Out of the Shoebox: Seattle

Not every post can be a rambling, meandering late-night collection of nonsense. (Spoiler alert - this one is.) I regularly champion the idea of printing one's photos - single prints, zines, books, whatever. Get it off the hard drive, look at it off screen.

Easier said than done. I've printed two photozines, and I'm glad I did. But it's not easy. There's a reason (or 30) that there are professional designers, book publishers, and photo editors. Shooting, editing, sequencing, design. The distance between printing a photo book/zine and printing a good one is analagous to reaching the moon vs. interstellar travel. Ok, that's an exaggeration.

I'm hooked, though, even though I find it challenging. I have three or four vague ideas for photobooks. They're not great ideas, and my photos are average at best. Not the point. I like the idea of printed work. I use Blurb and like their products, but I use Blurb mainly because I stumbled on their site and found that it made sense for me. There are tons of similar companies.

Unfortunately, I am easily distracted. Assembling books/zines means going through big photo catalogs. I stop and look at random photos all the time. Squirrel! I realized that I needed a mechanism to deal with the distraction of stumbling on a photo in the virtual shoebox, so I decided to have a blog category called "Out of the Shoebox" where I can just post a photo with limited or no copy. It lets me look at the photo, think about that time and place, tinker with it a bit, and post it.

I know what you're thinking, and you're right. I could also not post it. But one of the nice things about a blog platform is that it lets you categorize (or tag) photos. By posting it under this category, I can come back in a year and quickly filter the photos that made me stop and ponder. I could accomplish the same thing by adding a tag in Lightroom called "ponder", but I'd probably forget that tag in a few months.

Beautiful city, beautiful part of the country. I briefly lived north of this photo when I first moved to Seattle. I'm sure I would have been happy staying there. Wonderful area. But I found myself making the long walk to Capitol Hill all the time. Seattle's expensive, it's not all kayaking and friendly whales, and the long dark greys are real - but it's an incredible place, and I always like hearing which neighborhoods appeal to people and why. I can't think of any bad choices. (Only way out of budget places.)