Bickel infuses each subject with comedic insight into what exactly makes it creepy and provides an appropriately hilarious photo to help illustrate his point. And since not all creepiness is created equal, Bickel has invented an unnecessarily complex mathematical formula (or Creepiosity Index, if you will) to quantify each unsettling item's relative creepiness. (Band-Aids that were once affixed to someone's body but now aren't: 7.454.)
However, Bickel also acknowledges that creepiness, universal as it may be, is far from absolute. To that end, he invites readers to assign their own Creepiosity number to these and other curiosities via a companion Web site. (For example, what's more disturbing, hairless cats or Dick Cheney smiling? You decide!)
With their unique sets of challenges, night and low-light photography are often touted as some of the most difficult and frustrating genres of digital photography. This much-needed guide demystifies any murky topics provides you with all the information you need to know from choosing the right gear and camera settings to how to best edit your photos in post-production. Renowned photographer Alan Hess shares techniques and indispensable tips that he has garnered from years of experience.
Helpful projects and full-color stunning photos in each chapter serve to educate and inspire, while assignments at the end of every chapter encourage you to practice your skills and upload your photos to a website so you can share and receive critiques.
Packed with invaluable advice and instruction, Night and Low-Light Photography Photo Workshop doesn?t leave you in the dark.
 Fireworks (Click on image to zoom) Most of the time when shooting fireworks, the subject is the fireworks themselves but for this photo I tried to concentrate on the boats in the bay that were there to see the fireworks. To time the photographs, I had the camera locked into a tripod and used a cable release with the camera set to bulb mode so that the shutter stayed open as long as I held the button on the release. Taken at 2.7 seconds, f/16 and ISO 400 |  Ferris Wheel (Click on photo to zoom) This photograph is of a ferris wheel in motion and the pattern is actually made up of the light trails as the wheel turns. This was taken using a 3 second shutter speed to give the wheel time to move enough to get a good pattern. I zoomed in very close so that the image was more abstract, and to me, more interesting. Taken at 3 seconds, f/22 and ISO 200 |  Dave Navarro (Click on photo to zoom) Photographing concerts can be really tough. To freeze the action in the low light, a shutter speed of 1/160 second was used along with a wide aperture of f/2.8 and the ISO was pushed all the way to ISO 2500. I waited until the light was at it’s brightest, then took a quick series of shots with this frame being the best of the three. Taken at 1/160 second, f/2.8 and ISO 2500 |
The vivid history of the capital of love and photography
A city built on two millennia of history, Paris is entering the third century of its love story with photography. It was on the banks of the Seine that Niepce and Daguerre officially gave birth to this new art that has flourished ever since, developing a distinctive language and becoming a vital tool of knowledge.
Paris, Portrait of a City leads us through what Goethe described as “universal city where every step upon a bridge or a square recalls a great past, where a fragment of history is unrolled at the corner of every street.” This history is recounted in photographs, all the way from Daguerre’s incunabula to the most recent images. In fact, Paris can claim to be the only city in the world whose archives house an almost complete record of over a century and a half of transformations. This huge panorama of nearly 600 pages and as many photographs makes Paris, Portrait of a City unique. This book brings together the past and the present, the monumental and the everyday, objects and people. Thanks to images captured by the most illustrious photographers – Daguerre, Marville, Atget, Lartigue, Brassaï, Kertész, Ronis, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson and many more – but also by many unknown amateurs, these pages show the essential workings of a human drama acted out on the stage of history. These visions attempt to bottle just a little of that “Parisian air”, something of that particular poetry given out by the stones and inhabitants of a constantly changing city that has inspired untold numbers of writers and artists over the ages.
Presenting an exciting patchwork of images from past and present, Paris, Portrait of a City is a huge and unique photographic study that, in a way, is the true family album of all Parisians. It is to them, and to all lovers of this capital city, that this vibrant, loving and tender testimony is dedicated.
 Click the photo to see the page spread with callout tips from the book |  Click the photo to see the page spread with callout tips from the book |
 Click photo for excerpt |  Click photo to see detailed lighting setup |  Click photo to see detailed lighting setup |
Of those cameras, make your final choice based on which model delivers the best image quality.
This last point will be your most crucial criteria. If you've narrowed your choice to two cameras, and one has great features but the other produces better pictures, you should go with the second camera. Of course, it's frustrating not to get everything you want in a camera, but you can work around most feature deficiencies. Trying to work around bad image quality is much more difficult.
