PixelatedImage Blog

Just a quick update on the newest book, Photographically Speaking. I was genuinely worried how far we’d have to push the deadlines out on this after my accident but if there’s one things everyone knows, including publishers and Kathy Bates, it’s that a writer with broken ankles gets way more done than his colleagues that waste all their time with walking. So we pushed the deadlines out to mid-August. Today is July 08 and I’m happy to tell you – especially those of you that pre-ordered on Amazon or Barnes and Noble (and I thank you) – that I finished the writing two nights ago and the rest of it, image placements, captions, missing EXIF data, this evening. There will of course be edits and layout and all the stuff the superhero elves at Peachpit / New Riders do over there in the Bat Cave in Berkely, but for my part it’s done.

And I am prouder of this one than all three of the others put together. I think it out-WTFs Within The Frame and I’m hoping will be more actual teaching on the craft of photography than you’ve seen from me to date. What y’all think of it remains to be seen, but I’m prouder than punch. In the coming weeks, I think as soon as July 14th, there will be a Twitterview (an interview on Twitter) about the book, and as teaser material comes out from Peachpit I’ll be sure to tell you about it. But now that it’s so close to done, I can’t see a reason not to throw caution to the wind and just go ahead and pre-order it. You can, should you want to, pre-order from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble through the links below. Or you can wait. It’ll be the same book either way. As always, you’ve got all my gratitude – no author gets here without readers, and I’m grateful. Thank you.

Now I’m off to have a celebratory beer, and then dig into the first novel I’ve read in months. Or watch Misery, though I’m not sure we’re laughing about that just yet. But to re-cap: The fourth book in the trilogy is now out of my hands (cf Douglas Adams and do not question the math on 4/3)  and should be out, if Amazon is to be believed, middle of October. Start counting the days!

A friend just alerted me to the fact that the book I am this very moment writing has been posted to Amazon.com for pre-orders. Which means I need to get my butt out of the Land Rover and into a chair where I can finish the writing. It also means I can tell you about it a little more freely.

Photographically Speaking is the fourth in a the Vision Trilogy and before y’all get on my case about the mathematical impossibilities of a 4/3, I direct you to the recent trend in Four-Thirds cameras. Same deal. Regardless, it’s the logical follow up to Within The Frame and Vision & Voice. Where Within The Frame was about the role of vision in our work, Photographically Speaking is about the way we express that vision. The subtitle you see on the cover above is still being tweaked but reflects the core of the book – this is a book about how we express ourselves through the language of the photograph. Here’s a somewhat lengthy clip from the Introduction (ok, it’s pretty much the whole Introduction) that explains it better:

The notion of communication and expression are key to this book. If in the past I’ve overused the word Vision too much, this book runs the risk of overusing the word expression. As important as our intent for a photograph is, it remains only inside, unrealized, until it is externalized. Poets, songwriters, painters, dancers, jazz pianists, comics, and countless others, all have their own ways of getting the inner stuff out. We have the photograph. Not the camera; the photograph. The camera is merely the tool. The photograph is the very expression of that inner thing bursting to get out. How we make that photograph, with the tools at our disposal, and how close it comes to expressing what we hope, determines how successful that image is. To do that well, we turn to the language spoken by the photograph.

It’s like this with all art. The cellist uses the cello, but it’s only her tool. Her language is music, with which she expresses herself, through the skilled use of the instument. The mournful adaggio echoes in our soul and brings us to tears because she knows the language of music so well she can wield it with the nuance and subtlety needed to strike our deepest parts. She knows what she wants to say (vision/intent) and the music lets her do that right up to the limits of her own ability to wield her tool. The poet uses language in the same way; the broader his vocabulary, the greater command he has over grammar, and the more creative he is in juxtaposing one word with another to create new meanings and implications, the more clearly he can express himself.

Photographers, too, have a language. It is awareness and use of that language that allows us to move on from merely having vision to being able to express it. That language is unique to us alone, though not unconnected to the language employed by painters and graphic artists. What we share is the frame and the constraint of two-dimensionality.  The better we know the language, the greater our expression. It is in this sense that this book is called Photographically Speaking.

