April Monthly Special: Concept

"P" a graffiti photographer. Having a concept helps you notice things.

In the photography class I'm teaching this semester, we have covered several photographers whose work is highly conceptual. Sophie Calle and Hans Eijekelboom, in particular, come to mind. For one of Eijekelboom's projects, he managed to get himself into photographs (sometimes the front page) of his local newspaper for 10 days in a row. His more recently published Paris—New York—Shanghai is based on a self-imposed routine of going out in the city for a couple of hours, looking for a "type," (say, people wearing camo pants) and then photographing it to create a visual typology. His grids of photos featuring mean wearing striped polos makes me never want to wear another striped shirt (and not just because those horizontal stripes are unflattering). Sophie Calle's many projects include a chromatic diet (in which she ate a menu composed entirely of one color for each day of the week and photographed it) and the hotel project (in which she worked in Italy as a maid and photographed the contents of the guests' suitcases) stand out.

Clearly, those projects are at the more experimental end of the spectrum. But one thing we can all learn from conceptual work is how forethought and method can create coherence and a sense of purpose to our work. Sometimes the most arbitrary set of constraints can lead to unexpected and thought-provoking work.

"N" on a carousel ride

This month, I want to explore "concept" as a form of inspiration. And to kick off the month, I am officially launching my "ABC Paris" collection. I did a post about the project a long time ago, but now I am finally ready to promote it as a series of prints. The "concept" behind the project goes back to when my son, Max, was a baby and learning his alphabet. We were living in Paris and I was working on my PhD. The simple abécédaire became the organizing principle that helped me capture the city. I have always liked Victor Hugo's quote from Notre Dame de Paris: “If you know how to see, you can recognize the physiognomy of a king in a door knocker.” Hugo felt that although the invention of the printing press had help disseminate knowledge, it had also made people visually illiterate. During the Middle Ages, he most common laborer knew how to "read" a cathedral, but in post-Revolutionary post-Napoleonic France, cathedrals were falling into ruin and architecture had become a dead language.

"O" of a door knocker on Notre Dame

My ABC Paris project is a sort of primer for reading my favorite city. Whatever the literary connections that I may draw, however, the project is meant to be accessible and even commercial. For me, the thought of those images hanging up in someone's home is as great an end to the project as a book (well, maybe a close second), which is why I have priced the letters very low—starting at just $10 for a 5x5 print. I have made a minimum of 3 versions of each letter with the idea that people might want to buy several prints and spell things without repeating the same version of a letter. In all, there are 113 letters.

I have divided the project into three galleries:
1. The individual letters (available as 5x5 inch and 8x8 inch prints)

"L" stack of chairs at the Jardin du Luxembourg

2. A 24x36 inch print with the entire original alphabet



3. 11x14 inch prints of each original alphabet letter accompanied by a quote from a French historical/literary figure.


As a real "monthly special," I am offering my readers a 15% discount for the month of April. Just enter "takeoutphoto" (as one word, no spaces, all lower case) as a coupon code at checkout.

"H" chairs inside Saint-Sulpice church

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that I don't do this for self-promotion and don't use ads, but I am making an exception this month in this most blatantly self-promotional move ever:

Two ways you can win FREE ABC PARIS PRINTS:

1. For a chance to win a $40 credit, check out the galleries, leave a comment on this post saying which thing you would choose to buy, and on Friday, April 9, I will announce a randomly chosen winner. (I will let my 4-yr-old daughter choose a name out of a hat)

2. For a chance to win an $80 credit, do a post about my ABC launch, post the link to your post back here (my FAQ page tells you how to link here), and I will announce a winner on Friday, April 9. You can add images to your post from any of my galleries by clicking on the "share" tab and getting a link.

The present future of photobooks

While researching the world of "print on demand" (that's POD to those of you who like acronyms or the word "pod"), I stumbled upon the massive collaborative post ("crowd-sourcing") about "the future of photobooks" at RESOLVE in which various bloggers (many of them heavy hitters) prognosticate the demise/bright future of the photobook. I read every one of the 40 or 50 (I stopped counting) posts. I decided to take notes and share them with you in a way that will either save you time or whet your appetite for the ongoing discussion.

The "I saw the future, the geeks were right" stance.
Whether they see it as a good or a bad thing, most of the bloggers addressed the print vs. digital question. Some argue that mobile books, pdf books, and multimedia projects present a chance to rethink the entire system. But that means rethinking, not producing sub-par digital equivalents of the printed page. As one blogger writes:

“The struggle is to avoid the book being reduced to a means to distribute my photographs and to think of the online book as a stand alone project."

Point taken. Why buy a digital book if it doesn't offer something new. As Larissa Leclair says:

"Just look at a photographer’s website if you are going to look at photographs on a digital platform photobook – unless, that is, if the digital format has furthered the photobook in ways that the traditional book cannot."

Alec Soth argues that we're comparing apples to oranges when we talk about books and their multimedia digital counterparts:

"I’m currently experimenting with online audio slideshows and the like. But I see this as a new medium, not a book. For me, a book is a physical object."

The multi-user utopian vision
Several bloggers are hopeful that a multi-user experience will enhance our ability to read photographs and will lead to more collaborative publishing opportunities. One proposed idea unites chefs and food photographers to create the ultimate downloadable cookbook. Green Tea Gallery points to collaborative works such as PUBLICATION as models of the future:

"There will be more and more artistic collaborations that will flood the market with hundreds, if not thousands of new publications that will feature photography related projects, interviews and articles."

Ben Huff sees the move toward innovations (such as group publications) as part of the survival instinct—necessity as the mother of invention:

"As our economy continues to stumble, i'm seeing photographers become more creative and assertive in their efforts to become a part of the machine on their own terms."

The death of the editor
While some focus on cooperatives and multi-user content, others stress the rogue nature of the self-publisher. DIY=no editor, no designer, no teamwork. Critical terrain asks:

"What’s lost here? The combination of differently specialized people bringing their expertise to bear on a project in the making."

Sadkids agrees:

"My only concern in a POD world is the loss of editors. If the whole world is DIY, where are the quality checks? Look at the abundance of garbage on YouTube. No editors = lots of bad stuff."

This concern brings us back to the need for collaboration. As Amy Stein contends:

"If we want the photobook to evolve I believe we need to bring back collaboration and, more importantly, evolve the definition of a book. Instead of a mass mentality, where the book is reduced to a means to distribute your photographs, we must return to a place where photographers work with other artists and professionals to conceive and produce unique, standalone objects."

Without professional collaboration, chaos. The Online Photographer suggests an increased need for curating, for editing the useful from the mess of the internet:

"The internet is a junk heap. It's every frame that comes back from the drugstore. It's the contact sheet, the raw material, the unsorted mass."

Johanna Tumbler also emphasizes the importance of careful editing:

"I don’t know what the physical future of the photobook is, but I hope whatever it is, it still means that someone has committed themselves to an edit, a sequence, and thinks about the best layout for those images, rather than it just being a freeform collection where each individual image is more important than the whole…"

The tenacious printed book
The great majority of bloggers (photographers, editors, collectors) professed undying love for the book as object. (see, for example, Elysium, LOZ, Craig Ferguson, Daylight Magazine, and the Blurberati blog)

Elizabeth Avedon asserts that no matter what changes occur, collectors will keep buying books. DLK collection goes into more detail on the collector's point of view and give a counter arguments to deflate the hype about new technologies:

"For photography collectors, innovation in photobooks isn't a huge issue."

Other photo book enthusiasts (street level Japan, the space-in-between) look at their own buying habits to show that the industry is alive and well, and Lesley Martin of Aperture looks at the industry's current obsession with books on books:

"To my knowledge, there are at least four major Books about Books in development (Latin American Photobooks, German Photobooks, Dutch Photobooks, among other general interest) and several related exhibitions underway for release sometime in 2010-11."

Big publishers beware, innovate or die
Fractionmag compares the publishing industry to the recording industry. The big labels are all about profit:

"Sure, the giant companies are going to whittle things down to the bare minimum and it will become like the recording industry; if you cannot sell a certain and predetermined quantity of units, you do not get published (this is probably happening already). Gone are the days of believing in the work and the artist."

The publishers that take risks will be the publishers that generate sales. Christina Seeley (of Metro Nature) notes that if her own buying habits suggest anything, it is that innovative books will survive:

"The first thing I thought to do was to figure out which books in my own collection stand out and why. The consistency in the pile that formed was in the design of each of the selected titles. Each if only in slight ways, pushed outside the traditional design of the photography monograph."

Jerry Avenaim's comparison of the book industry to the movie industry is meant to be reassuring:

"When the DVD format was introduced in the 1990’s, movie theaters were terrified they would lose there business to people that had ‘home theaters.’ We all realized how nonsensical that was because at the end of the day, when the lights go down and the curtains part, we know nothing will ever replace the movie theater experience. And in my opinion a work of art is not digital, it is tangible.

Theater owners would disagree. Go to a movie anytime other than Friday night or Saturday, and you will understand why the megaplex theaters are pushing live events, corporate parties, and anything else they can come up with to compete with the home theaters. For Hamburger eyes, the self-published book (our "home theater" equivalent) will spur on creative thinking and give the consumer a better product:

"I think photo books will always be around and get better and better, and in 10 years they will look even better than we can imagine. It’s brewing now. The perfect storm. All these self published titles will make the bigger companies step it up and take risks to survive."

POD people, the self publishing revolution
Finally, we get back to what prompted my search in the first place: the "print on demand" market. Self-publishing no longer has the "vanity press" stigma it once did. A few self-published books have received widespread recognition. Blurb's Photography Book Now contest brings self-published titles to the attention of big-name jurors—although the winners are not necessarily published through Blurb.

The book Your golden opportunity is comeing [no, that's not a typo] very soon is kind of the "Blair Witch Project" (to keep the movie comparison going) of photo books: self-published, but with international buzz. This leads to the "quality content is more important than quality presentation argument" described by Shooting Wide Open as follows:

"Good photos printed in crappy quality or boring books still trump crappy photos printed at high quality or inserted into a fancy digital interface for me. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking every photobook needs to be of the highest quality to be viable."

This doesn't mean people love Blurb. In practice, many photographers see Blurb as an inexpensive way to pursue the traditional route. Elizabeth Fleming explains:

"I’ve had many conversations with fellow photographers who have also used Blurb, and the general consensus seems to be that we’ve all employed the service as a means for creating a template. In essence, when we show the book around it’s with a bit of a disclaimer: this is what my book would look like if an actual publishing house were to produce a more high-end version."

Shane Godfrey prefers the quality of a hand-made book and encourages photographers to revive that alternative:

"I do not think not using self publishing companies means make crap for a dollar and try to pass it as art. I think, personally, that handmade is the future. We are having a revival of alternative process, why not handmade books?"

La pura vida predicts great things to come thanks to self-publishing:

“Blurb is like Atari. Very cool for its time, but really only the tip of the iceberg in terms what’s to come."

My own conclusions
The movie industry and music industry comparisons are useful parallels to photo book publishing—at least to some degree. The proliferation of self-publishing and small presses creates an "indie" vibe that will influence the major publishers. For a lucky few, indie success will be a stepping stone to a major book deal. Books won't die, but our means of accessing them could change. There is not yet a photo book equivalent of Sundance, in my opinion, but various photo shows suggest that it's coming. Stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble are the megaplex cinemas of book distribution—most of them offering predictable, boring fare. I doubt that will change. The "art house" distributors will not suddenly become mainstream. However good the content, the general public doesn't have a huge appetite for indie material that hasn't received its stamp of approval from the mainstream. I go to the Sundance Film Festival every year and cram in about 30 movies in a week. I was at the first screening of "Precious" (then called "Push"). The audience gave it a standing ovation. I predicted Oscar nominations. It succeeded, but it will never be "Avatar." And for every "Precious" there are hundreds of excellent films that never make it outside a festival setting. Each year at Sundance I marvel at the excellent movies that are passed by. Sometimes, 2 or 3 years later, they find their way to a DVD release...

But the world of the photo book is unlike both music and film in one major way: the audience. Many of the big name publishers are only big names to collectors. Ask someone off the street about Steidl, how many have even heard of it, let alone Twin Palms, Actes Sud, Nazraeli Press. In many ways, the big presses of the photo world are the struggling indies. And if that's the case, where does it leave the rest of us?

I think that is what we are still trying to figure out.

For more reading, see:
Miki Johnson's presentation at the San Francisco Apple Store and RESOLVE's follow-up on the discussion.

In praise of mindless retouching

Sometimes I get involved in reading or retouching and I let the TV drone in the background, thinking that any minute I'm going to stop working, find something good to watch, and get my brain turned off (nothing dulls the brain like TV, right?) so I can get sleepy. But before I know it, whatever show I was not watching has turned into an infomercial. By the time Jane Seymour has extolled the virtues of "Natural Advantage" a dozen times, it's definitely time to stop, which is what I'm going to do the second I finish this post.

