So if this is 'the beach blog' what better place to announce my first book?

I'm not very good at blowing my own horn, but for this one, I gotta get out some new chops, and make some noise.

16+ years ago I did almost 50 darkroom montage prints for a project that was called 'Beach Trip'. done for the company a good friend of mine founded back east, which imploded before the project came to fruition/publication.

I put together a website w/ most of the images (californiabeachtrip.com) but it hasn't exactly gone viral.

A year or so ago the same friend wrote me and said 'self-publishing is here! Let's do something w/ this!"

I waited for further instructions - they never came.. and when I enquired 6 months later, he'd gotten way too busy with other things to deal with it. 

Blurb.com to the rescue. 

I looked at a bunch of the online options, but since this was really a photo (and not 'text') book, blurb was the obvious choice, i can make all the pages myself easily. No text, just PSD image files as jpegs.

So i went about 'colorizing' the images digitally, and added a number of new digital ones that seemed to fit in.

This is the first version of this book:

http://www.blurb.com/b/5470637-a-walk-on-the-california-coast

I put all the images on a right hand page, not realizing how expensive that would make it.

(I wanted to make it possible for anyone to trim out a page, and frame it, without losing any of the other pages.)

I've revised - a much shorter, leaner book is coming soon, much more affordable, and better as an eBook (no blank left hand pages!).

Check it out, give it a spin. I put my heart and soul into everything i do. Hope it is appreciated somehow.

BB

Beach Mirage - in the darkroom again

I started w/ just an image in my head, of a figure on the mirrored beach walking into the distance, in search of what? ..i wasn't sure.
It is of course a B&W neg, i shot a whole roll of this view, it was a spectacular occurrence at Ocean Beach, San Francisco. The sand was almost level, at low tide the water didn't recede, it created this glass-like mirrored surface, reflecting the sky. This is a digitally colorized version of one of the frames.

For this montage, i chose another frame w/ just the single figure.

Initially i thought i would burn in some ships moored at a long pier, something like this image, done in 2010:

But it felt too much like i was repeating myself, the first test was just muddy... so i went back to old tried and true methods, and sifted thru contact sheets til i came upon some images taken at Marin Headlands, of a figure at the end of a long tunnel, one of the remnants of decades of military installations and gun batteries.
The figure is playing bagpipes, the tunnel echoed the sound mysteriously, incredibly. Which of course doesn't show up in the film at all.

There we go again, i had the 'Aha!' moment.
On the contact sheet, it didn't look like there was much shadow detail, when i worked with it, it turned out there was shadow detail, as it fades into the sky, makes it more interesting, what is this space the figure is walking into? A place of myth or legend? And who is the figure standing out over the ocean?
That's a 'the viewer gets to decide' question.

I tried a digital colorization of this one, once again it's.. uh... kinda interesting, but nothing to rave about. There are 4 layers of color adjustments:
1 - a basic Hue/Sat colorize that makes it all seemed toned blue.
2 - a selective color layer that only affects the beach, warming it up a bit, making the blue a bit more cyan - Neutrals/ +cyan, + Yellow.
3 - a selective color layer only affection the opening at the end of the tunnel, warming it up a bit, +y to neutrals.
4 - an overall SC layer, adds a touch more warmth (whites/ +Y).

Then i came back and worked on it some more.

Subtle difference, but it works for me.
Now I can hit 'save' and write it to back-up HD's.
As usual, larger images at a page on my site:

www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2014/BeachMirage/index.html

Last but not least, digital photography is now 25 years old.
This is a page well worth your time:



July 31, 2014 5:00 amJuly 31, 2014 5:00 am 
Digital Photography: A Look Back - by James Estrin
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/digital-photography-nppa-james-estrin/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0