But there’s another sense too, and that sense is what first suggested this book. I often teach photography in the context of workshop tours in places like India, Nepal, or Kenya. I don’t usually lecture or even hold formal classroom sessions during these times because I mostly assume that anyone coming that far already knows the basics of their craft. If you show up for a workshop with a musician you respect and want to learn from, they aren’t likely to have you doing scales all week. You can do that on your own time. What we do, instead, aside from spending hours making photographs, is talk about photographs. Almost every day I ask my students to each submit one image that we can talk about. We have certain rules, but mostly it’s a free-for-all with the goal of learning to speak about what we see within the frame, what elements are there and what decisions the photographer made that led to this particular photograph, and what it says.

What first surprised me when I started  teaching this way is how universally hard it is for photographers to talk about photographs. To some degree, I get it. If we were all good with words we wouldn’t likey have turned to the camera to interpret for us. We don’t always have the words. However, I think the situation is more dire than a lack of words; it’s a lack of understanding. We simply don’t know how to think – and therefore to speak – about photographs.

It is always amazing to watch my students become comfortable with this process, begin to work through this stuff and become able to think about photographs. Without exception that process helps them create stronger photographs that more closely align with their vision, their original intent. So that’s the second meaning of the title, Photographically Speaking. Greater awareness of the language leads to an expanded and refined ability to use that language to express ourselves. We’ll use the process of speaking about photographs to teach us about the language of the photograph, and in turn to make us stronger photographers. In part this book is an effort to re-create those teaching times that I’ve seen so many times in places like Venice or Kathmandu, opening the eyes of students to the power of a photograph when the visual language is wielded well.

In a sense, this book is the logical follow up to Within The Frame, and the one out of which Vision & Voice would have more naturally flowed. Both books are different conversations about similar things, all of them connected by the idea that a mindful approach to our photographic process – being conscious of what we want to say and how we want to say it- will lead to images that are more able to express that unique inner voice that seems to prefer the camera as a means to getting those words out and onto paper. In our case the words are the elements around us, the paper is the print. We’re left with arranging those elements within the frame. Vision isn’t the goal. Expression is the goal. That’s where the visual language comes in.

This book is meant to simply introduce some key concepts in language that is as accessible as I can make it. It’s not meant to be a substitute for more academic books about composition and visual literacy, if your interests eventually run in that direction. I do, however, believe that you can understand visual language, that you can create expressive and compelling photographs without diving into academics and million-dollar words. I believe that a grasp of what’s going on within the frame, and a mindful approach to creating photographs that speak this language, is enough to create powerful photographs that express or communicates something within us.

So there it is. I’ll talk more about it in the coming weeks and months. Despite the jokes, I am well into the writing and have most of the words down, and am meeting my deadlines. At this point the book is slated to be released at end of August this year. Click the image above to go to the Amazon.com page. There’s not much there just yet, but I assume it’s coming soon. Thanks to all of you who’ve read the past books and thereby made this one possible. I hope this one’s as helpful in your journey as the past ones have been.

Well, the day is upon us. The final book in the vision trilogy is out and Amazon has started shipping it – which means others are soon to follow, and places like Amazon.ca and other Amazon.co.uk should have them heading out within a month. I can’t tell you how excited I am to have this done and out there as a body of work. So excited I want to give 3 signed copies away. But you have to keep reading to find out how that’s going to happen. No cheating and going straight to the end!

Anyways, the video (click the screenshot above and it’ll take you to Vimeo) is a quick intro to the book, hopefully it’s helpful in giving you a feel for what the book is and is not. It’s not very well scripted, mostly because after an hour of out-takes I was bound and determined to get it done in one take.

I mention this briefly in the video but it deserves more than a passing mention. It’s been 14 months since Within the Frame was released and in that time so much has happened. The community that gathers around this blog has grown significantly, I’ve had a chance to meet some of you, travel or photograph with others, and become friends with many of you. Writing books that no one reads was not one of my life goals and the audience that has sprung up around the books, eBooks, and this blog has truly humbled me; I’m deeply grateful and I want you to know that. As such, this book is dedicated to you. The dedication reads:

For the amateurs – the lovers – those who do this for the love of the image and the journey of getting there. This is for everyone who loves this craft, whether you draw a paycheque from your efforts or not. For everyone who has ever created an image just to say, “Look at this!”

Vision & Voice, along with the others in the vision trilogy – Within The Frame, and VisionMongers – is available at Amazon.com HERE or from your favourite bookseller

Want one? Want it signed? Leave a comment in the comments section, make sure your name and email are there and I’ll do a draw for three copies which I will sign and mail out to you before I go to Iceland towards the end of the month.

