Gurney Journey

A new book called 100 Flying Birds: Photographing the Mechanics of Flight delivers a helpful collection of images in a beautiful and useful form.

Author and photographer Peter Cavanagh has documented the flight poses of a variety of species, from swans and geese to hummingbirds to eagles and owls. 

The photos are sharp and clear, reproduced full-page along with the author's commentary on the facing page. The text presents the context of the shot, the mechanics of the flight pose, or insights about behavior or the environment.

That text combined with the photos makes this an unusually welcome resource for birdwatchers or ornithological artists who want a better understanding of their subject.

--

100 Flying Birds: Photographing the Mechanics of Flight, by Peter Cavanagh, Firefly Books, 320 pages, all color, 11 x 11 inches. 

Mr. Cavanagh curated the exhibition "How Birds Fly" exhibit at Seattle's Museum of Flight in 2015.

Photos by Peter Cavanagh (@howbirdsfly on Twitter).

The publishing client generally would pay for these sessions. Modeling sessions were expensive, so the team had to make the best use of the time. The illustration photographers had busy schedules with back-to-back appointments.

Paperback illustrator Bob Larkin recalled, "I had only an hour to shoot. Steve [Holland] first posed for what I wanted, and then what Bob [Osonitsch] suggested, then Steve did what he thought would work. Everything is going smoothly until Bob's camera shot counter tells him to put in a new roll of film. Bob opens the back of the camera to put a new roll in—and no first roll was put in! This is early in the morning. He's still not awake yet. We had a good laugh, Bob apologized, and we started all over again from the beginning with minutes to spare before the next artist had to shoot Steve. He was booked all day anyway."

---- 

Doc Savage cover by Bob Larkin

Read More:

Magazine: The quote comes from the new issue of Illustration #73, which includes features on Peter Driben, Art Fitzpatrick / Van Kaufman, Zoë Mozert, Steve Holland, and Robert Osonitsch  

Books: 

Steve Holland: The Torn Shirt Sessions and Steve Holland: The World's Greatest Illustration Art Model

Old photos provide a window to life in the past. A great deal of information is contained in those photos, but a lot of visual data has been lost, too—not just the color, but other features such as the subsurface scattering.

A couple of recent digital innovations have helped to bring old photos and paintings to life. There's a lot you can do with Photoshop, but there are limits to what you can accomplish with denoising, colorization, and superresolution. 

The result here has reduced some of the cragginess of the original Lincoln photo and made him look younger, but presumably that could be dialed differently. 

'Time Travel Rephotography' is a technique for recreating the natural, full-color appearance based on the the original photograph and an input photo of a contemporary person. The metrics of the modern person are shifted to match that of the historic person.

The way to test this method would be to take a photo of a contemporary person using an antique process and see if you could restore the missing information to match a high-res photo of that person.  

One way to capture light is to surround it with darkness. 

The light enters the dark space and casts shadows from each of the forms.

The key figure appears backlit in the central region of light.  

If you follow around the outside border, it's almost all in deep shadow.

The charcoal fires and cigarette smoke made for bad air quality, but it was a gift to photographers.

When he introduces color into this scheme, it's a revelation.

Books: 

Portrait of Hong Kong 念香港人的舊 

Light on the Landscape: Photographs and Lessons from a Life in Photography

Robert Bechtle (1932-2020), one of the champions of Photrealism, once said: "One reason my paintings have become realistic has to do with my interest in what things really look like." 

Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective Beyond his way of interpreting reality in photographic terms, his work is striking for its inclusion of mundane subjects. 

A new book on James Tissot discusses his painting techniques and explains how he used photo reference.

The reference photo shows Kathleen Newton and her son. The girl's hands are on a sawhorse and they all appear to be holding still for a long exposure.

In a second exposure, she is sitting up more and he is leaning forward. Tissot picked and chose from these variations to get the poses he wanted. 

More in the magnificent new hardcover monograph about James Tissot (1836-1902).