Dennis Dunleavy

Author Interview: Tony Northrup's "Stunning Digital Photography"

Once in a while, while looking around for interesting books about the subjects I teach, I find something that stands out. During a recent Amazon book search on digital photography books, Tony Northrup's DSLR Book: How to Create Stunning Digital Photography, caught my attention. The book, published in 2011, has met with great success and remains a top seller on Amazon. Tony worked on the text, design and photography for the book with his wife Chelsea Knowles. Turned out to be a great collaboration. 

 

Big Picture: What inspired you to write the book? 

Tony Northrup:  So many things! I love writing educational books--in fact, this was my 31st how-to book. Photography has been my passion for about 15 years, and I'd been shooting professionally for most of that time doing wildlife and travel stock photography and portrait and commercial photography. So, it seemed like a natural combination of my loves. 

I actually started writing this book after having a conversation with my partner (and now wife), Chelsea, about the future of learning. I imagined technology that combined the self-paced learning of educational books, the richness of video, and the teacher and peer support of a classroom environment. Then, I realized that with color ereaders/tablets and broadband Internet, I could make it happen right now.

But it would be far too expensive, time-consuming, and risky for any existing publisher to take on the project. So, Chelsea and I started Mason Press together and spent the next two years travelling to 15 countries to take original example pictures and videos for the book. And we're still working on it--we're constantly adding new content to it and giving the updates to our readers for free.

Big Picture: There are so many digital photo books on the market, why this one? 

Tony Northrup: There's no other book like this, about photography or any other topic. It currently has 3.5+ hours of video integrated into the book--short segments designed to support and clarify the written text. Free lifetime updates that I release every month or two, so the book gets better with time and stays up-to-date as photography trends emerge. We also have a virtual classroom environment on Facebook where readers can get peer and teacher support, for those times when you just want to raise your hand and ask a question.

Also, as an author I'm known for my easy-to-understand and practical style. In other words, no BS.

Big Picture: Who did you write the book for, what audience? 

Tony Northrup: Anyone who wants to take better pictures, from absolute beginners to professionals. 

Big Picture: Was it challenging to write? 

Tony Northrup: It was by far the hardest book I've ever written. Most photography books use stock photography taken by other photographers, but I insisted on Chelsea and I taking every photo in the book ourselves. After all, if you can't take a picture, how can you teach someone else to take it? So, we traveled around the world, seeking out the most amazing locations to best illustrate photographic concepts.

The video was the biggest challenge, though. While I had writing and photography experience, videography is an entirely different animal. We didn't have the budget for a film and production crew, so we had to learn how to record, produce, and publish video.

It's quite possibly the most complex book ever published... But I love a challenge. :)

What was your favorite part of the process of working on it? 

Definitely travelling the world with Chelsea.

We love travel, especially with a purpose.

Big Picture: How is the book doing so far? 

Tony Northrup: Better than anyone could have hoped! It's the top-rated photography book in the world. The ebook is the top selling photography book in the world. The paperback book is rising fast--there are still many gatekeepers that hold back small publishers such as Mason Press--but we're usually among the top 5 photography books on Amazon.

Thank You Tony for the time in preparing this post. 

So, You think you've got the picture?

Something happened in photojournalism class yesterday. Something important. After years of leading hundreds photo critiques, I stumbled across a way of explaining why looking at pictures can be such a meaningful experience. This may sound silly, but I have never been able to not feel guilty about the impact a critique will have on a student’s motivation and creativity. Some students are ready to be hammered with what’s wrong about a picture they have made, but many are not. Many students need to learn how to handle criticism.

After so much time evaluating students’ work, I realized that what I was looking at over and over again has affected me for two reasons. The first reason is that the image I am looking at has  a clear point of focus to the story being told. In other words, “I get it.” 

The second reason the picture affects so much is that it stirs me emotionally.  Beyond “getting it” I am “feeling it.”

Having a strong point of focus as well as the ability to convey a mood in a picture appears to be a fundamental part of ways of making things seen.

For an image to have meaning for me, then, I not only need to understand what is in the frame, with deliberate immediacy and intensity, but also I want to be made to feel something toward the thing I am looking at. Without this double-whammy, the picture will never be as effective as it could be – the image will have failed to embed itself in my memory bank.

Without feeling, the picture is all context and no impact. 

Picture are persuasive when they have a strong analogical appeal to viewers. The analogical relationship between what we know as “real” and what is represented in a photograph helps to validate us. To have just a clear point of focus in a picture, however, is not enough. The point of focus, the subject, must also evoke, goad, prod, provocative some feeling in us.

This is what I realized when looking at an endless stream of images. This is why looking at pictures seems so natural.  For the past two weeks I have been looking carefully at the front pages of several hundred newspapers across the nation on the Newseum’s website. If you want to really understand what I am trying to say here, spend a week looking at every newspaper displayed on the site.

Although there is always a danger in reducing human experience down to  formulae, thinking in very basic terms is helpful in learning how to make pictures with deeper meaning. Elsbeth Brown in her new book, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture (John Hopkins, 2005) offers an excellent perspective on making sense of pictures.

Brown, using Roland Barthes’ model, contends, “Photographic signification is a historical process, dependent upon the specific choices of cultural producers and the historically specific sign vocabulary of particular readers.”  In others, Brown is saying, we make sense of pictures based on what we already know to be “real” for us. Making sense of pictures is historically contingent  -- Signification is a process fixed in memory and time. Signification, the act of making sense of something, depends on a viewer’s capacity for decoding the literal and figurative meanings in an image.

It is only because I can place the meaning of a picture within the larger historical context of human memory and experience that I can ultimately be moved intellectually and emotionally by what I am looking at.   

An Uncanny Eye for Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

Have you ever looked at a photograph and just scratched your head wondering how much patience it must have taken to capture the moment?

Elliott Erwitt has been making "head scratching images" like that for 50 years. Erwitt's web site is a treat and provides a virtual glimpse highlighting many of his most memorable images.

I first ran across the work of Elliott Erwitt in the 1970s while thumbing through books at the library. The impression I had of Erwitt's work at the time remains with me today. He takes ordinary moments and makes them not so ordinary. In fact, looking at his pictures makes me think of things in extraordinary ways.

Erwitt's images are a form of social commentary, but they are also art. His pictures inspire me, make me laugh, and look at life in whole new ways. Erwitt is a master of the moment and his patience for making these moments is tremendous.

Most people, myself included, rush from place to place without ever truly taking the time to see the everyday world in new ways. Erwitt's work reminds me that things can have meaning if seen with clarity and patience.