Three Outstanding Digital Photography Titles from Rocky Nook
December 24th, 2010 by Gordon Cook
The Digital Photography Workflow Handbook From Import to Output
By Juergen Gulbins, Uwe Steinmueller
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Released: October 2010
Pages: 552
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781933952710
This is a wonderful volume. I am an avid but amateur photographer. In the past few years I have been scanning thousands of color negatives. The last film I shot was 2003 and I have had a digital SLR since 2007 – a Sigma 14. Love the Foveon CCD but hate the miserable Sigma software. Most recently a Nikon D90. Terrific software but the Bayer CCD is wretched. My photography is mostly travel and architecture and mountains. I have almost 4400 images on a site called Giph. http://pix.giph.com/main.php?g2_itemId=46 However because I’m still involved full-time in producing the Cook Report, I do not have the time that I would like to have to explore all the digital photography tools.
That having been said — the new Digital Photography Workflow Handbook from the Rocky Nook publishers distributed by O’Reilly is truly outstanding. I received my copy earlier today and I’ve been eagerly looking through it and learning. I’ve learned what workflow is in a very random fashion. I wish I had had this book five years ago. The way that it organizes workflow concepts from use of histograms, to white balance, to shooting in RAW is absolutely outstanding. One of the things I learned - albeit very elementary – is that I realize for the first time why my Nikon D90 images looked so dark on import to Lightroom.
The information that you can create raw import settings and values suited to your camera and your tastes was new and valuable. The use of workflow ideas to give a structure to one’s process of acquiring and manipulating images is highly useful, as for example on page 47, they make clear the kind of processing and image data that can be done and is probably useful to do in RAW before moving on to Photoshop or Lightroom. They break down these operations within RAW into categories of basic optimization and fine-tuning. It is also used in every step that can usefully be broken down into smaller steps. Because the tools are so huge and potentially complex and that this fine tuning of organizing a process helps the mind to understand and deal with the possibilities.
A section of resources, beginning on page 513, is also extremely useful. These pages give the reader the basic facts but also the URLs that will take the reader to the appropriate website or, for the first 27 resources, to the appropriate book. iMost of the resources listed are software tools that appear in the text in brackets at the places where information about them is appropriate.
Charts such as figure 2-11 on page 52 showing possible tool sets for use with digital workflow are also highly useful as well as comparisons of what software tools to what is the explanation of profiles for color management display and printing in Chapter 3 is very clear and explained it better than I have ever seen it before.
Moving on to image processing basics, issues like differences between Photoshop CS -3 and 4 for as well as quite new CS 5 are quite useful and one thing that I noticed way later in the book that I’m extremely intrigued by among many avdanced Photoshop techniques in chapter 8 are perspective corrections on page 298 and the section beginning page 302 on correcting lens errors. On pages on 306 and 307 are auto lens correction in CS five have me extremely intrigued. What I saw is enough to make me consider buying the upgrade.
It explains and shows in comparative photographs how it is possible to correct for image distortion in wide-angle shots and to do this with auto corrections profiles specific to your camera and lens that come with Photoshop. Another intriguing feature of Photoshop 5 on page 340 as the content aware of Phil where you can take the Spot healing brush amongst other things and draw over the telephone wire that you wish to remove or on page 341 something like the foot of a mother goat that intrudes into the picture of her babies.
Chapter 12 explains Photoshop plug-ins ranging from filter plug-ins, to automation plug-ins, to automation scripts. Thern the installation of some plug-ins for white balance and color correction and ones for reducing noise without losing detail as well as third-party sharpening tools and tonality tools.
