The New Photo Book Market

Traditional photo book publishers have been screaming about the change in their market and how it's so tough to make a buck anymore. But in this interview that photo director and blogger Rob Haggert does with Radius Books publisher Darius Himes, you get the sense that while the market has changed, it's opened doors for a lot of new, smaller publishers. The problem, I suspect, is that it now becomes next to impossible for photographers to make a buck directly off their books, which means they have to change their business models. Unfortunately, such are life and its version of black comedy, economics.

Review: Photoshop CS3 Photographer's Handbook: An Easy Workflow

I seem to be on the Rocky Nook mailing list. I just got a copy of Photoshop CS3 Photographer's Handbook: An Easy Workflow. If you've been using Photoshop for years, this probably has little interest for you. But if you've decided to take the plunge, this is a good first book. Notice my emphasis. You won't learn all the mysteries of the software available in the index. Certainly I noticed a few techniques in here that aren't, to my mind, the best ways of accomplishing a goal.

But what the book does is offer a roadmap, from bringing images in to learning the basic tools and retouching, and preparing images for their final use, whether print or electronic. The book (lists for $35.95) is only a couple of hundred or so pages long, but that's a strength in this case. You get at least one way of getting images through Photoshop. After you're comfortable with it, then there are many other references and more tricks than you could learn in a month of Sundays. This gives you a basic workflow that you can adapt and change to meet your own preferences and to incorporate the new things that you learn. But might as well get walking before you break into a sprint.

Book Review: Low Budget Shooting

When I requested a review copy of Low Budget Shooting: Do It Yourself Solutions to Professional Photo Gear by German photographer and designer Cyrill Harnischmacher, I was hoping to see something useful. I was first taken aback by the thinness of the volume - 72 pages with a hardback cover and paper thickness that only seemed to emphasize the lack of wider content. And yet when I flipped through, I realized that the $19.95 price was something a photographer could recoup multiple times in a single project. Just learning to create a custom soft box out of maybe $10 or $20 worth of material - without needing much in the way of skills or tools - is a money saver. You can learn to pretty easily make reflectors of all sizes, diffusers for a hand-held flash unit, even a table with continuous background for shooting products. There seems to be a bias toward table-top and close-up work, but the techniques he suggests are actually a jumping-off point. For example, you could adapt the soft box construction to a studio flash, or even series of flashes, or create large area reflectors using thin PVC pipes instead of fiberglass tubing. If you have the slightest inclination toward do-it-yourself projects, then this will give you great suggestions for building and improvising a lot of your own equipment without going broke in the process.