[Kestrana]

So today on a typically rainy Northwest morning I hike into the woods at Ft. Steilacoom to take pictures of the old Western State Mental Hospital turn of the century ward building that has stood abandoned for close to a century. I’ve never been there before but I’m told to go up the hill behind the old barns and I will find it all fenced off and tagged by graffiti artists of times past. Hiking up the hill I see the jagged edge of colorful cement against a dull gray sky. Victory, I think! Reaching the top of the hill I find that Steilacoom in all it’s wisdom demolished the building in March of this year and have now turned the foundation into a dog run.

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[Kestrana]

What would we do for permissions for Pangolyn‘s photos? I could ask her mom for permission, but wouldn’t know where to go from there. Also, I’m not sure if anyone’s gotten into her computer yet, she had it pretty well passworded, and her flickr stream only had fark-sized photos. There’s definately a few of her’s that I’d like to see included. case in point

/edited cuz I don’t speak bbcode.

Her next-of-kin should be able to provide permission. The resolution needed depends on the size of the photo. If we receive permission for pangolyn‘s work, we can probably use the fark-sized shots and be creative about the layout if we don’t have access to anything larger.

[Kestrana]

If its possible to count the # of diverse photographers at the same time, that might also be helpful. While there’s certain to be a fair difference between 10 & 20 places, maybe there isn’t such a big difference between 15 & 20.

If its not convenient to do at the same time let me know and I’ll get that info together.

If the difference were, say, 9 photographers, we could easily find a way to include those people on the title/index/cover/toc etc.

[Kestrana]

Also I totally understand the desire to get as many people incorporated in the book as possible but I really think that 400 pages is too expensive for the larger market, and trying to cram 5 or 6 pictures on a page is going to take away from the pictures. Prices for books larger than 10×8 go up exponentially, and 10×8 is the size of a regular sheet of paper. If we put more than 4 pictures on a page, each one winds up being about 2×3, and then you need to add the text of the picture’s name and photographer and any other information we want to attach to them.

However, if you’re going to talk to Drew about it, maybe he can work some magic Fark powers to get us a deal that would allow for more pages at a cheaper price – and if we order more than 15 or so copies, there’s a discount as well.

I guess it really comes down to a question of priorities. Is it more important to have huge farktographer inclusion? To create a professional and polished looking product? To be able to price the product competitively in the market, so that people outside of the artists may want to buy it and be exposed to some of the great talent and love of photography it embodies (and the poor working stiffs who participate here can afford it too 😉 )? If all three of these are equally important we probably need assistance from a publisher to make it happen because combining the first 2 priorities inevitably inflates the third.

[Kestrana]

Yes you need very high resolution pictures for blurb to process correctly onto paper. They may look fine in the computer but they don’t print well. If you’re getting permission from the photographers you might as well get them without the watermarks too. That’s an easy way to keep track of who has given permission for what photo, whether or not whomever is in charge of inputting into the blurb layout has their high resolution files.

[Kestrana]

Maybe we want to vet the images some, rather than reduce the number of places? For one glaring example, in Dragons I tied with myself for 3rd place, but I see no reason to put both pics in the book, especially since they’re very similar. Another thing that could be done would be to take only the best placing pic from any Farktographer in any given contest. So, if I got a 5th and an 11th place, only the 5th place one would be used.

That sounds like a good filter to start with. Another suggestion is we could also use a % of the total. If 20 places is our baseline and most contests run about 200 entries, then we are including the top 10%. So contests with more total entries would go up to 20th place but contests with only say 70 entries might only include the top 7 pictures.

[Kestrana]

That sounds like a great way to resolve many of the issues. However if we include up through photo 20, we have a lot of contests where we have multiple entries tied once you go past maybe #5 and certainly past #10. Also, 7 pages a chapter x 53 chapters = 371 pages + title page & index will probably rank in around 400 pages. That means if we self-publish, for a standard book it ranges between $76.00 – $94.00 depending on the type of cover you order.

I think it’s more realistic to include the top 10 photos for each contest, which reduces the page count to appx. 275, and $58 – $77 a book. (Using a formula of #1, #2-3, #4-5, #6-7, #8-10. Also allows for larger sizes of the pictures which does better justice to them imho).

[Kestrana]

/signs up

[Kestrana]

Congratulations!

[Kestrana]

Happy Birthday! I’m glad you linked the larger version of your pictures because on the initial scroll I was kinda meh about them but then when I clicked larger it was simply amazing.

[Kestrana]

I use Photobucket Pro because I don’t think flickr existed or was used much when I first started needing hosting space. But I think I will switch to flickr pro when my Photobucket subscription runs out because of the community angle.

[Kestrana]

Contests like these are a great lesson in humility and also a reminder that I do love taking pictures no matter the twinge of disappointment if they aren’t viewed as amazing by everyone else.

[Kestrana]

Theme of Farktography Contest No. 223: “Do It Yourself”. Details and rules in the Boobies. LGT next week’s theme

Do It Yourself? What’s that all about?

[Kestrana]

After messing with my website for a few minutes I think the easy way to go about what orionid suggested is to just create a dummy flickr account and have the password posted here so that anyone can log into it and add photos.

I just created a new Flickr account called Farkbook. http://www.flickr.com/photos/farkbook/
You can upload the photo you want. In the tags section put the farktographer’s name. Then you can easily check before you upload to see if someone has already posted the picture by searching the tags. After the picture is posted, in the comments section you can put your own name and +1 if you’re voting for it. You could also then comment on any other pictures in the same manner.
If you guys like this idea i will post the info.

Oooh another cool thing about this is that the blurb.com publishing engine can slurp from flickr or photobucket so the winning entries can be imported into the design portfolio automatically.

[Kestrana]

Should we automatically consider every #1 & #2 picture as nominated already? Then ask from the pool of photos beyond that, each person could nominate up to 5 and vote for up to 5 more? I’m going to mess with a thing on my personal website and and see if I can get it to work as orionid is suggesting.

I think I would prefer as a reader to see photos in a flow with an index in the back containing the bibliographical information that has been submitted. That way photos with a particular style or theme can be grouped together in a meaningful way. That also means that people with more or less submissions don’t look like they’re hogging page time in the book or pathetically have only submitted 1 photo, etc.

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