Photo Notes A place to talk about making images.

October 31, 2010

Involuntary Time Travel

Filed under: My Books!,Photography Communication — John Siskin @ 10:00 pm

I’ve been doing a lot of editing lately, as a result of the book projects I’ve been working on. Lately I’ve needed to look in the old files. I have film files going back to the early 1970ies at least. I have black and white negatives, color negatives and transparencies. I have 35mm, 120, 4X5, 8X10 and Minox, and don’t forget the stereo slides. I have multiple filing cabinets. By now I must have thousands of CDs and DVDs as well as floppies and what not. I can find things, but not everything is in the first place I look. The really heartbreaking this is when you find something that has been damaged over the years. I didn’t always use archival materials to store my originals.

The biggest problem is what I call Involuntary Time Travel. When you find an image that takes you back to college, or even to high school. Or you do nothing but wonder about what that person is doing now, a quarter century later. When I start looking through the files I visit my past. A good image can evoke powerful feelings. Photography is a really important way to diarize a life; to enable us to revisit the past. But it is much more than that, because we can create images that allow us to communicate with others. My goal is to help people improve their communication skills. To help others speak more clearly.To that end I just finished two more books! My first book is about lighting photographs: Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers. It’s on sale now. The link is to Amazon. I hope you’ll pick up a copy. You can see some of the book at Amazon, this link is to the chapter on Portraiture. I just finished a second book for the same publisher on lighting interiors, this book will be available in about a year.
The book that really sent me time traveling is a collection of personal images called B Four. The images are from the beach, buildings, being and beauty. There was a lot of editing involved. I really hope you’ll take time to look at the book, and of course it would mean a lot if you bought a copy. I did the book with blurb so that I could make the decisions about content. I’ve included a few of the images from B Four with this blog.

Please consider taking one of my classes, or even recommending them. I have three classes at BetterPhoto:
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting
Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio
Getting Started in Commercial Photography

BetterPhoto.com, The better way to learn photography

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress