(Belated) Happy New Year

I wish everyone on the blog a happy new year. I know I’m a little late to the party but I spent the last week working like crazy (and in complete isolation) to meet the deadline for a couple of new projects you’ll hear from soon…

With New Year always come New Year’s Resolutions, such as ‘I’m gonna loose weight’, ‘I’ll stop drinking’ or ‘I’ll quit smoking’(which isn’t a good idea if you want to loose weight, by the way). Or, to stay closer to the topic of this blog: ‘I’ll work on my photography skills’.

Well folks, if that’s your intent for this year, I’ve got an interesting site for you. It’s called CraftAndVision.com, and it’s the brain child of Canadian Travel & Humanitarian Photographer David Duchemin.

The idea behind the site is that you don’t always need the latest lens or the latest camera to improve your photography skills. Instead, Craft & Vision offers e-books. The e-books are about 70 pages each. The topics vary from business advice to advice on how to improve your composition and draw the viewer’s eyes. If you’re familiar with David’s printed books such as Within The Frame, you’ll know that it’s always as much about the ‘Why’ as the ‘How’. Or, to put it in David’s terms: it’s as much about Vision as it is about Gear or Technique.

There’s also a series called ‘The Print & The Process’ which shows a number of Photographs and then gives some hindsight as to how the photograph was made. Information that I always find particularly useful. What’s so unique about Craft & Vision is that, after a couple of books that were written by David, other photographer-authors have joined and each one writes about his specific area of expertise. With areas ranging from Landscape Photography to Reflections to How to shoot Light at the end of the Day, there’s a pretty wide range to choose from.

Best of all, unlike a new lens, these e-books won’t have you remortgage your house: they’re 5 USD each (‘Less than the price of a latte’, as David would say). They’re available as a simple PDF or an iPAD App.

The latest addition to the series is ‘Light & Land’ by photographer Michael Frye: it’s about how to make landscape pictures come to life in the digital darkroom, specifically Adobe Lightroom. I’m not even a real landscape shooter, but I found the book to be very valuable. With two books and seven different workshops on my repertoire, I think I’m fairly good at Lightroom but I still managed to pick up a couple of refreshing ideas, notably about the use of the Tone Curve.

You can get Light & Land and the other e-books here.