In a recent post, I talked about my favourite books. Well I have been adding to them. My collection of PhotoShop How-to’s has suddenly mushroomed, courtesy of a nasty and virulent Amazon habit. There is a reason for this. An expensive reason.

I have just upgraded my 1Ds Mk II to the MK III. Apart from the 21-23Mb Raw files, which have necessitated switching to fast 8Gb cards (gulp), I have come to realise that my PhotoShop skills just aren’t good enough to realise the quality level that I now perceive I want to accomplish with my images and which  I have learned the Ds, in the short few weeks I have had it, can deliver. It has little to do with the resolution. It has everything to do with the 14 bit files, which give me more information to murder/manipulate, and the ability to render smoother tonalities. Suddenly I feel out of my depth, as if someone has handed me the keys to a Skyline GT-R, or Topgear’s Richard Hammond trying to drive a Formula 1 car. There is too much that I do not know, so I am doing something about it.

Enter the great god Amazon.

It is quite exciting really. The prospect of all this cool knowledge waiting for me to master excites me. A new journey, new discoveries, and hopefully a new level of quality somewhere down the road.

But first a little learning.

It is a curious thing, but my comprehension skills need text. Printed text. I can stare at a monitor for hours and not get it. Give me a book and I can start to get it. Maybe it’s an age thing, but I don’t think I am alone.

So herewith, without further ado, five how-to books I really recommend.

1. The Adobe PhotoShop Lightroom book -Scott Kelby. A must for LR users. I am still learning new stuff.

2. The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers-Scott Kelby. Really useful, with techniques applied to real-world situations.

3. Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3. He puts the whole workflow thing together, and shows how to make ordinary images look stand-out.  Hmmm, maybe it’s time to go through the back-catalogue of my image library again….

4. Adobe Photoshop Restoration & Retouching (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter) by Katrin Eismann. Gasp! My eyes are watering!

5. Photoshop Masking & Compositing (VOICES) by Katrin Eismann. See comment #4

Be warned: The last two books are heavy-duty, with the sort of tranquillising effect that would knock out an enraged bull elephant. Great bed-time reading for the insomniac; guaranteed to send you off in 13 nanoseconds. The information is however invaluable and hugely worth it.

O happy soul, whose body has risen from the Earth which you wander and tread on during your sojourn in this world. Made to be the very mirror of Divinity, you have been crowned with divine imagination and intelligence. –Hildegard of Bingen

Kia ora tatou:

In the space of three days, three people who barely know each other drew my attention to the same article, about the same person. It has been said that one thing is an event; two things a coincidence, and that three things constitute a pattern. This post has been welling up inside me for the last few days, demanding to see the light. This article may appear at first to have little to do with photography. I make no apologies for that.

But on reflection it does. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Every so often we need to feed our idea bank, to take fresh look at what we are doing, to put our picture-making concepts under the microscope. Books are a great way to do this. Some are old friends; they reinforce the path we are taking or add to our knowledge. Others are like rats’s feet clawing the inside of our heads: they challenge us, ask us to look differently at our picture’making concepts….

For your edification may I present Taking Measures Across the American Landscape by JAmes Corner and Alex S. MacLean.

A reviewer describes it thus:
How we represent the land to ourselves affects the ways in which we value and act upon it, according to landscape architect Corner (Univ. of Pennsylvania). His text accompanies the beautifully suggestive aerial photographs of MacLean (whose previous book was Look at the Land), which document the ways in which we impose shape and meaning on our landscape: Irrigated fields contrast sharply with the surrounding desert; old homesteads, now abandoned, anchored people in an undifferentiated and dangerous landscape–their isolation from one another reflecting American individualism; and wheat fields follow the rolling contours of the land. “Revealed is the absurd and magnificent ingenuity of American people,” Corner writes, “a people enmeshed with yet remote from their land.”

You can read about it here