I’ve been a fan of Marco Paoluzzo’s photography since I discovered his “Iceland” book a few years ago. I was very impressed by his uncompromising monochrome approach to exploring the icelandic landscape, and his skill in conveying the feel not just of the landscape, but also the people who inhabit it and contribute to shaping it. I found his style very different both from anglophile, Velvia school as well as the more austere and formal Germanic style. As demonstrated through his wide range of works, and especially the wonderfully melancholic “America Blues”, It is perhaps more accurate to describe Marco Paoluzzo as a travel photographer than “just” a landscapist, and this shows through in the way he has of conveying a sense of place rather than abstracting from the landscape.“Iceland” was followed up a few years later by “North”, which in fact focussed mainly on Iceland itself, but offered a fleeting glimpse of another old North Atlantic Viking dominion, the Faroe Islands.  Now, with his new book “Føroyar”, Paoluzzo gives center stage to these islands.

Føroyar actually reprises most of the Faroes section of “North”, within a collection of 72 photographs of windswept, often fogbound scenes of a land at the edge of the world. Although Paoluzzo favours dark, one could almost say dismal, tones in his landscapes, nevertheless they radiate light, sometimes soft, sometimes brighter, always hinting at something slightly lost, slightly mysterious. The landscape work tends perhaps less towards the abstract than in “North” and “Iceland”, but nevertheless there are some wonderful studies of form and movement. To my mind this book seems to be the work of someone exploring his inner landscape as much as the external world, blending in a touch of a reportage perspective.

It comes as a shock when the sequence of desolate cliffs and mountains descending sharply into the sea is broken up by an overhead shot of a road - a real road, with cars, snaking along a narrow strip between steep slope or sea. Other photographs remind that this is actually an inhabited landscape, sometimes obviously, sometimes more discretely. One wonderful shot shows the bows a ridiculously large cruise liner barely distinguishable just off a fogbound port. Such a ship must be completely out of place in these settings, but finally the fog reclaims it and it just becomes another angular bulk looming up out of nowhere.

But finally, these departures from the “classic landscape” repertoire do not detract at all from the collection. They give it an extra dimension and that sense of place which is often lacking in more formal works.

You can order the book (with text in English, German and French) directly from Marco Paoluzzo. A French edition has also been published, and can be ordered from Amazon.

You can also see a wide selection of Marco’s photography on Flickr.

in the ten years which I. have been living in Ticino, I have tried to make sense of it photographically. it shouldn’t be all that difficult, after all there is no lack of source material, all year round. Ticino is a land defined by its steep, twisting alpine valleys, each liberally sprinkled with fascinating traces of a not so distant tough rural past, and an endless sequence of spectacular and inspiring scenery. And that’s just the valleys: higher up are the alpine meadows, lakes of all shapes and sizes, glaciers and towering peaks. And let’s not forget the whole other world of Italianate culture and architecture nestling around Lakes Maggiore and Lugano. Add to this a literate, well-off population and a healthy tourist trade, and you might expect that bookshops would be spilling over with gorgeous coffee table photo books.

But in fact, with a few honourable exceptions, all you find is are endless series of formulaic books about different regions, which work ok as documentary and guide books, but are usually full of bland, poorly executed and (especially) dreadfully printed photographs. The whole market seems to be tied up by a small clique of so-so photographers and publishers. Clearly actually getting to the locations of some of the photos in these books was an epic in itself, but unfortunately, this does not automatically translate to good photography. Good landscape photography requires some attention to light, to composition, and technique, not to mention good printing. And this is hard to get right in Ticino: the light is often harsh, contrast is a big problem, and getting to a lot of locations at the right time (which might only exist a few times a year) require a lot of planning, a lot of hard work and effort, and a degree of luck. Not to mention talent.

All this serves to explain why I was so surprised and delighted to discover the book “Spazio Greina” (Desertina Verlag, Chur) last weekend, especially as it is an area I’ve recently started exploring.

Spazio Greina is a book about 5 photographers’ personal visions of the Greina plateau, a region of upper Ticino bordering on Canton Graubunden and classified by Switzerland as a natural monument of national importance. It’s a fascinating blend of wide open stony valley, jagged peaks, glaciers and lakes. The photographers - Roberto Buzzini, Sergio Luban, Tamara Lanfranchini, Giosanna Crivelli, and Marco Volken each have a distinct take on this “space”, but what they all share is that they have taken the time to absorb the landscape and to find their own way to express it. They’ve come up with quite different approaches: Buzzini contributes a beautiful selection of wide-screen panoramics. Crivelli takes a abstractionist approach, finding surprising contrasts in the detail of the land. Lafranchini’s perspective as a film maker clearly shows through in her subtle use of flat light and discrete forms. Sergio Luban shows a wonderful eye for composition with elements of the landscape and capturing beautiful contrasts of light and shadow. Marco Volken has chosen to use black and white, a departure from his usual practice of colour photography, to great effect. It really is impossible for me to say that any of these are my favourite: it is the overall effect that dominates. You can see a nice slide show of some of the featured photos on the swissinfo site.

Although there are 5 distinct visions, the editing and layout by Roberto Grizzi brings them together for a coherent narrative. And speaking of narrative, the text by Leo Tuor (only in Italian, German and Rumantsch, I’m afraid) contrasting the “touristic” ideal of Greina with the lives of shepherds and hunters who call it home is the icing on the cake.

The print quality is excellent, and altogether this is a must-have photography book - perhaps the only one so far from this corner of the world.

NOTE: unfortunately I cannot find a link for ordering the book. If I do, I’ll update this post. It does appear to available from Amazon Germany.

