sofobomo 'batticaloa fishermen' as blurb book

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yesterday i received the printed version of my sofobomo book from print. i had been really curious about the quality, especially the rendering of the difficult, so i thought, darker regions. in this respect there is hardly a fault to find. problems however arise in two other aspects: colors, especially red and blue, come out definitely more vivid than on my calibrated monitor, and fine structures like sand on the beach or a fishing net suffer from the printing resolution. sometimes even in fine nuanced bright areas it seems that compression artifacts become visible. now i stop nitpicking, because i know only too well that i can definitely not expect steidl quality for a print-on-demand book in that price class. we always get what we pay for.

the positive experience of the first self-made book, where i did not resort to the pre-fabricated layouts of photobook making software, is simply unbeatable. and in this sense i have learned a lot in this year's sofobomo, and i guess i'll be in next year again. the image above was taken on the beach of batticaloa and is the back title of my book.

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vicinity

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what an amount of books sofobomo yielded this year! i did go through only a small part up to now and already found quite a number of really precious, extraordinary ones. so on top of the personal success of having really created my book, analyzed in part what it meant to me and what it taught me, there is so much food for reading, seeing, reflecting that i am truly overwhelmed. a lot of my free time the next days i will spend going through those books.

the image above, taken in the newly built house of a tsunami victim in batticaloa, left me somewhat speechless in its tight vicinity of the lord of mercy and a war instrument. strange, in many aspects.

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sofobomo: a victim of the selection process

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nice synonym for the catch i sometimes find on my flash cards. but sometimes those emblematic empty bottles just hide their merits (or less sugarcoated: they have to wait for a more clear-sighted moment). carl weese hinted in a comment he made yesterday on the value of an archive and the necessity of a 2nd look, and of course he is right. especially the rejected images deserve this re-evaluation, and in this way i found my empty bottles.

postscriptum: i have uploaded the book to issuu, too, and am astonished how hassle-free this was. so if you want to see it more book-style in a nifty flash version, klick here: Batticaloa Fishermen on issuu.

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sofobomo 09: strengthening my vision

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reviewing my selection process for the images to be included into the book, i made an interesting observation, for which today's lead shot can serve as an example. during the first review of the pictures within days after their creation, i had a very different attitude towards their qualities. the image above came out only 2nd, the lower image, already posted on 2009/05/20, won.

now creating a set for the sofobomo book, the criteria changed. the silhouette of the man in the lead image won over the more interesting structure of the water. and suddenly i realized that for too long a time i had tried to carefully avoid people in my images of situations and sceneries. for a reason unknown to myself even now i did not want humans in the photographs. only now i felt the added value that men/women and their interaction bring even into such scenes.

and here lies for me the added benefit of sofobomo: i had to re-evaluate my images, thoroughly weighing there merits plus their function in a sequence, something i wouldn't have done without this project. and i think this improved my vision.

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sofobomo 09: finished it is

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finished. after some intensive hours my sofobomo 09 book is ready. it is available from the sofobomo website here: batticaloa fishermen. scribus proofed to be a reliable tool for this work, it can only be recommended. the resulting pdf is 7 mb for more than 40 images with 150dpi, so compression works reasonably well. plans are to get it printed by blurb, the layout was carefully crafted for the small square book that blurb offers.

and having completed it gives a good feeling, i can tell you!

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sofobomo status

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using the evening hours for sofobomo work, i learn to master scribus more and more. it turns out that the first framework i had prepared did not make proper use of the templating functionalities, so modifying fonts and text colors turned out to be more tedious then necessary. as i prefer the systematic approach, i first did the necessary refactoring and then only started to fill the frames with pictures, cherishing very much the drag-and-drop possibilities of the digikam asset management software and scribus under ubuntu linux.

what works amazingly well with scribus is the creation of pdfs. i now have 13 images in the book, and limiting the output resolution to 150dpi, scribus makes a 1.7mb pdf file out of this. sounds and looks reasonable, but i still want to check the quality on a better monitor than my laptop's.

oh, and the girl: she's happily using a pump provided by our project and locally built with available material and techniques.

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barrel door

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a matching door for the fence blinds shown yesterday, this door is one of the rare cases where the recycling/upgrading path left the original structure well visible and self-contingent, not mixing in or adding other components.

the fence, too, is a case of recycling: the net was beyond repair and unsuitable to catch fishes any more. it still is, however, fit to keep the hen in the garden. together with the pine twigs and the cones optically it makes up for a fine structure.

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metal structures, batticaloa, sri lanka

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in sri lanka, plots are usually at least fenced with barbed wire. only the wealthy ones can afford real walls, often topped with bottle bottom fragments. To protect the owners from the curious views of the bypassers, the street side of the fences is usually equipped with blinds.

traditionally they were made from palmyrah leaves, but these degenerate within some years, and now people use metal sheets, rarely new. even old oil barrels, cut and bent straight, are used for this purpose. these materials now offer a wide variety of textures and colors.

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sofobomo 09: batticaloa fishermen

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finally my sofobomo 09 theme has found me: the fishermen of batticaloa. since 2005 i try to spend the early morning hours of my missions to batticaloa on the beach, and over the time i got more and more acquainted with them. since quite some time i planned either a small exhibition or a pod-book on this topic, so using it for sofobomo is just natural.

the next evenings i will spend with bibble5 - the preview 2.1a really rocks - and scribus. my laptop is not too well suited for heavy image editing, this is one more reason to use bibble instead of lightzone. to compile the book should be not too difficult, as the framework is ready: a blurb book is going to be the print target. now it's high time for doing the final selection.