Last night, under cover of darkness, Adobe rolled out Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. And there was much rejoicing. It was fun to watch people quietly realize it had been released, order it and begin to play with the new features. For the first time in my life I was on the inside of a secret little club, complete with NDAs and letters from lawyers and stuff, so that meant I could finally start talking about it. Phew. I hate keeping secrets.

I’ve been living with Lr3 in its various incarnations for months now because Vision & Voice, Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the third in the vision trilogy, is based on Lr3. So now is a good time to tell you what Vision & Voice is and is not and how it fits into your learning curve for Lr3.

First, Lr3 isn’t – on the outside – vastly different from Lr2. If you know and love Lr2, Lr3 will be an easy upgrade for you. That doesn’t mean it isn’t better. It is. It’s faster and leaner and the image quality, especially with noise, seems noticeably better to me. Most of the tools are the same, though the Post Crop Vignetting has been ratcheted up a couple notches, there’s Grain, and the new ability to remove lens distortion is going to rock people’s worlds too. Import is noticeably different as well.

So, is Vision & Voice the book you want to learn Lightroom 3?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Vision & Voice was written with Lightroom 3 in mind. The screenshots are all from Lightroom 3. But the purpose of the book was not to completely unpack the software for you. In fact I never once leave the Develop module. So Importing, doing slideshows, printing, and making fancy web galleries – you’re on your own and there are bound to be great books out there that teach you those things better than I could. Vision & Voice was written to discuss the aesthetics possible with Lightroom, to help you find a process that works for you but that begins with discovering and articulating your vision for the image and then using the best tools to get there in your workflow. I call it Vision-Driven Workflow. It’s not a system, just an adaptable process to refine your vision in Lightroom.

Will Vision & Voice work for Photoshop, ACR, or Aperture 3 users?

Well, I’ve never used Aperture 3 but like Nikon and Canon cameras have some differences but are essentially just cameras, so too I think are the leading post-processing programs. Basically it comes down to what they call the slider and how you accomplish one change or another, but if you are willing to do a little translation work in your brain, the principles I explore in the book are absolutely transferable. There’s a large-ish chapter in the middle about the specific tools in Lightroom 3 itself, but again I think you can read that with your preferred software open in front of you and get some good learnin’ in.

What about LR2? Surely you aren’t abandoning the Luddites?

Lr3 and Lr2 aren’t profoundly different in the way you do 98% of your development, and this book is all about development. Don’t sweat it. If you use Lr2 you’ll feel right at home with this book.

But I don’t need all this vision-stuff, I just wanna make my pictures look better, man.

This is where I began with this book. So many of us seem to approach our post-processing with the “just make it look better, man!” mentality. I pushed back and said, until we define what “better” means, I can’t help you and you can’t help you. You have to know what your own intent for the image is before you start heading in that direction. So I discuss that. And then we look at 20 of my own images, work through them together from beginning to end. I’ve provided 20 DNG files that you can download when you get the book and work alongside me from beginning to end.

Will we learn really fancy Dave-Hill techniques and Recipes for Awesomeness and the latest Un-Suck Filters?

No you won’t. Shame on you for asking.

When does the book come out?

It went to press last Friday. Should be in my hands by end of the month or the first few days of July. Then it’ll begin shipping from various retailers. Folks who pre-order through Peachpit’s website will get theirs first. Amazon orders will arrive after that.

What if I want to learn Lightroom 3 right now?

Well, my first stop is always the NAPP and that’s where I’ll send you. No doubt the blogosphere is about to explode with posts about new features and they’ll be great, but my go-to place for learning is Kelby and the gang. Go to the NAPP Lightroom Learning Center.

Hey. Well it’s been awhile since y’all got much more than book news and stuff. I’ve been hidding in my cave working on deadlines. I’m not exactly emerging so much as I’m sending out a smoke signal. So grab a cup of tea ’cause as smoke signals go, this one’s random and long.

First, thanks for all the encouragement and congrats on finishing Vision & Voice. Man does that feel good to be done. Makes me glad I’m heading to Italy for a month this weekend, as it’ll give me time to breathe before I come home and start on the next book. The deal for the next book just came through but I’m going to take this one a little slower. Reminds me of the lines at the beginning of Apocalypse Now – “I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one.”

