Phone Photo Blog Continues

While I’ve fallen behind in my posts here and at my fine art photo blog, I have been posting images semi-regularly to mobilelene.blogspot.com, my smartphone photo blog.

Yes, you may question the wisdom of trying to maintain three blogs. (I mean, who does that?) Just… roll with it, please.

I’ll periodically cross-post new content from those sites here, just to add variety to my book talk.

Life: 2021 Personal Year In Review

It’s been… a year. Since time had no meaning (due to the sameness of being at home every day during so much of this pandemic), it is hard to believe it ended, rather than continuing on in a Groundhog-Day-like fashion.

I’m TIRED. But alive, which is a victory unto itself!

Here are some of 2021 highlights from my iPhone photo blog, mobilelene.blogspot.com.

January 2021: Monotype printing

I made great progress with my acrylic monotype printing practice this year, producing hundreds of prints, and expanding from my favorite opaque colors into transparent paints.

February 2021: Leaving the house to explore SF

There are entire new parks that didn’t exist before the pandemic!

March 2021: Botany

I like plants!

April 2021: Botany and Murals

There are murals I’d never seen before out there, and they’re great.

May 2021: Architecture, Monotypes, and Playing with Instax Cameras

Instax cameras are fun! Yes, I have THREE Instax-compatible cameras, one for each size of film, PLUS A PRINTER that uses the mini size. Judge me, while I have fun with my tiny little prints.

June 2021: SF Exploration, continued (and medium format photos)

I will not admit how many photos I have of this building. On multiple cameras.

July 2021: Mostly Murals

This month starts to look like me: all my interests are reflected, and I was taking more photos because I sprained my right arm and couldn’t write or draw.

August 2021: Museums, Duochrome, and Sunshine

Have I made the book I planned to make of these? No. Did I produce another photo book mock up which I’m not sharing? Yes.

September 2021: I LOVE SF (architecture, sailboats, contemporary art, and phone photo filters)

The photo I wanted to show is cropped too hilariously to post here.

October 2021: Art experience in the park

It was the most fun I’ve had being enveloped in smoke in forever.

November 2021: Sunsets, Plants, and Murals

By this point, you realize how conventional my phone photos are, and how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE San Francisco.

December 2021: Holiday lights, holiday projections, Boston, and textile arts

I really do love this town. 🙂 And I’m completely predictable in the photographic ways I express that love, and THAT IS OKAY.

Books: Photo Book Experiments

These lay-flat books, which have no center seams because it is built of glued spreads instead of stitched like a normal sewn binding, arrive in a beautiful, fancy, padded box, making this clearly a great gift or special event type of book. The hard cover images are great; they are lovely overall.
(The bright spot ear the top center is from sunlight coming through a gap in the blinds: it isn’t the book itself.)

Before I began my big project of rewriting my first novella into a proper novel, I laid out a monochrome photo book of horizontal images I’ve taken of recent architecture downtown.

Blurb is a local self-publishing, art-book-printing powerhouse that I’ve used for more than a dozen projects. I decided to try out their new, continuous-spread books with a subset of this body of work.

The book is printed beautifully – so beautifully, that I sent a copy to another photographer friend, to inspire him to use them as well! 🙂 (He will!). I’m really happy I laid this out and ordered it.

The flaws with the book are with my choice to make it so short: the samples I chose create a photo essay that doesn’t show off the range of architecture I intend to highlight.

I have the images to make it much more comprehensive, but need to re-shoot some reflections (I’m using a rangefinder, and I boggle it with reflections taken through wires of complex surfaces), and be very thoughtful in planning the layouts once I expand it. I’ll likely use Blurb’s regular premium book type (which is sewn/glued like ordinary books), to get a much longer book with a wider range of layouts than I chose this time.

Design: Postcard Collections (and the patterns they show)

As a hobbyist postcard designer, I loved watching this video about a color photo postcard printer whose art department had an interesting influence on the way specific postcards looked, which is only noticeable if you see enough of them. I’m sharing the video, because I just love the story.