This book is like a beautifully arranged and well ordered encyclopedia. I would recommend that especially for someone new to the field as a purchase that is well worth the $50 price because it could easily enable the book’s owner to avoid having to purchase a small library of other more details subject oriented books
The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression http://www.barnbaum.com/Home.html
By Bruce Barnbaum
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Released: November 2010
Pages: 364
Description
“This is an updated and newly revised edition of the classic book The Art of Photography (originally published in 1994), which has often been described as the most readable, understandable, and complete textbook on photography.” Direct quotation from http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781933952680
Anyone with a serious interest in photography needs to be aware are a small family of books that focus on the art and creativity behind personal expression in well-chosen and well thought out images. Bruce Barnes’ the art of photography and approach to personal expression is clearly a classic and it’s one that belongs with the more encyclopedic how-to approach of the Digital Photography Workflow Handbook. This Rocky Nook book is an updated version of the basic philosophical work published a good many years ago by the author who started out as a UCLA trained mathematician and programmer of guided missile systems. Bruce went on to a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains and in the early 1970s sold some of his resulting photographs to the New York Times. When he recognize that he could get paid for engaging in creative fun he turned his back on programming.
As he says on page 5, it “has long struck me that people who attend creative work of any type without feeling any enthusiasm for that have no chance at success” is very very true. And as he says on page 17 “good composition is the artist’s way of directing the viewer’s vision in a planned de- randomized fashion. When the photograph is well composed, viewers first see the elements that the artist wants them to see most prominently and remember longest… With good composition the artist leads viewers through the photograph in a controlled manner .”
This is expressed as the idea is that I realize I need to incorporate into my own work, if I can ever slow down to a more measured pace in my tendency to take as many travel photographs as possible. Having thought about this over the past several years, I’m coming to realize that the kind of communication art that is possible and will depend much more on a deliberate pace of expression. One must give thought to the light, composition and colors found by the eye. Only then can one embrace all the possibilities that make up a freshly viewed landscape or objects of any kind of which one wishes to capture a portrait in light.
Bruce has a great deal to say about composition and on page 44, figure 3-13 and figure 314 there is a quite extraordinary image made while crawling underneath a cottonwood branch in an unnamed Canyon. As he says “after the first photograph, I realized the real dynamic was missing: the low camera position was wrong moving the camera to high level and a foot closer to the branch created greater dynamism that was my goal. The log explodes toward the viewer confronting the viewer directly. The only difference between the two images was camera position.” Indeed this is an outstanding illustration of the need to think about placement of the camera especially in a situation that is somewhat abstract
He has many awesome abstract images taken in Antelope Canyon and similar canyons into which as he write, he developed a habit of rapelling into “before it was fashionable.”
The callouts are quite useful as he writes on page 45 “when you encounter a scene that grabs you, it is imperative that you respond instantly and spontaneously to the impulse. That doesn’t mean you instantly shoot the scene but that you immediately investigate it.”
Another interesting example of his work is its use of light and shadow with swirling geometric forms from which he has extracted stunning examples in places like Antelope Canyon and in a very different way from places like English cathedrals. Finally one of his most attractive images is figure 9–six a four-story spiral stairway at Château Mouraine in Provence, France that is, as he puts it much like an Escher drawing looking almost the same upside down as right side up. It is truly hard to imagine this with words let alone to describe it but looking at the image on page 157 he is certainly correct. I regret that I don’t have the time at this point to really dive into the book as much as I would like.
Let me say in conclusion that his writing in the last chapters 16 17 and 18 on creativity is some of the best I’ve seen — subtle without being boring.,
Let me close by recommending still one more book from Rocky Nook press “Wildlife Photography” which is worth the purchase price strictly for the magnificent photographs of the African animals. It is something that were I to be able to go on any kind of photographic safari I would dive into the utmost pleasure.
This paragraph from O’Reilly says it all “Photographer and environmentalist Uwe Skrzypczak wrote Wildlife Photography (Rocky Nook, $39.95 USD) with several goals in mind—to teach the technical aspects and the workflow of digital wildlife photography; to show the beauty of East Africa and his beloved Serengeti National Park, and to educate about its habitat; and to provide a guide for the photographer who is planning to go on an African photo safari and wants to be prepared to capture the finest possible images.” http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/2591
If you find this material on my blog quickly don’t hesitate to rush out and put it under your favorite Christmas tree – Amazing books and well worth the prices.