Category: Just Shelley

Books

Digiterati

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date April 1, 2004

For someone who has mainly read the O’Reilly animal books, Adobe Photoshop CS and Digital Photography: Expert Techniques have been a completely different experience.

Both books are beautifully produced, rich with graphics and using the glossier paper that is typical with highly graphic publications. However, like the animal books, both are rich in detail with lots of examples and tutorials.

The Adobe Photoshop CS: One on One book is by a well known Adobe trainer, Deke McClelland, and includes a 2-hour tutorial on CD. As you step through the video you can follow along with the examples (also loaded on the CD), as you learn all the ins and outs of Adobe Photoshop. Though the book is focused on the newest Photoshop, CS (version 8.0), I found that most of the examples worked equally well with my Photoshop 5.0 on Windows and Photoshop 6.0 on the Mac.

I really liked the comfortable writing style, and the fact that the author embeds his own opinions into the text. That’s important – you don’t want someone to just tell you how to use Unsharp; you want someone who will tell you why you would want to use Unsharp over the other Sharp filters (even though he will also demonstrate these, too).

Photo correction is a major component of the tutorial, but much of it is focused on some pretty extensive photo retouching, in addition to building rich graphics for publication. This book will be particularly good for someone who wants to learn some nifty new tricks with Photoshop–including good examples working with the layers, which I don’t use probably as much as I should. However, I did use the book to help me tweak the production quality of some images I was trying to print out (to inkjet).

The images in the book are wonderful, and the production quality is above average. This is not a cheap book. If I have one problem with it, it’s that each chapter has an introduction and summary section associated with it. You know what I’m talking about: “Here’s what you’ll learn…” and “Here’s what you learned” with questions and answers. I’m not a kid, I don’t need this type of assistance. However, this is only a couple of pages in each chapter, and easily ignored. So ignore it, unless you like that sort of thing.

Good book, could definitely recommend for all beginning to beginning/intermediate Photoshop users.

The next book, Digital Photography: Expert Techniques had a little more appeal for me primarily because I don’t necessarily use all the nifty tricks of Photoshop, but I would like to improve my use of the digital camera.

This is an unsual book. As with the Photoshop book, it’s full of beautiful images, but the focus of the book is how to set up and take the best image directly, rather than using Photoshop later to try and recover the image. And it covers everything, including the equipment you’ll need, why, and basic photography how-tos and information such as focal lengths and the use of gray cards for accurate color balancing.

Once you have your image, the book then gets into basic digital photo manipulation and correction, but with an assumption that you have had some exposure to Photoshop. The reason for this is that the two books are meant to complement not compete with each other.

Digital Photography has chapters such as “Retouching and Rescuing Photos”, “Sell it on the Web” (which includes some good advice on creating portfolios and how to make animated images), “Bringing out the Best Picture”, and so on. It also has a chapter called “Creating Fictitious Photos”. For the photo purists out there, “Creating Fictitous Photos” will drive you crazy. The chapter focuses on how to create images by merging multiple images, or removing entire objects–even how to create a collage! This is a twisty chapter; if you like to play around with your images, you’re going to like this chapter.

All in all, if you’re not experienced with photography and have or are planning on buying a digital camera, and then investing in either Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, this book would be a very good use of your money and time. Even if you’re fairly experienced with photography, there are some interesting tricks in the book that should make this is a good buy.

I think that O’Reilly’s going to do well with these new brands. I believe that digital photography is going to open photography up to a whole new audience, and the members all going to want to know how to do great photos. The book packaging– covers, graphics, and the production quality– are perfect for selling the books.

(Once you convince people that O’Reilly books aren’t just for geeks, anymore. )

Now, would I write for either of these series? Not a chance.

I am in the midst of taking my photos in a new direction, and taking a lot of my work back to ground zero. Writing for a book like these is best left to those people who have had their ground zero moments. Additionally, I’m not a heavy hitter with Photoshop, having just started mastering Unsharp. So it would make no sense for me to work on this series, I couldn’t do the books justice.

They sure are pretty books though. I wonder if I can convince O’Reilly to do a second edition of Practical RDF, but using photographs? I can demonstrate an RDF Photography Finder.

Just Shelley Photography

Walker Evans: Real need is a personal thing

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 29, 2004

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve spent the last week reading about the photographer Walker Evans. The more I read, the more I understand why I like his photos so much, and will have more to say on this later.

There are some excellent biographies and compilations based on Evans, but my favorite of the books I picked up from the library was a slim volume of Evans photos matched with the contemporary poems of the poet Cynthia Rylant — Something Permanent. Though a writer for children’s books, there is nothing childlike in Rylant’s poems; however, their wonderous simplicity and humor might not appeal to more jaded tastes. I liked them. Perhaps I like simplicity and humor; or perhaps I like poems meant for the Young Reader (which rather pleases me than not).

