My author questionnaire and author photo for 1616: The World in Motion are due this week to Counterpoint Press. My daughter Ellen, who is a brilliant photographer, among other things, took this photo from the roof of her apartment overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland. It was raining lightly at the time, and later that day ice would fall from the sky.

In Tom’s Glossary of Book Publishing Terms the author photo is defined as “Pictorial fiction. Authors always choose photos that emphasize that quality in which they feel most deficient.” So what does this say about me? I dunno — but I will say, as a guy who has been cutting his own hair for years, that I don’t think the hair looks too bad.

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Author photo

While we’re in Verona, here’s a picture from the courtyard of the Castel Vecchio, which is a handsome museum indeed. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect they slyly chose the planting to coordinate with the banner for the Maria Morganti show.

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Travel photo: Castel Vecchio Museum courtyard, Verona, Italy

This photo amuses me because the gondolier reminds me of the Eric Blore role in the Astaire/Rogers film Top Hat.

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Travel photo: Venetian gondolier

Please bear with me while I post a few photos from my recent trip to the Veneto and Upper Adige.

I travel with a little (maybe 12-inch) tripod, but for photos at dusk like this one I usually just set my camera on something steady, like a trash bin or fire hydrant, in order to get a longer exposure. Usually I’m able to hold the camera steady for quite a long time in such situations.

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Travel photo: a street in Verona

For the 100-meter-long photo of which the detail above is a part Simon Hoegsberg shot one-hundred seventy-eight people, “in the course of twenty days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasses in Berlin in the summer of 2007.” Impeccably stitched together into one enormous photo, the images create something like one of the great narrative scrolls of the East Asian tradition. Check out the full image here.

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Via Substraction.

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100 meters of humanity

Eugène Atget made a number of interesting sets of photos of aspects of Parisian life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has made a number of them available on the web. This is a detail from a photo of the Cabaret Alexandre, 100 boulevard de Clichy, printed between 1910 and 1912 from a negative taken in 1910. Great stuff! (I love the way the type echoes the form of the doors in this one.) See more here.

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Early 20th-century scenes of Paris

There’s nothing new about the rule of thirds — it’s almost a photographic cliche. Still, as a, well, rule of thumb there’s a good deal of sense in it. Let’s have a look.

One of the worst instincts of amateur photographers is to aim the camera directly at the main subject, as if it were game to be bagged. You can see this in society pages, like one in the back of a magazine I’m responsible for (I try to keep the section’s space to a minimum). The photographer’s strategy in these situations is just about always to line the subjects up in a grinning row facing the camera. You can see what I mean in the above image (I’ve replaced the people’s faces with smilies so as not to embarrass anyone, and to highlight the composition).

The rule of thirds says that you’re better off arranging your composition with a main element a third of the way from one of the edges. In effect you imagine your image as composed of nine equal rectangles. Consider this image from the Sentiero degli Dei in the Lattari Mountains above Amalfi.

You can see that the cliff at the left is a third of the way in from the left edge of the photo. (You can also think of each of the nine squares as a section to be balanced in its own right.)

Or look at this photo from the Sentiero della Republica in the same region.

Here you can see that the image is arranged more or less in three horizontal bands.

One more example. This is at Pompeii.

Here the roof and the vertical element of the main building both relate to the thirds.

Now, I don’t follow this slavishly but it’s a good rule of thumb when you’re shooting quickly (like I tend to do since most of my photography is travel photography and I don’t want to spend all day on one shot). Basically it works because you’re moving the main elements of the photo off center. If you wanted to experiment with variations you could also try what you might call the rule of five-eighths.

I won’t go into the unique mathematical qualities of the golden ratio — you could do a search. Suffice it to say that golden rectangles usually look good to most people. Expressed as a mathematical ratio the golden ratio is 1 : 1.618, or from the other perspective .618 : 1. While the golden ratio cannot be exactly reduced to a neat fraction it’s pretty close to 5/8ths, which is .625.

