English: Logo of Steidl Verlag Deutsch: Logo des Steidl Verlags (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The ‘Couture’ Photo Book Maker
PDNOnline has just published an article that is as lengthy and detailed as it is interesting and informative; it is an inside look into the world of ‘couture’ photo book publishing.
Why Gerhard Steidl Is a Book Publishing Master by David Walker is about a man dedicated to the art and craft – to the point of being “obsessed” – of designing and publishing photo books that would usually not be published by traditional / major publishers.
Steidl goes so far as to co-design and do proofing with the photographer being a junior partner and with a stake in the process.
These sessions can get a little fraught and emotional; you’ll read about a female photographer who got tetchy one day and slapped Steidl, and found herself thrown out of his shop. (The article also mentions that the two “made up” after Steidl demonstrated his technical wizardry to her the following day.)
You’ll get to know that Steidl is no ordinary private photo book publisher in any sense of the word: to begin with, his creations are anything but ordinary on top of which he is the commercial printer for Chanel and is the publisher for (besides high-profile photographers) Gunter Grass and Karl Lagerfeld.
A Real-Life ‘Q’
You’ve seen strobe-frozen photos of exploding fruit and droplets in midair countless times. Head over to PetaPixel to learn about the history and science behind this now-well-known photographic technique.
In an appealing article subtitled Paying a visit to Doc Edgerton’s high speed photography lab, Randall Armor talks about the man who “made flashing light cheap and portable, and found endless applications for it,” Harold E. ‘Doc’ Edgerton.
Edgerton, who passed away in 1990, was an inventor and also a professor at MIT where he worked in a lab, now known as ‘Edgerton Center,’ that is filled with the kind of gadgetry that would probably be of great professional interest to ‘Q’ of Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.
The Edgerton Center is where high velocities, high-powered rifles, and high-speed strobes come together to make for high-tech photography. This isn’t only about today or yesterday; Edgerton’s high-tech genius goes as far back as the 1950s when he had photographed pioneering high-speed images of nuclear bomb tests.
Read the article to find out what happens (or doesn’t happen) when a bullet goes through a cream doughnut and see an incredible image of a bullet tearing edgewise through a business card.
