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Antarctica 2009 – Live Blog Posts


During my January trip to Antarctica I emailed text for blog posts back to my studio. The satellite phones made data transfer of images for those posts prohibitively expensive, so we used images from 2005 and 2007. Now all of the 2009 posts have been updated with finished images from each location.
See the images here.
Find out about my exhibit here.
Stay tuned daily for more resources.
Get priority status in my Antarctica 2011 workshop.
Email info@johnpaulcaponigro.com.

Find Your Muse


Creativity is all about finding inspiration. Where does it come from?
The Greeks cherished the concept of a Muse – a divine visitation. Homer spoke of them as both one Muse and as many Muses. Hesiod identified 9 daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Who were these 9 godesses?
Calliope – epic song
Clio – history
Euterpe – lyric song
Melpomene – tragedy
Terpsichore – dance
Erato – erotic poetry
Polyhymnia – sacred song
Urania – astronomy
Thalia – comedy and bucolic poetry
These are big Muses. There may well be many smaller ones that are at times equally or more important. Most mornings I have an encounter with the Muse of coffee. Most photographers are frequently visited by the Muse of light. And there are so many others! Take a little time to get to know them better. Be ready for their next appearance.
It’s important to know what inspires you.
Who are your Muses?
Find more inspiration in my Creativity Lessons.

Combination


You can create synergy between existing elements in your images and generate something new. How? Takes these steps.
Step one. Identify all the elements in your best images.
Step two. List all the possible combinations.
Step Three. Put what you’ve discovered into words.
Step four. Select the most promising combinations to pursue.
Step five. Generate a lot of variations on a single combination before committing to a final solution.
Step six. Execute.
This is an extreme distillation of my article Combination, now in the current issue of AfterCapture magazine.
Read more in my Creativity ebooks.
Learn more in my workshops.

Darius Himes – Inside Photography Book Now on PhotoEye


PBN’s lead judge, Darius Himes, co-founder of Radius Books, is interviewed by photo-eye Director, Rixon Reed.
Here are a few choice excerpts.
“Creating a successful book involves editing and sequencing and design all in light and in line with an overriding concept that has to be determined ahead of time. Asking yourself ahead of time, “Who is this book for?” and “What am I trying to accomplish with this book?” is extremely important.
I think that print-on-demand books have become so popular for two main reasons. First, they open up a major industry to the amateur: publishing. For the average American, it’s novel and fun to take your photos and lay them out in a book, push a button and a week later get something that looks pretty professional. That’s fun!
For the photography “professional” or art photographer, it’s also fun, but in a slightly more serious way. Most photographers dream of seeing their work in print (for a variety of reasons) and this technology opens up a whole world to them. It’s the publishing world made accessible.
But what most photographers don’t realize is that there are a whole host of people in the publishing world that work hard behind the scenes on different aspects of books, and when those people aren’t included—designers, editors, typographers, marketers, and distributors—they often end up with an inferior product.
Printing a book with an offset printer is different than using the HP Indigo printing process that is currently the standard for print-on-demand books … If you expect a print-on-demand book to look like, or have the range of materials, that an offset printed book has, you’ll be disappointed. … each has their advantages and disadvantages.
There’s no print-on-demand “author” that has sold 1000s of copies of their book (that I’m aware of). If they had, they would have made more money using offset printing and selling the project to a publisher. Again, it’s the quantity game.”
Read the whole interview on photo-eye.
Check out photo-eye.
Check out Radius books.
Check out PBN and Blurb.