Books

Advanced Digital Black and White Photography: My second book on digital b&w remains, in my view, the most up to date guide to the mono digital darkroom.

Big claim? Well, it was the first book on the subject that showed how to use the superb Black and White adjustment tool introduced in Photoshop CS3, the use of Smart Objects for b&w conversion with Adobe Camera Raw, and includes sections on how and why to use the newer tools, Lightroom and Apple Aperture, for black and white.

The book describes every existing b&w conversion technique, and explains which are best in terms of quality and workflow. This is important because people still advocate methods which are obsolete and inflexible, and you need clarity. There's also plenty on the how but why of dodging and burning and local contrast control. The underlying creative purpose is what's really important.

Blending Modes Cookbook: The Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook for Digital Photographers explains everything there is to know about blending modes - how they work and what they can be used for.

Before writing this book I only really used Overlay, mainly for dodging and burning, and occasionally applied modes when instructed by Photoshop recipes that simulated smoke, rain etc. Books on Photoshop squeezed blending modes into a few paragraphs that do little more than rephrase the help file. There was a gap in the market and in people's knowledge, and at the very least that's what I wanted to fill.

Nowadays I routinely switch a Curves adjustment layer to Luminosity or Color, or see if Multiply or Screen sorts out an exposure problem, or see what a bit of Hard Mix might do. It's become a deliberate decision. So while some of the effects in the book may look strange, you learn a whole lot more. If blending modes become simply another everyday tool, then the book's a success.

Fine Art Cookbook: The Photoshop Fine Art Cookbook for Digital Photographers is another cookbook style approach with recipes that teach certain Photoshop techniques while showing how you can take your digital image and transform it to suggest the work of a famous photographer or painter.

So there are ways to use Photoshop to imitate Ansel Adams' style of black and white photography, or older processes like Dageuerreotypes or platinum printing, as well as some more modern fine art techniques like the various types of Polaroid manipulation.

Painters are also covered with recipes for creating van Goghs and Warhols but also less well known painters like Hokusai, Klimt, Escher, Gaudi ... yes, it was a fun book to write!

Lightroom Essentials: It's important to see Lightroom as not a new Photoshop, a tool for adjusting individual pictures, but as a combination of management and adjustment features for multiple images.

Shaking off the fine art one-off Photoshop mentality is where I feel this book differs from others on Lightroom. There's all you need to know to start adjusting your pictures and squeezing out the utmost image quality, but the starting point is the need to manage your pictures and process them efficiently. So there's a big emphasis on DAM, digital asset management. After all, if you can't find a picture, or waste time doing so, it's almost as frustrating as if you'd never taken it.

Step by Step Digital Black and White: My first book was published in late 2004. Aimed at a readership ranging from beginner to intermediate level, it was written when many serious photographers were switching to digital and needed to understand how digital methods differ from film, and how to translate b&w darkroom techniques to the digital era

The first half is about the camera (film or digital) and about black and white photography. So it discusses issues such as compostion, backlighting, tone and contrast, and why you should never use black and white camera modes.

The second half is on the digital darkroom and starts with the best ways to make black and white from colour. So don't just convert to greyscale or go to Lab mode. Then there's lots on adjusting contrast, dodging and burning, and on special effects like simulating infra red and reproducing darkroom effects such as split toning.

The Art of Printing Photos on your Epson Printer: This is a general user's guide to the whole of process of printing photos. It starts with choosing your printer, the paper, even the inks, and then works through how to prepare an image for print.

Begun by another author, the publisher asked me to take it over at short notice and to knock it into shape, make it meet the brief, and take it through to completion.

I’ve written a range of books on digital photography, all available via Amazon:

Step by Step Digital Black and White Photography, Ilex/Thomson in 2004
Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook, Ilex/O’Reilly 2005
Photoshop Fine Art Cookbook, Ilex/O’Reilly 2006
Adobe Lightroom Essentials, Ilex/Lark June 2007
Advanced Digital Black and White Photography, Ilex/Lark, late 2007 (13+ translated editions)
Advanced Digital Black & White Photography 2nd edition 2012
The Art of Printing Photos on Your Epson Printer
101 Top Tips for Black & White Digital Photography 2013

For me it’s important to be a writer who can take good pictures, and to be a photographer who can use words effectively – a combination that doesn’t always go together. My publishers don’t waste time or money correcting grammar or spelling, or sourcing images to make the book jump off the bookshelves.

I also tech edited part of Peter Krogh’s The Dam Book (second edition) and am available for other tech editing projects.

Capabilities

If you’re a publisher checking me out for a book project, I can take on anything involving these programs which I use daily:

Image editing – Photoshop – Lightroom – Aperture – Nikon Capture – Capture One
DAM – iView / Expression Media – MediaPro – Extensis Portfolio – Bridge
Web design – Dreamweaver – Fireworks – Flash

While I list programs where I’ve plenty of experience, contact me about any projects. In one case (I won’t say which) I actually began the book with no previous experience of the program I was trying to explain.