I recently finished reading “Within the Frame“, by David duChemin. Subtitled “The Journey of Photographic Vision” (that’s right, THE, not “A”), it has received pretty much unanimous rave reviews from all quarters. And I’m going to go against the flow.

Let me say up front that duChemin seems to be a genuine, likable character, and his intentions are excellent. He sets out to avoid geekery, and by and large he succeeds, although it would be interesting to see what difference it would make to the book - apart from making it commendably shorter - if he left out the chapter on gear.

But the book has many problems, and for me it was a real slog to get through. First of all, it is far, far too long. Early on, the author makes a joke about repeating the word “vision” too often. Well, that, I can live with - it’s the topic, after all. But worse is the multiple repetition of themes and ideas throughout the book, which verge on hectoring at times. It’s a technique that might work in a classroom presentation, but it doesn’t work a book. The text could be half the length and loose nothing in content.

Next, I found most of the content to be statements of the obvious. The fact that it all boils down to putting yourself in an interesting location, keeping your eyes open, and engaging with the subject isn’t exactly rocket science. My impression is that the book doesn’t really have a clear audience. It ends up a lot more “Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Photography” than I suspect it pretends to be. I was hoping for something a few notches higher.

Third, the scope. This is very much A Journey. David duChemin’s main photographic theme is street / portrait photography in a few far flung locations like India and Cuba, and unless you’re into that sort of thing, the illustrating images are soon going to get pretty monotonous. He makes a half-hearted stab at landscape photography, but he’d have done better not to bother. He doesn’t get it.

Finally there’s the photography itself. Personally, if I ever have to flick through yet another average set of narrow depth of field closeup portraits of elderly asian rustics, it will be far too soon. The book’s readers might have been better served with at least some examples which did not require the author to travel half way around the globe. This is of course highly subjective, but I don’t find David duChemin to be a particularly interesting or indeed talented photographer. He’s certainly better than I am - but that’s not difficult. On the other hand, he has nothing of the skill of, say, Steve McCurry, in drawing you into people’s lives and locations. Whether or not he avoids zoom lenses, the bulk of his photos feel like the work of a curious, detached onlooker with a ticket for the next city in his pocket.

With not only a foreword by Joe McNally but also an afterword by Vincent Versace, not to mention close associations with Scott Kelby - the archetypal gearhead - he’s clearly paid his dues on the networking and backslapping front. As they say, to make a business in photography, first you need to be a businessman. The marketing effort supporting the book is impressive and commendable. But ... well, sorry, but it’s just as well.

I wanted to like this book. After all I paid good money for it. I was hoping it would provide similar insights to two excellent books on photographic vision, Landscape Within and Landscape Beyond, by David Ward. But, at least as far as I’m concerned, it just ended up being irritating.

Oh, and note to the editor: for the non-US market, cut out the cringey God stuff. Please.

I know it’s insane, but I actually enjoy scanning film. I enjoy the discovery process in a freshly developed roll of Velvia 100F, I enjoy extracting the best out of it by careful scanning and retouching. And I enjoy printing it.  The creative process is so completely different from a RAW workflow that I cannot mix the two. Some days are “scanner days”, some are “Aperture days” - and these days can stretch to weeks.

I’ve just read “Scanning Negatives and Slides, 2nd Edition”, by Sascha Steinhoff. I’ve been aware of this book for a while, but I didn’t expect much from it. Well, I was wrong. Although it is about 10 years too late, it is actually rather good. Steinhoff covers the background and general techniques, reviews the main software options (Silverfast, VueScan, NikonScan) without pulling any punches, and covers fairly esoteric topics such as Scanhancers in quite some depth.

The author has been criticised for a strong bias towards Nikon scanners, but I don’t see this. He discusses Nikon a lot, but what else should he do ? Apart from the stratospherically priced Hasselblad Flextights, nobody else makes serious film scanners any more. And Nikon probably will not for much longer either.

I’ve been scanning film for well over 10 years, and I thought I’d find little if anything new here. Well, I was wrong. Although this book would be an invaluable resource for anyone starting out in film scanning, it has plenty to offer for the like of me too.  And it avoids padding. Highly recommended.

Apple’s Aperture has nothing like the host of how-to books that have sprung up for Adobe’s Lightroom. The positive spin on this - and one which I would say has some degree of justification - is that it doesn’t need them. Aperture ships with a very good and complete manual, albeit only in PDF form since version 2, and a printed fully illustrated getting started guide, whereas Lightroom comes with only the lightest of lightweight getting started pamphlets. Aperture is also considerably more intuitive, at least in my opinion. The negative spin, also tenable, is that Aperture’s market share is so low that it isn’t commercially viable to publish books.

Well, at least Focal Press seem to believe there is a market for their recently published “Aperture 2: A workflow guide for digital photographers”, by Ken McMahon and Nik Rawlinson.

This is the book that Aperture 2 users need. It goes far beyond the fluffed up user manual, the Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 2 book (which isn’t exactly bad, but is very short on detail). McMahon and Rawlinson’s book matches the best of the Lightroom books, taking a photography rather than computing perspective.  For example, the Pro Series book has about 1 paragraph on sharpening, and this basically tells you where the sliders are. Here, the authors dedicate at least 8 pages to explaining the various options, and how they interact.

They provide a very nice tutorial on how to extract maximum dynamic range from a RAW file, balancing the boost, exposure and recovery sliders (and more), really putting Aperture through its paces and revealing considerable hidden depths.

On the DAM side they are equally thorough, although in this case the Pro Training Series book does a pretty good job too. However, across the board, “Aperture 2: A workflow guide for digital photographers” either equals or considerably surpasses “Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 2”. I haven’t read any other Aperture 2 books, but certainly as a general, in-depth guide, it is difficult to see how it could be beaten.

Highly recommended.