how we see things

I was delighted today to find this comment on one of my blog entries:

Michael Alvis16 August 2014 01:21

Thank you for sharing your wonderful travel blog about your visit to Japan. I lived in Saitama for 6 years (1988-1993, 1995-1996) and was back for 5 short weeks in 2009. After reading your blog, I feel the need to start planning another trip to Japan.

I'm pleased to find that copying and pasting that comment. the link to Michael's own books is preserved. Where you may find some common ground, do go and look at some of his Blurb books. I had not seen his photos of people on trains when i began taking mine. Here is something from one of his books, I acknowledge his humorous human perspective came first!

pages 34-35 of this book

Here is a breathtakingly beautiful book on Japan, one of a number he has produced, such inspiring hard work as well as vision.

Perhaps this photo, from Michael's Tennessee, sums up something important. Or some things. Maybe the text describes the brains of some of us photographers. But also the humour in it arises from the way we see. Or what I think Michael and I, hugely separated on the planet, have learned through photography, or applied in photography, the inability to walk past things that for the most part people may not see, the wonders of incongruity and the delight in ordinary human foible.

from this book, page 28

oh this probably fits the same mould, in these he's playing with metonym or rather synecdoche,

from this book, page 16

I bow (and grin) before this wondrous book, Oligomania

making the Blurb photobook

I have just published a book through Blurb to cover our travels.

This is a very different thing from the blog.

It was somewhat tormenting to try and change the brain space from blogging to booking.

The result becomes something more than a photo album with some thoughts, but in the end mainly visual images.

The book of course lacks the movies accessible through this blog.

You can see some pages of the book in preview here.

Briefly in Japan, April 2014 by Dennis Argall | Make Your Own Book

I will write again*** when I see the quality of the book. This is not my first Blurb book as you will see at here.

• ***THE BOOKS ARRIVED WITHIN A COUPLE OF WEEKS AND ARE FINE. 
• BLURB BOOKS ARE VERY GOOD QUALITY. THE BLURB SOFTWARE PROVIDES IN MY EXPERIENCE MUCH GREATER ARTISTIC CONTROL THAN OTHER MASS MARKET ONLINE PUBLISHING SYSTEMS I HAVE LOOKED AT. AND THE PRINTING IS OF A STANDARD SUFFICIENT FOR MY PHOTOS. 

As with many creative productions, somehow my first Blurb book remains my favourite It's hard for me to judge why I think that, perhaps it simply is the best, perhaps it represents first spark or greater inspiration at the time. The hardest thing to judge is how the images will appear on paper. There is a tendency for print to paper to be darker than as seen on a monitor. I do my best to counter that, lightening images or dodging parts of images in Photoshop. But then again you don't want it to look like it's been out on the washing line all summer either... These products have been recommended to me but life is too short.

Last week, to get past the block in trying to produce this book, I whipped up this in a day, getting up on Sunday morning, capturing the colour of my domestic environment (using the iPad, I'm still waiting for camera repair!) and assembling a little book before the evening, uploading to Blurb Sunday night and having it delivered (from a rural printery in Australia, in Glen Innes) the following Friday, five days). I printed that short book soft cover with image wrap. For this bigger enterprise and to have something solid to remember our wonderful trip, I chose hard back with dust cover and best paper. Anyway, I'll tell you what it looks like when it arrives!