Shooting trees as people

Playing, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Tree with character, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Bridge shadow, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

The spring progresses here in Finland. As snown in the first image, the melting snow makes ground wet, which is something new for the children to explore. The two other images illustrate my practice for SoFoBoMo '09, my "35 Trees" project.

I pondered a related subject at Andreas' blog some time ago: "Would it be possible to [...] photograph people like trees, or trees like people, cars like bicycles, mountains like flowers, etc. Probably not I guess."

In my project I'm testing out whether it is possible to think of trees as characters, the same way as taking photographs of people. This projects feels a bit crazy, but in a good way, making the project not too serious.

I have several other ideas for a SoFoBoMo project, and in fact when taking photographs I'm starting to think of the images as a beginning to a series. This is new for me - I have taken single images, not been thinking about a collection of them. However, the tree project feels like a natural for me although it remains to be seen whether something suprising happens.

Yesterday I tried making a photobook template in Pages. It turned out that it is straightforward to generate a high-quality PDF file from the program. But there was no apparent easy way of generating bitmap images of the pages for including as full-bleed images to the Blurb (or similar) POD system. Some other software is needed for this conversion.

I'm debating what would be the best size for the photobook. Previously, I made a 7x7 inch photobook with Blurb, and it turned out well. Perhaps this would be a good size here as well. On the other hand, most trees are tall, so a portrait-type book would be perhaps best. 8x10 inches?