

These pictures are of flowers around my condominium complex. I suppse these are further signs that spring really is here at last.

I used my 105mm Nikon Micro lens with a Nikon 2x teleconverter. There was a bit of a breeze, so I used 1/250th shutter speed and aimed my Metz flash into the silver side of my reflector to get enough light to freeze their movement.

Photography Books

I have signed up to do SoFoBoMo 2009. For more information on it, look at:

http://sofobomo.org/2009 and for my specific page, http://sofobomo.org/2009/books/RakeshMalik/

During the February ArtWalk in Pioneer Square, I showed my prints to the folks at the National Parks Conservation Association (http://www.npca.org/northwest/) and they liked them enough that we started discussing the possibility showing my work there in fall. They interested in a show focussed on Mount Saint Helens, because they are working to raise interest in getting Mount Saint Helens promote from the status of National Volcanic Monument to National Park, to improve its budget and to provide more protection for its environment.

So when I spoke about this with the friend who is helping me design my web site, he suggested also writing a book about it. Since I thought that was a good idea, I mentioned it to the NPCA folks, and it seems that they might be interested in helping me out with it. So I'm going to work on putting together a book about Mount Saint Helens this year.

The photograph above is one that I took tonight at Golden Gardens Park near sunset.