Chinese translations of my flash photography books
It was with great surprise when my publisher notified me that my 1st book, On-Camera Flash Photography, has been translated into Chinese and is now available for purchase in China. While still trying to digest that news, I got an email from the translator of my 2nd book, Off-Camera Flash Photography, wanting to clarify a few things. So that’s pretty big news, especially because it’s already getting good reviews, if I go by the star ratings.
I will be presenting three flash photography workshops in New York this year.
The first date is Tue, May 22 – sold out!
The other workshops will take place in July and October, with the specific dates to be announced.
I’m very happy to say I’ve been invited again to present at After Dark Education’s next event, which is in Charlotte. As you may well know from my previous blog posts about After Dark Edu, I love it! It is in my opinion the best opportunity for any photographer to learn and shoot. A lot.
This discount code: NVNP will save you $72 when you register!
To sign up, or for more details, check out the After Dark Education site.
(The image at the top was taken at a previous After Dark event in Las Vegas.)
Google’s translation says that means: “Photography with a flash in practice”. Either way, I’m very proud to announce that my second book, Off-Camera Flash, has been translated and released in Poland. More details here on this Polish site. A big thank you to the followers of the Tangents blog there in Poland who made this possible!
I’ve mention on the Tangents forum, and in comments sprinkled around here on the Tangents blog, that I am busy writing a third book on flash photography and lighting. The topic is quite expansive … and I am struggling at the moment with the title.
The title of a book needs to be interesting. It needs to be snappy. It needs to catch people’s attenion. Simultaneously, it needs to inform the potential reader.
This is a tall order. So I thought I’d reach out to everyone here who follows the Tangents blog, and see what ideas they can come up with, based on the (draft) introduction to the book:
The top three entries will get an autographed copy of the book when it is released. (Probably some time early in 2013).
The author of entry that I use (or eventually base the title on), will get a mention in the Acknowledgements of the book, as well as mad props here on Tangents and on my Facebook Page!
Two other rules: I have final say in this. And no whining allowed.
Oh, and I may or may not use the winning suggestion for the title. Or I may use it as a further idea. (I would still acknowledge this in the book in this case.)
Here is the introduction. (As I mentioned, it is still in draft form.)
So let’s see what you can come up with!
I presented another Master-Class this year at WPPI in Las Vegas. I rather audaciously chose the title of my talk to be:
Flash Photography – The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth
As a photographer, there are certain inescapable essentials we absolutely have to know before we can progress in understanding light and lighting. In this presentation, Neil barrels through the conflicting advice you’ve received, offering the essential building blocks to help you truly grasp the power of flash and lighting done right.
That does seem rather bold now! Very ambitious. With the presentation I pulled together a number of key concepts which are essential to understanding flash photography. So there wasn’t an overall theme in this case – just ten different concepts which I think are important.
The presentation over-ran by about 45 minutes, with all of the questions that had to be answered. The response to my presentation was very good. One of the emails I received afterwards said: “I took your platform class at the WPPI this year and I have to say, it was my favourite by far!!” And that is so good to hear!
With this, I have decided to add the material to the flagship articles here on flash photography.
Fundy has let me know that Fundy Software has released a cool little tool that could help with your digital workflow. And the best part? It’s free.
Free Image Finder from Fundy Software
How many times have you gotten a list of files from your bride or your shopping cart. It might a complete list with the entire file names or it might be just the numbers on the end of the file names. The only way to go through and find these selects is go open the folder up in Bridge or Photo Mechanic and find and tag them one by one manually, then copy them out to a new folder.
Image Finder does all this hard work for you. It’s super simple to use. Just paste in a list of file names, the file names don’t even have to be complete. If you have 074, Image Finder will find that file name or something like Johnson-074.jpg. So don’t worry if all your clients don’t’ send complete file names. After pasting in the file names, point Image Finder to the folder where the images are and click Find. It will find all the images within about 2 seconds. Then just copy out those images to another folder.
I’ve had several people tell me that my books aren’t available on Amazon’s Kindle anymore. So I double-checked with the publisher, Amherst Media, and received news that while my books aren’t available as a Kindle publication, they are available in a number of other electronic formats.
We’re not on Kindle for now. We are on iPad, Nook, Kobo, Google Books and dozens of Android tablets and PCs through protected Pdf and ePub files.
IPG, our distributor into bookstores and Amazon, is having a pricing issue with Amazon. Amazon is demanding that Kindle books sell for next to nothing, basically cutting out profits for authors and publishers. Amazon, as a threat, has pulled over four thousand books from Kindle including ours. IPG is working on it to establish fair terms and has the support of the publishing industry.
Another issue is that the Kindle book quality is very poor. We encourage our readers to buy their eBooks from Apple or from Amherst Media direct. In fact, we are now having an eBook sale on our site. Our eBook quality is the best, books are in full color with page design features and page numbers.
So that’s where we are at the moment.
Also, if you’d like to order an autographed copy of my book directly from me … that’s an option too!
Just to let everyone know that the creator of the Spinlight 360 has added five more how-to video clips to the site. This should answer many of the questions on how to use it and how to assemble it.
I’ve raved here about the After Dark photography conventions before, as being the best photography convention / learning experience that I’ve attended. So it is with great pleasure that I did several presentations at the After Dark event in Dallas, TX during Feb 27 -29, 2012. I even expanded the range of topics I taught to include a presentation on basic portrait retouching in Photoshop and Lightroom.
Of course, part of the fun of After Dark Edu, is that you can use any of the 10 bays where there are numerous lighting goodies, and photograph one of the models there. So you get to play with gear you wouldn’t normally have access to … along with the various Mentors there to help you. Or, if you choose, you can just play around on your own and discover. And this is what I did here when I photographed Madison. I added a beauty dish and an Eyelighter reflector, and a gridded softbox for a bit of a kicker, and another light for the background. Just having fun, seeing what the result would look like. And that’s a way to learn. Here’s the pull-back shot …