Download the full bonus chapter of Ben Long's Complete Digital Photography. [PDF]
Praise for Elizabeth Hand's previous novels:
"Inhabits a world between reason and insanity-it's a delightful waking dream."--People
"One of the most sheerly impressive, not to mention overwhelmingly beautiful books I have read in a long time."--Peter Straub
Cass Neary made her name in the 1970s as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and hangers on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, got her into art galleries and a book deal. But 30 years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out. Then an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Downeast, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and into one final shot at redemption.
Questions for Elizabeth Hand
Jeff VanderMeer for Amazon.com: Your novel Generation Loss introduces readers to a very eccentric and sometimes selfish photographer named Cass. Are all artists inherently selfish?
Hand: Yes. You can't be an artist without being inherently self-involved, without believing that the world owes you a living, and that everything you do--anything, matter how sick or twisted or feeble or pathetic--is worthy of attention. This is the secret behind the success of stuff like American Idol and YouTube. This is the world Andy Warhol bequeathed to us.
Amazon.com: Isn't it partially that selfishness that results in great fiction? Isn't the antagonist of your novel in a way driven by selfishness?
Hand: I don't think I'd call it selfishness, to be truthful. I think creating any real art depends on an intense amount of focus¬--of filtering out the rest of the world as much as you can, to sustain and then impart your own vision or secondary world--what John Gardner called "the vivid and continuous dream." I think the antagonist of Generation Loss sees himself as being impelled by love--romantic love, carnal love, the pure love of artistic creation--not selfishness. Whereas Cass's motivation is something far darker and more sinister than love. She's seen the abyss; she lives there.
Amazon.com: Is Cass Neary a prototypical "bad girl"?
Hand: Well, she's your prototypical amoral speedfreak crankhead kleptomaniac murderous rage-filled alcoholic bisexual heavily-tattooed American female photographer. So, yeah.
Amazon.com: So this is definitely not what you'd call "chick lit"?
Hand: Umm, probably not. If it were a movie, it would have a NC-17 rating. Or maybe NR. Is Lolita considered chick lit? That book had a huge influence on me, especially with this novel. I always wanted to create a narrator like Humbert Humbert, someone utterly reprehensible and unsympathetic who still manages to command a reader's attention and even an uneasy sympathy. I loved the idea of making a reader complicit with the crimes committed by a protagonist. The simple act of continuing to turn the pages makes you guilty by association.
Amazon.com: Did you have a particular artist in mind as the inspiration for the foul-smelling but visionary paintings in the novel?
Hand: No. That part I made up.
Amazon.com: C'mon. You're not allowed to just make things up. Spill the beans.
Hand: No, I really didn't have anyone in mind. There are elements of the work of photographers I admire--Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Sally Man, Joel-Peter Witkin--and of outsider artists like Henry Darger or Richard Dadd or Roky Erickson. But the whole concept of an artist creating his own emulsion paper--I thought of that, then researched it and learned that, indeed, some photographers work that way. I also consulted a photographic conservator who's an acquaintance and asked him, Is this possible? He said yes, and I took it from there.
Amazon.com: Are people in Maine as mean toward tourists as you describe?
Hand: No. Just me. Though folks who work at the general store three doors down from me really do sometimes wear a T-shirt that reads THEY CALL IT TOURIST SEASON, WHY CAN'T WE SHOOT THEM? So, okay, me and them.
Amazon.com: Have you ever driven a tourist off your property with a shovel?
Hand: Not yet. But I would. A few years ago friend said he pictured me up on the Laurentian shield, threatening outsiders with a pitchfork. That's pretty accurate.
Amazon.com: Weren't you once a tourist?
Hand: Never. I lived in DC for 13 years, and worked for a long time at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum--Tourist Central. That effectively killed any sympathy I might ever have had towards them.
Amazon.com: What's coming up for you?
Hand: Well, I'll be doing some touring and readings for this book, and I hope to record the entire novel as a podcast/audio book--I'm very excited to be performing again. I'm presently at work on a YA novel about Arthur Rimbaud called Wonderwall, to be published by Viking, and am brooding on another novel that might be something along the lines of Generation Loss, or not. I get restless and like to shift gears a lot. So we'll see.
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