So 2/3rds is .667, while the golden ratio is .618. Therefore, rather than dividing an image into 1/3 and 2/3 parts, you could divide it into parts of approximately three-eighths and five-eighths. In other words, the two parts created by the dividing element would be a little closer in size to each other than with ninths, and your guidelines would be roughly where the red lines are in the following image (taken in the Vatican museums).

Here’s the same image without the lines (yep, you caught me — I’m looking for opportunities to post photos from my recent travels).

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Photography’s rule of thirds

While driving the Via Amalfitano has its motoring excitements as well as its famously spectacular views,

it little compares to the road through Furore for adrenaline-inducing narrow turns (especially exciting when encountering an oncoming bus, which can sometimes require a line of traffic to back partway down the mountain).

You can reach the Costa Amalfitano by way of Sorrento in the north, from which you will arrive at Positano, or from Salerno in the south, which will lead to Amalfi. But there is a less-used (by foreigners) third way, which cuts over the Lattari mountain range, through a tunnel at the top connecting Gragnano and Agerola.

Agerola is a rustic complex of hamlets where one sometimes finds oneself delayed by herds of goats swarming the roadways.

We took a vacation rental in Agerola – it afforded a panoramic view of the valley clear down to the drop-off to the sea. At that point the road plummets to the sea by way of innumerable sharp turns. As a consequence of our location in Agerola we traveled it a number of times.

In the map below, the hairpins switchbacks of this road – a true engineering marvel, with very welcome stone walls on the seaward side – are represented by the intestine-shaped tangle in the middle. Unfortunately, the memory card in my camera got filled up before we reached the most thrilling section of the road; still, this video of the beginning of the uphill climb might give a taste of what it is like to drive this remarkable road.

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Driving from Furore on the Amalfi Coast to Agerola in the Lattari Mountains

Okay, I guess I’m still a little jetlagged — or maybe just worn out from coming back to an office in crisis mode. Anyway, too tired to do more than post another couple photos (click through for larger versions) from the Sentiero degli Dei — the path of the gods — in the Lattari Mountains overlooking the Amalfi coast.

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The Path of the Gods

This photo was taken from the spectacular trail in the Lattari Mountains overlooking the Amalfi Coast called the Sentiero degli Dei — the path of the gods. A few hours after the photo was taken a fierce storm hit the coast. (Click through for a larger version.)

I’ve just returned from a trip to Rome and the Costa Amalfitano and will return to blogging. I’m processing my photos from the trip and sorting them into smaller and more manageable sets and hope to post them to Flickr over the weekend.

In this blog I try to mostly focus on issues of print and electronic publication, from concept through distribution. But I am likely to be off topic for a bit as I share some Italiana over the next week or so.

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Gathering storm clouds over Amalfi

This is from a couple of years ago. I happened across it when I was cleaning up an old photo card I haven’t used in, well, a couple of years.

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A couple more photos here. Maybe more coming to the same set, if time allows.

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Cà d’Zan Mansion, Sarasota, Florida

Maybe by the time this post runs the photo will have been widely printed. If not, you can still try your luck at guessing what this picture — which won the 2008 World Press Photo of the Year contest — represents. Answer after the break …

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According to the Telegraph, the photo shows “an armed sheriff moving through an American home after an eviction due to a mortgage foreclosure….Jury members said the strength of the photo by Anthony Suau for Time magazine was in its opposites – it looks like a classic war photograph, but is simply the eviction of people from a house.”

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What’s going on here?

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via photodoug

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Photography the hard way

Huge, aren’t they? See them at the National Building Museum.

Kind of a random post, but I’m on the road and don’t have a lot of time for internet. Here’s another view of this remarkable building:

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Big columns at the National Building Museum, Washington, DC

This image of woodtype figures sorts at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, is from Nick Sherman‘s photostream.

