SoFoBoMo Thoughts

Paul Butzi ruminates on possible futures for the Solo Photo Book Month projects in one of his blog posts earlier this month. The post, "Beyond SoFoBoMo" is here. A couple of really great ideas.

I have to admit, the first one, "The Brandenburg Challenge" both fascinates and scares me. Basically this would be a project where you only take one photo a day for a period of time, Brandenburg did it for 90 days. No second chances, no do overs, one photo a day, that's it. Earlier this year, I watched a film about Jim Brandenburg and the reasons and process he went through to produce that body of work. While I can understand why he did it, I'm not sure I have the discipline and time to pull it off. Plus getting out with a camera when an event comes around, especially in the summer is something I find too enjoyable to really give up for even the two month period that SoFoBoMo covers.

Some folks have suggested using two cameras and making your first shot of the day be the photo for the project. I could possibly do that, I will have to mull it over.

The second possibility, "The Long Look", is something I think I might like to do. This would be a photo taken at the same time of day, on a specific day of the week or month over a long period of time. It could be a year or ten years. For some reason this one seems more doable to me and not quite so scary. I'm not sure why, it would be a big commitment. I'm trying to come up with a subject and I may try it for a bit and see what happens.

Since Paul's post came out, I've been thinking about other things that could be done for SoFoBoMo. A themed period might be interesting, pick a theme and see what this group or a subgroup of photographers come up with. While I know the purpose of the project is to come up with a pdf book, it might be nice to do a print exchange also, but that's probably getting a bit far off the topic of the project.

I'm already looking forward to next years SoFoBoMo, even though it's 9 months or so away.