Since this is an odd post anyway, I might as well say that I was insane to think that I would cover masking AND compositing in one month. In fact, I think one more masking tutorial is all I will do before changing themes for April.

Some tutorials I do simply to share techniques that work for me. Others, I write in order to force myself to expand my own knowledge. The latter is the case with an "Alpha Mask" tutorial that I hope to write. I'm more of a layer mask guy, so this whole "alpha" thing is not something I normally do. I decided to read up on alpha masks and then got distracted (as I am wont to do). Actually, distracted is not quite right. Burnt out from technical details is probably more like it.

So I thought of poor Lucas, my 10-year-old son who has been home sick. Then I thought about how much he hates having his picture taken. Then I pulled out this photo I took of him at the Tate in London:
The photo has that hazy, yellow, bad indoor lighting thing going on. Its meant to be stronger, bolder. Before I knew it, I was retouching as a sort of therapeutic mindless activity.
Before you can say Jane Seymour 1,000 times I stopped and thought, I love Photoshop. Mindlessly retouching, trying things out just for fun (rather than for a client) is great therapy. Its like Photoshop as a form of meditation.

But then a bad synth soundtrack and an saccharine voice talking about a money back guarantee reminds you that its after 1. Before you know it, Joan Rivers is pitching some kind of paint that women can brush onto their scalps to hide their thinning hair.
Must. Get. Remote. Now.

Feathering

No, this isn't a hair tutorial, which is too bad, really, because having rocked the whole feathered hair look back in the day, I could tell you a thing or two—as could my older sister, who was like the brunette Farrah Fawcett of Jefferson Junior High. Instead, I wanted to do a quick post about that often ignored "feather" setting that you see in the top menu bar when you use any marquee or lasso tool for selecting. It might say "0" it might say "1," but once you know what it does, you may even decide to put "100":


Here's a sample photo:
Let's pretend that I wanted to select the red door because I thought it would look better green to match the shirt of the biker (for the record, I don't). In this case, I decide to use the magnetic lasso to select the door:
To demonstrate the effect of the "feather" setting, I will select the "refine edge" button from that same menu bar:
A dialog box appears that allows you to adjust the feathering of your selection:
Right now, it is set to "0" which means that for better or for worse, the red door you see is exactly what I selected. Feathering softens the selection evenly on both sides. If I change it from "0" to "10" you see this:
You can see how feathering softens the selection. Rather than a hard edge, we now see a smooth transition. But before we pass any judgments, let's really push it. Here's "40" :
And here is "100":

If I stick with "0" feathering and then adjust the color of the door, I get this:

Clean, sharp edges. At least as clean and sharp as the original selection. But if I went wild and put "100" and then adjusted the color to green....
I would end up with a weird trippy red/green haze. Great, if that's what you're going for, but you can see why most people stick with a very low number or even no feathering at all. I should point out that the actual effect of a "10" or a "100" will change according to the size of your image, because the number indicates pixels not a percentage. To be precise, you can enter anything from "0" to "250." I know what you're thinking: No you di'int! 250? 250! What's wrong with you?

Which brings me to why I even wrote this post...

Like I said, most people either don't change the "feather" setting (out of ignorant bliss) or they keep it low. So when Amy Dresser (see my last post about the webinar) started evening out skin tone by lassoing patches of skin, clicking on the curves adjustment layer icon, and then adjusting that patch (she made about 26 such changes), all of us webinar participants watched happily from our various locations until OH THE HORROR!!!! Amy Dresser said that when she lassos patches of skin, she sets the feathering really high. High? How high? 5? 10? No! An insane 100!
Yes, you heard me—100 pixel feathering. The moment she said it, I swear that I heard a collective gasp echo from around the globe like all of the whos down in whoville screaming for dear life. I think I heard the moderator pop the lid off of his heart medication pill box.

But seriously, why the surprise? Well, people expect precision from a high end retoucher and they assume that any selection would be extremely precise (i.e. have hard edges). Au contraire, as Amy pointed out, when you're adjusting skin, you want gradual transitions—it's more natural. Just as the clean lines of the red door above demand a sharp selection, the smooth tones of a person's skin need gradual adjustments.

The moral of the story is that if you think about feathering, you can use it to your advantage. Some people more than others.