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Photo Wednesday: woodtype figures

This photo of books simply left behind after a St. Louis Public Library move comes from nathansnider’s photostream.

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Photo Wednesday: abandoned books

Wasn’t that fun? Many people see this effect as creating the illusion of a miniaturized landscape. You can do it, or something very like it, with an extremely expensive camera called a “tilt-shift” (whence the name of the effect). Or you approximate the effect in five or ten minutes of Photoshop.

The technique is described, with a few variations, in many places around the web. You can check it out on your search engine. Or, you can just read on.

First, you have to go into quick mask mode.

Then, with your colors selected as black/white (you might want to invert them so that white is foreground and black background) you select the reflected gradient tool (the fourth gradient over).

Now just stretch a line from the focus point in whatever direction you like (experiment). I find a short stretch is better than a long one. Your image will look something like this:

Switch back out of quick mask mode and apply a blur (you might have to invert your selection). You will read that you should use a lens blur, but a Gaussian blur works just about as well (I don’t have lens blur as an option on my home version of Photoshop, where I still haven’t upgraded from 7.0).

Then I just adjust the levels, curves, and saturation, and apply a high-pass sharpening, as I’ve explained before.

Let’s recap. Some tutorials are frustrating because they leave out some small but critical step along the way. So there can be a value to detailed instructions. On the hand, it can be difficult remembering eighteen or nineteen discreet steps to an operation. It’s worth understanding its basic principles. What we’re doing here is applying a gradient mask and blurring the result. Remember that and you can play around until you get the effect you want.

Here’s a before and after:

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Tilt-shifting the Pioneer Monument

I was struck by a subtle quality of light at dusk on Longboat Key. It’s the kind of effect that is very difficult to get in photos. It was very dark by then, and my Canon A620 isn’t as good at low-light situations as an SLR would be. I shot this at ISO 400, 1/30, 3.5. In Photoshop I lightened it a bit just by moving the center and right levels sliders — I didn’t want to use my regular technique for lightening dark photos, because I wanted to keep the sense of gathering darkness. I also increased the saturation just a little. I think the result is the sort of picture that some people might like while others will just shrug.

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Difficult photo subject

I’ve chosen an image more or less at random (except that it is one that I like, from this photoset). My vantage point was looking down at a river from overhead, with colorful leaves on the right. For the purpose of this demonstration the image has been resized to fit this space (435 pixels wide).

The first thing I do is to open an action I’ve saved under the name “open adjustments.” This opens three adjustment layers: levels, curves, and hue/saturation in that order, which is the order I make the adjustments.

First I look at levels. If they look well balanced I might leave them alone. Often they are weighted to either darks or lights, and I slide the midtone triangle to get a better balance. That often makes the image look worse but it puts it in position for the next adjustment, curves. Usually I find a midpoint that looks good and then generally make an ess-shaped curve in order to get a good range of darks and lights. Finally, I adjust hue/saturation. With my current camera this usually means just increasing the saturation a little bit.

Next I open an action I’ve saved under the name “hi-pass sharpen.” This sharpens the image using the duplicate layer – invert – blur – overlay – adjust transparency workflow that I have described previously. I don’t like oversharpening, so my default transparency is a modest 40 percent. It’s important to remember to select the background layer first or you will just be sharpening your hue/saturation adjustment. One nice thing about this way of sharpening is that it is size independent, so I can resize my image and do a save for web to reduce the file size without having to resharpen.

The entire process is done with adjustment layers and is completely nondestructive — no changes are made to the original image. Below the image as it came from the camera is on the left and the adjusted image on the right.

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My Photoshop default workflow

This photo was taken on the walk to Taughannock Falls near Ulysses, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. For more fall color, see the clickable thumbnails below.

The thumbnails are courtesy of Duane Storey’s Crossroads plug-in. I’m soliciting feedback — does this feature make the page too slow too load?

Tomorrow I’ll be talking about book design.

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More fall color