I just finished my new photo portfolio. It’s a lovely little book, holds 8×10’s just about perfectly, and has these nice soft denim covers. The chicago screws (or binding screws) let me change out pages without significant difficulty, and also eased the sequence of production, since I need the book tommorow, but couldn’t get the photos until today.

If you’re going to be at the EBHQ meeting tommorow (show and tell night), I’ll be wandering around showing it off and telling people all about what I do.

As a photographer, it’s important to me to know when the sunrise and sunset is. It’s not important for me to know precisely– I’m going to be there a bit before anyway, or I’m looking for just after. But in a rather Tufte sense, I wanted to have, in my pocket at all times a calendar that let me know when the sun was rising and setting– I didn’t need to have the precise times for every single day, just a general idea of “the sun is going to set between 5 and 5:05 today.

So I came up with this:

It’s a simple chart, with the time of year across the bottom, and times (AM or PM) along the left side. The horizontal lines are 5-minutes. The vertical lines are around 15 days. It’s based on San Francisco, CA, and doesn’t take into account hills. I can carry this around in my bag, and know– to reasonable certainty– what time sunrise or set will be. So the big huge jumps in the fall and spring? That’s daylights saving time. When making this chart, I finally figured out how it works. It’s “summer time”, and it creates a “smoothing” effect on the sunrise times (not so much on the sunset times– instead of varying over 2.75 hours (or so), it only varies by 1.75 hours. Of course, sunset then varies over 3.75 instead of 2.75, but that’s the price of progress. Also available in PDF form