Just a quick FYI here — Craft & Vision are having an anniversary sale (they’ve been producing really good photography eBooks for 3 years now). If you want to fill in some gaps in your library, you can get 33% off any order of 10 or more eBooks (use discount code “3YEARS”). So hustle on over, the sale only runs through August 29 (tomorrow)!
Every month, the folks at Craft & Vision release another title in their fine series of photography eBooks. This month’s contribution was just released today — it’s Finding Focus: Understanding the Camera’s Eye, by Nicole S. Young. As you might expect from the title, this eBook is a top-to-bottom discussion of the use of focus in photography. It’s comprehensive, and doesn’t assume you know very much of the subject (which has its pros and cons, obviously, depending on where you’re at photographically-speaking).
Finding Focus costs $5 for a PDF with 36 (double-width) pages, full of explanatory text and plenty of helpful example images. It covers the following topics:
The eBook’s coverage of focus is technical and comprehensive, but given the nature of its subject, may be a bit basic for some people. From my perspective, Finding Focus will likely be more useful for a beginner or beginner / intermediate photographer than for a more advanced shooter. That being said, it’s a well put-together eBook if it answers a need for you. I have only one complaint about this title: example images are labeled with their EXIF data, but many of the labels don’t include the focal length used (for shots taken with a zoom lens). This is an odd oversight, given that telephoto compression of a scene is part of the ground this title covers.
Here’s a bit of artistic Americana, captured just off I-70 in Goodland, Kansas:
Why, you might ask, did I wander here? Like many (I’d guess most) visitors, I was driving home from an out-of-town trip via I-70. I needed to stop for some gas (not a lot of gas stations in the middle of Kansas), and happened to drive by this on my way into the heart of Goodland.
Granted, a 24′ by 32′ reproduction of a van Gogh painting isn’t what you’d expect to see in the middle of the prairie, so I did a bit of research on it. It turns out that this artwork was put up in 2001, at a cost of $150,000. Part of a project of Canadian painter Cameron Cross, it was intended to be one of seven similar works spread across the globe, all based on van Gogh’s sunflower paintings from the late 1880s — so far, only three have been erected (the other two are in Altona, Canada and Emerald, Australia).
As it turns out, my accidental timing was perfect — this summer, the painting was taken down from its easel and repainted. It was put back where it belongs a bit over a week before I passed through. So the new paint job should be good until 2023 or so — swing by if you’re passing through (as you can see, parking is no problem!).
Want to read more about this structure? Check out Roadside America, the Goodland Star-News, or the painting’s Facebook page.
Over the years, I’ve settled into having two semi-related sets of photography gear — a “large set,” and a “small set.” My small set of gear is all micro-4/3 stuff, and I recently upgraded that body to an Olympus OM-D E-M5 (yes, bit of a mouthful there). Or to be more accurate, I should say that I ordered an E-M5
back in March and it finally arrived a few weeks back.
So buoyed by reports of good performance in low-light situations, I took my shiny new (surprisingly small) little camera with tripod and cable release to a fireworks display that our town put on recently.
Craft and Vision has just released a new eBook — as usual it costs $5, and as usual it’s a good one. The latest title is Up Close by Andrew S. Gibson, and is all about Macro and Close-up Photography — so not a lot of philosophizing in this title, but plenty of practical information for those who shoot things up close (or who are interested in giving it a try).
So what, you may ask, will your $5 get you? Up Close is 90 pages long, and is divided in four parts. Part one (the largest of them) is all about equipment — dedicated macro lenses, close-up lenses (a.k.a. close-up adapters or diopters), reversing rings, extension tubes, and the like. Each gets an exhaustive discussion of its uses, benefits, limitations, and things to consider before you buy. This section of Up Close also includes a nice set of example images made with each of the equipment types, so you can see for yourself what each is capable of producing.
The second part of Up Close is about macro and close-up photographic technique. Focusing, use of depth of field, dealing with camera shake — all get their due in this comparatively slim part of the eBook.
Part three is about lighting for macro and close-up photography. Gibson definitely prefers natural light, but still gives a fairly complete (and commendably brand-agnostic) treatment of lighting options for your work with your camera.
The final section of the book contains case studies of work done by Mandy Disher (macro) and Celine Steen (food close-ups), along with photography tips from both of them.
All in all, Up Close is a very solid work if you’re even just toying with the idea of getting into macro or close-up photography. Gibson includes (really, emphasizes) approaches that don’t involve buying super-expensive macro-specific gear. And for $5, you don’t have much to lose.
