Collection IV

A week or two ago I bought Sean Tucker’s Collection IV. If you don’t know who Sean Tucker is you should really go to his YouTube channel and watch a few videos. The important videos are not the “how-to” videos but the ones where he discusses various things surrounding photography … and life in general.

The book consists of 90 photos from last year, 45 b&w and 45 colour. The photos are presented one per page without caption, so you’re free to interpret them as you want. There are also a few quotes between the photos, not many but a few.

So, what do I think about the photos? Some of them are excellent, they make me start thinking about how I can take ideas from them and play with composition & exposure. Many of the photos are also good lessons in learning to see the images that are all around us but that we usually ignore simply because we don’t “see” them. There are a few photos that I don’t feel any connection to and my reaction is mainly “Meh”, but that is perfectly OK. It’s Sean book, he has selected the photos and I don’t have to like all of them, they speak to him, but they don’t need to speak to me.

I like this book and buying it is, in my opinion, well-spent money (I bought Collection III last year) and I’ll probably buy this year’s collection if he decides to make one.

I think the perhaps most lesson from this book isn’t stuff like composition, exposure, etc. For me, the most important lesson is that we should all do something with the photos we take. Instead of just leaving the photos on your computer/phone, it’s way more fun to do something with them. You could publish them on a website like this one, but even more fun is to make prints or books. Last year I did three or four photo books, and it was really fun, the process of selecting what photos that should be in the book, figure out in which order they should be presented and finally the layout is really fun. I’m not very good at it, but it’s very fun. I hope I’m able to create at least three more books this year.

One person with strong opinions of photo books is Daniel Milnor who works at Blurb and if you watch his YouTube channel you will get some motivation for making your own photo books.

I deserve this

I deserve to sit down with this book tonight. I’ve spent the day on administrative tasks and trying to figure out how the various systems the university have should be used. Not to mention 6 Zoom meetings yesterday.

So tonight I will give myself a treat and enjoy this book that I got in the mail today. If you don’t know who Shawn Tucker is I suggest that you take a look at his YouTube channel.

Audiobooks

Kirk McElhearn lists a number of good enhancements that audiobooks should get, although I admit that I rarely listen to non-fiction books (it could be that source code doesn’t work well as audio :) ). But I’m not sure that this is correct:

Audible does have chapter breaks in its files (at least they show up on iPods; I’m not sure about other MP3 players), but these breaks are set at the ends of the original CDs, not the actual chapters of books. So you can skip ahead to the beginning of the next (virtual) CD, or go back to the beginning of the current CD, but not to the beginning of a chapter if you missed part of it. For that, you need to scrub back and try and find where the chapter starts.

I’m currently listening to Ben Bovas “Voyagers” and there the length of each chapter ranges from 8:27 to 30+ minutes. Similarly “Right Ho, Jeeves” by Wodehouse ranges between 28 to 48 minutes. Ken Follets “The Pillars of Earth” have chapter sections that are between 15 to 50 minutes (I only checked 1 of the 5 files that the book is divided into).

I admit that I haven’t actually checked to see that these chapter sections corresponds to book chapters but at least it seem to apply to “Voyagers” and “The Pillars of Earth”.

But agree completely that you get a completely different experience when listening to a book compared to reading it. In fact audiobooks are the reason why I’ve started to “read” books again, I’ve been in a phase in my life where I’ve had little time to sit down and read. But audiobooks have made it possible for me to take advantage of the time I spend in the car (I bought extra iPod support), on the bus, while waiting in line or walking downtown. The only drawback is that it’s almost impossible for me to lay down on my bed and listen, I always go to sleep :)