The Print and the Process is a book of
ideas, thoughts, and techniques about our photographs
and the process that leads us to the final image. (To be
clear, it is not an instructional book about how
to print your images.) In this beautiful book, David
duChemin takes the reader behind the scenes on four
distinct photographic projects, discussing motivation,
image creation, and post-production. The projects he
walks the reader through are from Iceland, Kenya,
Antarctica, and Venice–and for each he discusses the
hows and whys of his own image-making
process.
Each project begins with a beautiful
series of 20-30 final images from that project–this is
"the print" section, and it's geared for the reader to
really take in those images holistically. Then, duChemin
discusses "the process" behind creating those
images.
In this section, the reader will see the
project images again but as thumbnails, and David goes
through each one, explaining very thoroughly his
process. duChemin does not "pre-visualize" a scene, as
Ansel Adams famously discussed. Instead, he feels it.
And it's from that feeling that he begins working with
the elements in front of him and looking at the choices
available to him. As he moves around, including and
excluding elements from the frame, the camera and the
photographer become collaborators. It's from this
struggle that the final image emerges.
DuChemin
has been making images for over two decades, and this
process has changed and evolved during that time. By
exploring duChemin's images and reflecting on the
process behind them–both behind the camera and in
post-processing–the reader learns to pay more attention
to their own process, and identify ways in which their
process can be further examined and improved in order to
take more compelling images.
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