Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking by Julieanne Kost
Reviewed by Kathy Pryer, member of Eureka Photoshop Users Group, an official Adobe user group
The first section is entitled; The Art of Creative Thinking, which is descriptive of its contents, occupies the first 20 pages. The results, consisting of photographs taken out of window seats in commercial airliners, occupy the next 90 pages. On pages 23, 41, 57, 69, 81, 99, and 109 there is text that takes the reader through the mental steps she had to follow in her creative process. The appendix, occupying the final 25 pages, sets forth the steps used in Adobe Photoshop manipulating the raw images. The book is well arranged.
Digital photographs were taken with a Nikon D100 using a 35-70mm lens with the ISO set at 200, the white balance either Auto or Cloudy, and using RAW format. All of the digital images were processed using Adobe Camera RAW in either Photoshop CS or CS2.
THE ART OF CREATIVE THINKING
This section is divided into 18 suggested steps. In addition to mastering the tools, Julieanne Kost delves into what life is trying to tell her and being open to whatever comes her way. As we do in our user group, sharing and collaborating teach us to be flexible and learn to negotiate. Art and daily routine do not mix and she suggests how to separate the two. Kost's airline flights were a part of her job at Adobe. That company is not connected directly with the subject matter of this book. It all began after numerous boring flights led her to conceive of shooting pictures out the window of the earth below as an immense constantly scrolling image; becoming a spectator of the scene rather than a part of it. This shows clearly in the many pages of photographs of the surface and clouds, which have little text.
On pages 81 and 99 she talks about her feelings and ideas as she reviewed the 100s of images laid out on her dining room table in 4x6 inch prints. These brought out strong emotion and love of our planet, which made it difficult to reduce the number down to a manageable level. She had no preconceived ideas on how much to manipulate each of the chosen photographs. The RAW images were often not the same as Julieanne remembered and she tried to recapture the emotion the scene had generated when she took the picture. Each of us would tend to have different categories of scenes we want to photograph and manipulate. Her main focus was clouds, mountains and unusual land formations.
IMAGING TECHNIQUES
For most of our membership the appendix might be the most valuable portion of the book. She began her project with a film camera but soon switched to digital using the Nikon D100. Kost writes of the difficulties shooting through the airplane window giving several solutions. I found the before and after images especially interesting, since she gives techniques used.
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