Archive for the ‘Photographic Books’ Category
200 Best Advertising Photographers Book
Just got the word that I was selected for the next edition of the book. This is pretty cool. Hopefully, this along with the new (soon) version of the web site with the (soon to be published book) will change the perception of the work I shoot and where I am going.
I am honored and grateful. I have several friends who were also selected, including Mr. Bad weather, super dramatic landscape himself, Mr. Julian Calverley. Jules has eight pictures in the book!
Ken Allen Digital | Alexandria, Virginia
Ken Allen has set-up a sister studio to his Brooklyn location.
I attended his open house in Old Town last night. Ken and I spoke at length about their services and customer base. I brought along a D3X raw file from a recent aerial shoot to see how large he could take the image up and the quality of the print on Hahnemuhle Baryta paper.
The studio is on the second floor with sky lights and a clean open feeling. I looked at several sample prints: including an Obama election picture from Burnetti that was printed on three manufactures matte papers.
He is dividing his time between the Brooklyn and Alexandria studios. He has a solid client base in the DC region with museums and associations. After interviewing twenty-five people chosen from 300 applicants, Ken chose Patrick Allen (no relation) to work in the Alexandria location. Patrick spent a year flying up and down the east coast shooting aerials of Lighthouses. I thought that was a great introduction to this crazy business.
With my Chesapeake book close to sending off to the printer, I plan to host a show of very large aerials from the book.
Ken may be the studio that I work with to produce the limited edition prints from the project.
Contact: ken@kenallenstudios.com
Web site: kenallendigital. (Alexandria)
Web site: Ken Allen Studios (Brooklyn)
Phone: 917-853-0592
How Kodachrome influenced my life
My first photographic heros were Jay Maisel, Pete Turner and Eric Meola.
When I started shooting in high school, I lived in a small town in central Michigan. My two choices for color film in those days were Agfachrome CT-18 and Kodachrome II. Both needed to be sent to the lab by U.S. Mail. I’d scour the back pages of Modern Photography to find the best deal for Agfachrome or Kodachrome mailers or the film/combo package that some dealers offered. As a high school student with little funds, I usually would go for a three-pack or ten-pack and try to make every image count. I’d spend my evenings studying the yearly photo annuals of U.S. Camera and Popular Photography. The people whose photographs touched me were Hiro, Arnold Newman, Bruce Davidson, Pete Turner and Jay Maisel. I wrote Hiro about interning at his New York Studio and he sent me a gracious note asking me to stop by the studio when I came to New York.
I choked about going to New York on my own with no financial support. Instead I headed to DC and the Corcoran School of Art and started working at Charlie Scheer’s National Camera near the White House where I met my next set of influences. Frank Johnston of the Washington Post and Fred Ward of the Geographic were mentors of sorts to me along with the wonderful Fred Maroon. All of them influenced my approach and style. Frank shot B&W for the Post, but Fred Maroon and Fred Ward were masters of Kodachrome. My heros shot Kodachrome, the Geographic used Kodachrome with a special messenger run for their film at the Gaithersburg, Maryland processing facility. Kodachrome was the film to use. I remember “RUSH” processing of Kodachrome. You would drive your film to the Gaithersburg lab, hand it over with a store film envelope to someone who reluctantly met you at the side door and then you could pick it up the next morning or have it delivered to your camera store. I also remember shooting 120 Kodachrome for an editorial feature, waiting a week for the processed film and then shipping by FedEx the selects to the photo editor in New York. I can not imagine doing that these days.
Copyright Jay Maisel
How can a film influence a style or approach? The beauty and simplicity of Kodachrome was, you knew what to expect. If you shot under fluorescent lighting you added a 30 or 40 magenta filter and nine times out of ten, you were good to go. If you needed a little pop for color at sunset or in the afterglow, you added a bit more magenta. Usually a twenty would do it. In the early morning pre-sunrise mist, Kodachrome would give you soft colors. In crisp sunlight with bright colors you were good. Add a polarizing filter and underexpose by a half-stop and you were golden.
When I look at my pictures from High School, I see the beginnings of my style. The use of empty space with graphic patterns and always influenced by color or form. Kodachrome helped me achieve my early style by allowing me to trust its consistency and bold colors. Now that Kodak has announced the retirement of Kodachrome, you hear of people buying up as much of it as possible at often prices that seem foolish. Yes, I have a stash of Kodachrome 64 and I plan to shoot it this fall in Haiti. I’ll send it off to Dwayne’s in Kansas and wait patiently to open that box of mounted slides for the last time. When Kodachrome 25 was announced, I recall professionals in DC coming into National Camera and buying up as much of the Kodachrome II as they afford. Seems like history is repeating itself.
Copyright Eric Meola
Alex Webb, Bill Allard, David Alan Harvey and Medford Taylor were all Kodachrome users. Their photography showed me how to use Kodachrome in low-light and to push past the cliche colors into a softer palette.
In the past I’ve written small posts about scanning Kodachrome transparencies and on the amazing collection of 4×5 Kodachromes from shot during the forties that can be seen at the Shorpy’s web site. Take a look at the collection of images at Shorpy’s. Kodachrome on 4×5 is amazing: clean rich blacks, intense skies and a smoothness that you can only come from large format.