Next. Italy. I leave Sunday and with travel I’ll be gone almost exactly a month. I’m in Liguria for just over two weeks with Jeffrey Chapman and a bunch of talented folks for the first Italy Within The Frame workshops, then to Venice for a 3-day extension and a week after that by myself to sit an drink coffee, breathe deeply, and run amuck with the Hassleblad and some old film. I will do everything I can to keep you updated with postcards. Y’all are like family, so I’ll be neglecting you the same way I neglect them, I promise. That means no phone calls, cheezy postcards when I can, and no souvenirs.

I am planning to release the next eBook while I am gone. I’m excited about all of them but this one especially as it’s some of the stuff I am most passionate about. It’s a large compilation (and by large I mean about 120 pages, God help your bandwidth) of 50 articles from the blog – like the best of Pixelated Image, but offline and with some nice large photographs. If all goes well the elves over on this end will have it up and on the Craft & Vision store before the end of the month. And by then you’ll all know what the book is called and I’ll announce a winner and a prize as soon as I am able.

Chase Jarvis is making an announcement today at 10:40am PDT (GMT-8) that you’ll want to see. Check his blog HERE for those details.

My buddies GAVIN GOUGH and MATT BRANDON are leading the first Lumen Dei trip that I don’t get to go on. I’m pouting over here as they and the team take in Kumbh Mela in India right now. Check their blogs daily for updates as they’re hoping to post images daily if for no other reason than to taunt me.

The folks at Blackrapid, makers of the R-Strap, are at it again and if it’s been a while since you looked at their wares, I encourage you to do so again – they’ve got some great new stuff out and more on the way. More to come on that because I’ve got some swag to give away. Find the Blackrapid site HERE.

Lastly, if you want to pursue a life in the creative arts or just have more time to do what you love, I want to point you to the book I am currently reading. It’s called The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferris, and despite the title and crappy cover,  and the fact that it all sounds like some trendy, cultish, get-rich quick thing, I’m finding myself making pages and pages of notes. There’s some truly excellent stuff in here and while much of it doesn’t apply to what I do, there are transferable concepts. Much of it is about doing more with the time you have and who among us couldn’t use that? But lest you think this is about time management, consider these two take-away bits:

The first is his encouragement to go on a low-information diet. How much time do you spend on Twitter, on Facebook, on countless blogs, plus TV, news, newspapers, magazines? If you stopped watching TV, only read one magazine, and didn’t read the paper, think how much more free your mind and time would be. I haven’t watched TV, nor even owned a TV, for years, and it allows me to get more done. Consider shutting off the noise at the source. You can live without it.

The second is the concept of batching. We love multitasking, we think it makes us efficient. This is the opposite of that, and it’ll make you more effective. Stop doing 5 things at once 20 times a day. Instead focus. Do email twice a day. Sit down, do it, then turn it off. Same with social media, blogging, image processing, whatever. This will free larger blocks of time, free you from that always rushing around feeling, and make the blocks of time you do knuckle down to work much more productive.

Add to this the idea of automating your business, or hiring a virtual assistant in India that can do much of your work for less than you can, and during the hours you sleep, and you’ve just made yourself more effective and freed up chunks of your time to do what you love, like shutting the laptop, grabbing a camera, and making photographs. Now do it all in Costa Rica or Nepal where the cost of living is next to nothing compared to SF, NYC, or Vancouver, and you’ve got more than enough money and time to do what you love. If this all sounds amazing or too good to be true, at least give the book some consideration. Have you read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m half-way through and already it’s changing my life.

Yesterday I submitted the last of the words and images for the last book in the trilogy – Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Hard to describe how excited I am to be done not only this book but the whole series. Harder still to believe that it’s been less than a year since the first one, the poorly acronymned Within The Frame, rolled out. Have no idea what I’ll do with all the time, other than travelling, shooting for clients, and continuing to offer the eBook at Craft&Vision.com. Might be time to begin the fourth book. Hey, if it was good enough for Douglas Adams to do a trilogy in four parts, it’s good enough for me.

Anyways, Vision & Voice. At the beginning of Within The Frame I explained my thought that there are really 3 images that go into the creation of the final photograph – the first is the one you envision, the second is the one you shoot, and the third is the one you refine in the darkroom. The better you are at the second two, the closer you can come to the first. Within The Frame was about the image you capture, Vision & Voice is about refining that image in the digital darkroom, specifically Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Vision & Voice is not a recipe book full of ways to make your images look “cool” or “better.” In fact that was really one of the premises of the book; to create a book that provided a newer way of looking at post-production than what we’re often told. What we hear so often is. “How do I make my images look better?” What we should be doing is looking for something more for our photographs. We need to define “better.”  An image to me is only better when it gets closer to my intention (vision) for the image. If the photograph looks the way I envisioned it, if it makes me feel the way I want it to, then it has a chance at making others feel that too, and that, to me, is better. But how we get there will mean different things to different people. That’s what Vision & Voice is about.