Rylant’s words complement the effect of Evans’ photos rather than overlay or alter or detract, and the book was a pure delight. You can read it in less than an hour, though I think it deserves to be consumed more slowly. My favorite approach was to turn each page and look at the Evan’s photo and form my own personal interpretation. Once finished, I would then read the poem, and it was like rediscovering the photo all over again. What an absolutely fun way to spend an afternoon, and I made a special event of it by taking the book to the park with me to sit beside the water in the sun and finish it slowly.

I’ve reproduced a few of photo/poem pairs here, and then one of my favorite poems alone (because I could not find the matching photo).

Boys

They both loved the same girl
but she wouldn’t have either of them
because she was married–
and to the store owner by god,
so it wasn’t worth thinking about.

But at night,
they each stretched upon a bed
and had her,
had her whole
and leisurely.
And when they were done,
they settled her back in their minds
like a soft peach
will disappear

into a young boy’s pocket,
warm August nights.

House

She loved it with all her heart
and on warm days would take a blanket
out into the yard so she
could just sit and look at it.

She never once complained about the
work it took to
keep it clean
nor about being so far from things,
living outside of town.
She loved it.
And when her husband said
he was taking a job in Chicago
and they’d have to be moving,

she was sick on and off for weeks
until it finally occurred to her
that staying sick would keep them there.
She developed the most awful cough,
and now and then a patch of her hair would fall out,
but she never felt so bad
she couldn’t do a little dusting.

There wasn’t a poem I didn’t like in the book, or one that didn’t make me chuckle or nod my head. Rylant’s writing, like Evan’s photos, provide a sensuously real look at the world, keeping sentiment to a minimum. By doing so, they bring a true honesty to an experience in both words and pictures.

Filling Station

Everybody wanted that job
and when Ferrell Brown’s son

got it,
when Mr. Brown’s son got to pump gas
and flirt with the pretty girls all day long,
they all said it was a crock,
that that boy never worked a day
in his life, never had to,
with his rich daddy,
so how come he got a job that

plenty of decent boys with real
need wanted.
Then word got around about
the boy’s mother
and how she walked through that
house stark naked and
trying to hang dinner plates on the
clotheline,

and people shut up about the
Brown boy.
Real need is a personal thing,
they said.
And his mother’s a loon.

Photography Writing

A touch of spring

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 20, 2004

Yesterday and today were perfect days to herald in a gentle Spring, and I was able to photograph several early flowers, including magnolia, snow drops, and, of course, daffodils. The magnolia and snow drops will wait till tomorrow; for today, in what is becoming a Burningbird Spring tradition, the first of the daffodils and the perfect poem to go with them, Henry Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
   That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, 
They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: 
Ten thousand saw I at a glance, 
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, 
but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: 
A Poet could not but be gay, 
In such a jocund company: 
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought 
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, 
when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, 
They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; 
And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodils.

Dedicated to promise of future Springs.

Books Plants

Of found gold and ghost orchids

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 17, 2004

After the orchid photos last week, a friend recommended that I check out the The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean. As serendipity would have it, Mike Golby just wrote a fascinating essay on the movie version of the book, Adaption, and the topic of passion, Gibson and otherwise:

We all have our desired Ghost Orchids and, damn it, we need them. I’m all for orchids. But the stronger our passions, the more we project them and the larger our shopping baskets become. Sometimes, we’re given opportunity to fill them. But I sometimes find myself hoping that, if confronted by one of my Ghost Orchids, I’d duck and run. Well, maybe not run; I’ll just play things cool… thinking things through, you understand.

There is beauty in the Ghost Orchid; beauty that can act as both impetus and anchor, and there’s only a thin fragment of self separating the two. As for me, I’m not sure that I am that passionate, about anything. I think, though, if I did come face to face with my Ghost Orchid, knowing who I am now, I would be content to look and not own. Regretfully.

Returning, though, to more mundane matters in passionate absentia, I was able to find The Orchid Thief at my city library, and the movie Adaption at my county library, along with a much desired documentary film on James Agee. I feel like a woman who has discovered gold coins when putting her hand into a seemingly empty satchel, and I will now indulge in an unseemly fit of gloating.

Writing

The wall dog

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date March 16, 2004

Dale Keiger talks about a recent visit with his 83 year old father:

He keeps a gun, a Walther PPK automatic, by his bedside, with a round in the chamber. On my last visit, I asked about this, suggesting it was a dangerous practice, even though he keeps the gun’s safety on. A loaded clip was one thing, I said, but a live round in the chamber? He impatiently replied that there was no point in having a gun around if it wasn’t ready to fire. What he fears coming through the door in the middle of the night—drug-crazed neighbors, a burglar, the Taliban—remains murky, like the light in his house.

Wonderful story from first word to last.