Kodak has decided to retire Kodachrome and Dwayne’s will continue to process the film through December of next year.
Paul Freeman | Space Lands
Paul Freeman is a photographer friend from England. He is presenting a long-term personal project titled “Spacelands” to several publishers and decided to create a blurb version of the book.
He is a killer architectural shooter. Last month Paul and four photo industry friends (one Israeli, one Ozzie and two Englishmen with same first name – Jules and Julian) and myself got together for lunch at RULES in London. I believe RULES may be the oldest restaurant in the city. (1798 by Thomas Rules)
Paul shoots medium-format digital and the work is spectacular.
From the forward
“I became culturally obsessed by the space age when I was nine years old, in the final days of the British colony in Singapore. This was about the time my father introduced me to photography. My absorption by space fantasies and Americana was determined by pivotal moments that stand out like vertical beams of light.
One such moment brought me visions of the desert and happened on an evening when my parents were out. My brother and I crept downstairs, knowing that our young ahmah was canoodling with her boyfriend on our bamboo frame sofa. She usually let us watch the TV after our bedtime. The programs included the Outer Limits which could sometimes send us running back up to bed in terror. This particular evening through the monochrome flicker of the TV we saw an image of a desert land. Into this space we watched Mr Sulu and Lieutenant Uhura materialise in the flash of light from the transporter beam. Our eyes were the size of saucers. There was a black lady on TV with an asian man; they were in an alien desert and had ray guns. It was a different social order – one not yet realised in our living room.
Later that year I anticipated the moon landing for interminable months, scrapbooking articles from the Straits Times. The moon landing went exactly to plan; it followed the diagrams I’d collected from the newspapers to the most infinitesimal detail until we eventually saw the flickering apparition of the man in the EVA suit planting his flag on the surface of the moon. There was great comfort to be obtained in such scientific certainties. I had expected to see something like this from the moment I sat in the cinema in Singapore City watching ‘2001 a space odyssey’. It felt like the future was predictable, my life was planned out – Neil Armstrong had planted his flag, In 2001 America would be gleaming white, designed by Verner Panton, surgically clean and aesthetically depopulated. By then I would be in space. All I had to do was wait.
That sense of mathematical predictability was not to continue as the years went by. Space, and my life in it, remained stubbornly distant as it became clear that the cold war had simultaneously powered and destroyed these fanciful ideas. Since 2001, space tourism has become a surrogate for those idealistic dreams of the first space age. In New Mexico and across the desert states of the American South West one can find the decayed remnants of that first age which twinned utopian ideals from science fiction with the diabolic machinery of potential mega-mass murder. One also finds the sites of a new tourist driven future for space travel. A few miles and a range of low hills separate the site of the planned Spaceport America (where Richard Branson plans to launch his spectacular Virgin Galactic spaceline sometime in 2010), from the site of the first atomic explosion. Between these two locations lie discarded rockets, atomic age ghost towns, alien landscapes, and a town that renamed itself after a radio show. “
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/673478
I bought one.
The Photographers Survival Guide
My friend Susanne Sease along with Amanda Sosa Stone have written the must-have, must-read, must-pass-on definitive book on how to launch and sustain a career in photography.
I’ve known Suzanne for years. Her guidance and suggestions to me have been helpful and on target. The current redesign of my logo, promotional brochures and email blasts all came about from her suggestions to work with Nadine Brown of Brand Envy.
This is the book that I wish was written twenty-years ago. Tightly edited filled with interesting and informative tidbits, it will stay on my desk. I just ordered a second copy to give to my first assistant.
Click on the jpeg of the book to go to Amazon to purchase or click here.
High Voltage Line Work
My friend Mark, a photographer in Nashville, sent me this video link.
I’ve seen it before. It is wild.
Robin Williams in England riffing on the the Election
Chesapeake Bay Aerial Images uploaded to Alamy
The North Fork of the Shenandoah
I recently uploaded over two-hundred aerials from my Chesapeake Bay Watershed project to Alamy. (the book is in design now) The link above will show you the first one-hundred.
Nanticoke River of Maryland
Christmas Books #5 – Over Florida
My first aerial book was shot in the early nineties. Over Florida is look at the beauty and destruction of my native state. Noted Florida environmental activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote the forward. Mark Derr, the writer for the book and I had the honor to visit Ms. Douglas at her home in Coconut Grove. What a treat. She was gracious and elegant and even in her early 100’s was a fierce defender of the environment in Florida. The primary pilot for the book, Lisa Tarhan, photographed Mark, Ms. Douglas and I together for the inside back cover of the book.
Since the books are sold from resellers the prices range (with condition) from dirt cheap to very expensive. New Copies of Over Florida are selling for twice the list price.
A few images from the book were included in a Communication Arts Photo Annual.
If you buy a copy of any of my books, let me know and I’ll sign it for you.
Link to a site that carries all of my books
Christmas Books # 4 – Washington DC From Above
In 2005, I shot my second aerial book on our Capitol. Washington DC from Above took a lot more effort, permissions and permits to get into the new restricted airspace above the city. (Made for some great and exclusive stock of DC though)
