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.