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the president's funds

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trincomalee internally displaced persons again, in front of their shed. one of the boys is sick, born with a hole in the cardiac septum.

basic healthcare in sri lanka is free, and in some aspects of really high quality and excellent quality/circumstances ratio. however an operation in this case has to be paid extra, and the 4000 us$ the family is not (and will not be in the near future) able to afford.

for cases like this there is the sri lanka president's fund. doesn't sound like a really democratic solution, more like a holdover from good old monarchy, where the sovereign distributes alms, eh? and, the family is not able to apply. they are not educated, they speak the wrong language, they don't know where to apply.

why they are smiling on this picture? they got a new toilet, and that is a big improvement.

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idp bathroom, batticaloa

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some people are not born poor, but made poor. the idps that now live in navallady, batticaloa, in the former tsunami buffer zone (no permanent house should have been there, the former residents were all resettled) had their homes in the trincomalee district. the civil war came, they were driven out of their houses in the combat- or security zone and now live under most primitive conditions in sheds made of tarpaulins, corrugated tin sheets and leaves. you count the toothbrushes? 8 people live here, in a hut maybe 3,5x5 m2.

and i learned a lot about gender budgeting, too (it pays to travel with the boss, who is a psychiatrist by education): if there is a male head of family, there will be: a mobile phone, a tv set (to watch cricket), a small motobike...

but the number of male-headed families is small. the usual story reads more like "lost husband in the conflict, lost the son, fleeing, now living with the small kids here until knowbody knows when, little support, fear, discrimination (by army/police)". I spare you the details. It is simply incredible.

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to be poor

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taking up the topic of my recent post "eyes", just a bullet list of what it means to be poor in batticaloa, sri lanka (but feel free to put in any other place):

• the husband (if present) works as a day labourer, earning barely enough to feed the family
• the kids leave school early to add to the family's income
• you live on your own plot, but twice a year it gets flooded and turns into a swamp. so the romance showing up in the lead shot is just a temporary one
• your daughter carries the daily laundry quite a distance. to wed her, you should save for a dowry, but don't know from where to take it
• your plot of maybe 100m² houses well and toilet pit, not a really healthy arrangement
• when you are not in a specially affected group like the tsunami victims, you probable are poor and stay poor

by careful usage of funds, our project could increase the number of donated toilets, and some families in puthur, batticaloa, now have decent hygienic facilities. to help them to help themselves, the beneficiaries were paid in installments and themselves contracted the work. this also created a good sense of ownership - and kept the costs really low. and the toilet now is the most solid structure on the plot, much better then the house...

fortunately enough, un-habitat's programme "cities without slums" will tackle this situation in order to achieve a structural improvement.

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beach abstract

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at the moment i feel a bit like this pants on batticaloa beach: totally worn out after more than 30 hours work and traveling with only some naps. at least the official part of this mission was successful, so no reason to complain. photographically it still has to be evaluated. more after having slept, promised!

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dancing feet

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still under pressure, this time at the airport already, on the way home. today i got sad news again about the refugee situation in the north of sri lanka - ban ki moon seems to have categorized the situation 'apalling' regarding the government's treatment of the tamil civilians - and he seemingly has seen only the least awful part of it. will try to compile something more coherent about this tragedy. meanwhile i share with you this image from the beach.

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giving something back

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photographing in exotic locations usually means meeting people only once in a lifetime. photographing the not-so-well-off means that you even can't just send a picture or two as email, and even when they write down their address - in the present case i couldn't read it as i don't know tamil.

but in this case i was happy: i had the opportunity to meet the fisherman of this post again and present them a print of the photo where he was posing 5 seconds for me.

it was a joy for him and for me. of course, some others now also want their portrait taken...

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knocking on (fire)wood

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risking the fact that it sounds boring to hear the same thing over and over again: being here on the east cost of sri lanka changes (again) my perspective. whilst at home wood pellets form the ever available and theoretically co2-neutral alternative for burning oil to heat the rooms, and that ever-ready central heating makes me lazy and lolling, here energy only for cooking can mean hardest work. for quite some time i wanted to catch such a push-bicycle loaded with firewood, and on the very arrival in batticaloa i was lucky not only for the subject matter but also for the matching light and dust.

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batti kids

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some of our youngest beneficiaries: their families received rainwater harvesting tanks or toilets through our project. we are targeting especially the poor families, among them so many woman headed families, having lost the husband/father in the tsunami or the war.

the stories you get to hear there are sad, sometimes hard to bear: one woman had lost her husband in the tsunami and 18 months later her son under unknown circumstances due to the war. the death toll of that conflict is now well over 70.000, and besides an end of the fighting on the battlefield no reconciliation is in sight, instead acts of violence and vengeance may deepen the trench between the ethnics. politics has messed up completely here, the reasons you can easily find on both sides.

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catching fish in the waves

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since my first official visit to batticaloa and kalmunai, fishermen were the subject of numerous shots, from beach overviews up to portraits, details of their catch and their tools. this time i brought two small albums as tokens of my gratitude for their acceptance of my photography.

trying to find the essence of the pictures, i am reviewing the raw files several times, judging back and forth which picture to pick and which to reject, also modifying details here and there.yesterdays posting included the scenery with the two men walking, which i had already posted here. the new version crops out the sky, and i like it much better now as for one thing the sky was a bit too rosy, but also because the lack of sky now gives a stronger impression of a vast and powerful ocean.

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repairing the net

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catching the small fish, and only small numbers, is hard work, tearing on muscles and gear. the sharp corals brought by the waves to the shore constantly tear holes into the net. a good part of the morning this fisherman spent repairing the net.

he had a helper, and after having tried one spot and repaired the net, off they went along the beach to another spot where the net was thrown again. half a kilo of small fishes after one hour is definitely not sufficient to feed even a single person, so at this time of the year most of the men go to work as labourers.

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