Courtesy of a tweet by Kirk Tuck of the Visual Science Lab, I ran across an interesting essay by David Lowery about digital media and its issues for content creators titled Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? It’s written from the perspective of a musician, but equally applicable to photographers and authors — at least, if you’d like to occasionally be paid for your work.
It’s not a fast read, but well worth your time.
It’s tough coming up with a “different” way of photographing a landmark like the Golden Gate Bridge. Making life more challenging for me was the fact that on our recent trip to the bay area, it was overcast and wet most of the time.
But as luck would have it, we were headed north from San Francisco during one brief window of time in which we had actual blue skies and sunshine. I’d found some roads on the north end of the bridge via Google Earth, so wound up at an old artillery site called “Battery Spencer” in the Marin headlands. It was windy as can be, but I managed to hold my gear still for long enough to get off a few good shots like this one.
There are other spots further west along the road that will give you good views of the bridge, but Battery Spencer is the best one I could find to capture both the bridge and the city in one frame.
Craft and Vision has just released a new eBook — this one’s called Forget Mugshots: 10 Steps to Better Portraits, and as usual, it’s a good one. $5 gets you 32 tabloid-sized pages full of good tips on making more engaging portrait shots.
Right up front, I have to say that the book’s title is a bit off — because the 10 steps aren’t really “steps” that you’d take one after the other. But then, calling it “10 Factors to Keep in Mind in Order to Make Better Portrait Shots” would have been cumbersome.
So, about the book. After a brief introduction, Forget Mugshots dives into the 10 “steps,” each explained in depth and illustrated by a couple of fairly quick examples, and nearly all of them wrapping up with a “Portrait Profile.” The profiles consist of a portrait or two of an individual annotated with the camera settings used to make them, and accompanied by the tale of the subject themselves.
By the way, here are the titles of the 10 steps:
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that David duChemin’s 10 “steps” are some sort of hard and fast rules, they’re not. But they really are aspects of the inter-personal process of portrait photography that you need to think about before you start to make your next portrait. And of course, thinking about them while you’re making a portrait would be a good thing too. So as far as I’m concerned, Forget Mugshots is a fantastic deal for $5, even if you only occasionally do portrait shots.
This is the north face of El Castillo (a.k.a., the Temple of Kukulkan) at the ruins of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico:
It’s pretty much the image you see of this structure on postcards, calendars, T-shirts, and the like — and it’s harder to capture than you might think. Since it’s a “marquis” structure at one of the most visited of Maya ruins, everybody wants to get their picture taken in front of it. So if you want a “clean” photograph (i.e., no tourists) of the structure, you’ll have to do what I did — take a dozen or so photos of the thing, then use Photoshop Elements to combine them.
It’s been a few months since I’ve written up a book review, so right on time here comes another title from Craft and Vision — this eBook is Exposure for Outdoor Photography by Michael Frye.
I don’t know about you, but when I first saw the title, I thought — “Outdoor Photography, that’s a bit broad, isn’t it?” It turns out that in Frye’s use of the term, he’s talking primarily about landscape photography, but includes some wildlife and outdoor macro / close-up photography in the definition. So, no pictures of the family on a picnic here, but the same principles would apply.
But I digress.
If you buy Exposure, $5 will get you a 51 page PDF eBook — not counting the covers, that’s 48 tabloid-sized (!) pages of material on all the ins and outs of photographic exposure, including example images and 10 really good case studies (rapidly becoming my favorite part of Craft and Vision books!). So let’s break this down to see if it’s something that would be of use to you…
The first 20% or so of the eBook is a thorough if somewhat elementary discussion of the exposure triangle (shutter speed, aperture, ISO), metering and exposure modes on a camera, and using a histogram for better exposed images. Nothing Earth-shattering, but a good introduction to the topic if you’re relatively new to photography, and an excellent refresher otherwise.
But the majority of the eBook is devoted to case studies. A few of them are on scattered aspects of photographic exposure (using the histogram, the zone system, HDR and exposure blending, etc.). But most of them use example images to explore all the various aspects of the exposure triangle:
Maximizing depth of field for scenic shots
Minimizing depth of field to isolate a subject from its background
Short exposures to freeze motion
Long exposures to blur motion
Pushing ISO for low-light work
You get the picture — the eBook covers the exposure triangle very thoroughly, and with well-chosen example images to help you see the effect of changes in various settings. Then Frye wraps up with a short discussion on breaking the rules — when choosing a deliberately unusual approach to exposure can be a good creative choice.
So all-in-all, I’d say that for most people, it’s a very good value at $5.