Craft and Vision for the second time
EBooks that aren’t in Czech republic – that’s how you can describe the publication I’m writing about. If I went to any local bookstore looking for photography books, I would not be able but to wonder if everyone want only books like Tutorial to Wedding photography, Street photography in ten easy steps, Mastering time, aperture and ISO in three minutes. As if a technically perfect photograph – and these books without a huge amount of practise don’td help to produce any – could actually move anyone. They speak only about HOW, but not about WHY. And the question “why?” is much more important – often even a crappy craftsmanship can move masses, while we can see lots of a technically perfect picture without any message everywhere, and they don’t move us, they even blunt our senses and ability to perceive. Of course, I don’t say that a photographer shouldn’t know his craft, not in the slightest, but the technical level should be important as well as the content and creativity. He should not know just HOW and WHAT, but WHY.
In any case, the books I’ll be mentioning today deal with the creative process from the non-technical view, and they also speak about a few good exercises to keep your creative spirit fresh, and where to look for an inspiration.
Your Creative Mix – Corwin Hiebert
It’s necessary to note, that Corwin isn’t a photographer. He does not write as a photographer, he does not think like a photographer, but he is living in creative environment for very long time, he has many friends amongst photographers and other creative people. His view isn’t one-sided and focused only to photography and his broader view is obvious.
This eBook is more like a collection of articles from different authors, rather than Corwin’s thoughts. It’s divided into two sections, the first is focused on inspiration and the creative process and the second one talks about collaboration, about mutual inspiration, mutual assistance, task distribution and many other matters relating to the cooperation.
It’s probably the longest Craft&Vision publication and it’s worth every cent of the five dollars you’ll pay for it. If anyone is currently suffering by a total distaste to create or he wants to create but has no idea what to do – this is the right reading for him. He can find reasons to create as well as inspiration sources.
The Inspired Eye 1 + 2 – David duChemin
These two eBooks belong among the few of the first published by Craft&Vision, and you can notice that easily. It’s missing a lot of design you can meet in any of the new ones, it’s just the text and a few pictures. And I think that merging these two parts into one book might benefit it greatly. Transition from the first eBook to the second is just bothersome and I think that’s the biggest flaw of this in other ways very good book. The Inspired Eye is a book about creativity and searching for inspiration, it’s very readable, although the poor design sometimes disturbs. If you’re able to focus just on the content, then you can find lots of things that could inspire you and that are worth some thinking. If this isn’t enough, at the end of the second book is an interview with a photographer, publicist and lecturer Chris Orwig – that itself should be a reason to read the whole book.