As if by coincidence, while preparing for my upcoming trip to South Africa, David duChemin comes out and publishes “Safari: A Monograph” from his Print and the Process series of downloadable ebooks. As he rightly notes, this ain’t your typical how-to guide on photographing a safari in Africa.Rather, the combination of large images, explanatory text, and annotated thumbnails serve as an invitation into David’s mental retrospective of his first photo safari trip. It’s like reading his Moleskine notebook, sitting with him as he edits his images and having a fireside chat about how his photos are coming along. In this last respect, his thought-process behind the production of his photos reflects his years of experience and also offers insight valuable to any photographer.
One of the key messages within this ebook really strikes a chord with me as I plan my South Africa trip. Expectations play a part in any voyage and especially affect photographers as we by nature are visual people and are constantly seeing, creating and manipulating images in our heads before the actual click of the camera. No matter where one goes, there is always a preconceived idea of what the place will look like and quite often we’ve got a stock of images in our heads that spring to mind as we prepare shot lists or sketches. David notes that our visual rolodexes can’t be ignored and must therefore be confronted. You’ll have to read it to find out how to do that.
The other important lesson David presents is probably the most succinct way I’ve heard of describing the methodology of analyzing an image; he calls it “Layers of Impact.” He writes, “a photograph goes from mediocre to good to great depending on the strength of the layers of impact.” Drawing from many photographers’ inability to go beyond meaningless superlatives (“Awesome! Great photo!”), he suggests a condensed way of looking at images and drawing out the Whys and Hows of image deconstruction.
It’s quite a useful way of putting it and it sure is more practical than the semesters of art history filled with semiotics, Marxist and feminist theory that I studied in college. In conclusion, at exactly a month away from my first trip to South Africa, David’s advice about expectations and creating better imagery through layers of impact comes at no better time. As I’ve noted in my other reviews of Craft & Vision’s growing library of great ebooks, there’s no better bang for the buck than these mini-passports into the minds of David duChemin and his creative cronies. Click here to visit Craft And Vision.
Gabriel "Morty" Ortega is a visual journalist.
Design by Graph Paper Press. All content © 2010 by Gabriel M. Ortega Photography + Multimedia