The first half of the book is the part where I drone on and on about visual language and the myth surrounding the “did it really look like that” notion, and the tools in Lightroom and what they do. It’s a little like Within The Frame in that sense. Or my blog for that matter. I hope it comes off with the same sincerity as Within The Frame does. In fact I hope all three books work together along similar lines. The second half of the book is the rubber-meets-the-road part of the book. I walk through about 20 of my own photographs, identify my intent for the image, and then walk you through the process to get there. It’s a full-on how-to kind of book but always connected to the why-to. How come? Because why you do something in post is more important than How and there are always 10 ways to get to the Why. And because these images are congruent with my style and the point is not to teach you how to make images that look like mine. The point is for you to work through the images – with DNG files suppplied online for download so you can work on the same files – and learn the Why and the How, so you can then work on your own files with fresh eyes and a new paradigm – the vision-driven workflow.

So there you go. It’s done. More or less. A few edits here and there, and then some tweaks and the book should, fingers crossed be on the presses early June for July delivery. You can pre-order it now from the link above. If you’re in a hurry, pre-order it with the publisher – Peachpit Press – you’ll get it faster. But it’ll still be in July.

One last thing. I dedicated this book to most of you. It’s dedicated to the Amateurs, the ones who do this for love of the craft whether or not a pay check is involved. Your enthusiasm, persistence, and sheer quality of work constantly humbles and inspires me. To all of you who sent emails or tweets or Facebook comments with encouragement over the past 2 years, which is how long I’ve been writing this trilogy – from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I still believe we have one of the best growing communities of passionate photographers and all around great human beings here on this blog and that’s because of you. Thank you.

At the risk of more jokes about how y’all can’t read as fast as I write, ahem, Amazon.com now has my third book for pre-sale. It has for about a week, but I was holding out on telling you. So, for the uber-impatient among you, here are the links to the book on Amazon, and on Barnes and Noble. I had planned to do three books over the course of three years, but the folks at Peachpit put RedBull in their water cooler.

Vision & Voice is the third in what I’ve been thinking of as a trilogy, three books bound together by the common theme of vision, but addressing different facets of photography. Within The Frame is about the vision-driven capture, VisionMongers is about the vision-driven career, and Vision & Voice is about the vision-driven digital darkroom. Y’all will be forgiven if you never want to hear me use the word “vision” ever again.

I began Within The Frame by stating that I believe there are three images that go into making the final photograph – the one you envision, the one you shoot, and the one your refine in post-production. The better you are at the latter two, the closer you’ll come to the first. Vision & Voice is about the role of the digital darkroom, specifically Adobe Lightroom, in refining our vision. It’s not a how-to use Lightroom book, though the exercises will help you learn Lightroom. It’s not even a “how do I make my images look better?” book, because that’s the problem with the whole thing. Any book that tells you how to “make your image look better” would first have to know what “better” means, and as only you know your intention for an image, I think it’s best we look at the tools in the digital darkroom through the metaphor of voice. You first have to know what you want to say before you can go about deciding how to say it. Then you choose the right tools, the right voice, to express those intentions.

So I’m working furiously on this now, and it’s easily the most daunting project to date. The release is due in the later spring sometime, May 24 according to Amazon. If you’re counting, that’s 3 books in one year and I’m getting tired, so I trust you’ll all be OK with me taking a breather and hiding on a beach in the Maldives or something for a while once the third book in the trilogy roles off the press in May.

Thanks for being on this ride with me. Churning out these books, having them so beautifully realized by my publishing team, and so enthusiastically received by you, this has been an unforgettable year. I have the best photographic community in the world and I don’t take it for granted – thank you! Thanks also for the response to yesterday’s post. If you’ve not read the comments, you should take some time to do so – seems there are many of us swinging back to film and reaping the creative benefits. My buddy Kevin Clark has a 4×5 camera I might steal from him and play with. It’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun stirring the paint. Much of this stuff,and the resulting images, will be going into the 2nd volume of The Inspired Eye. But don’t hold your breath, that one will come in the new year.