Fantasy Nudes: Digital Techniques in Photography

Rating:
Summary: Useful Ideas, Some Odd Imagery
Review: I have no experience in nude photography, and my knowledge is limited to an evening's lecture given in 1974 by Peter Gowland. Mr. Gowland was a photographer for Playboy magazine, and lectured on glamour photography, one of the six topics covered in a photo seminar. I learned quite a lot, including that women with different body types can be made to look better or worse depending on the angle from which they are photographed. I'd just learned about special effects, three years before the first Star Wars movie.

Jim Zuckerman's book is also concerned with special effects, namely those created with digital photography. About half of the book is graphics. Every page either contains a graphic image or faces a graphic image. This is a book to be looked at and admired as much as read.

The text covers a number of topics, including setting up a digital operation, inputting photos, and working with them. He concludes with a chapter on marketing digital photos of nudes. The discussion isn't in depth. The book devotes more discussion to the photos and how the author made them.

He uses Adobe Photoshop and MetaCreations Painter, and writes within that context. His explanations can be easily transferred to most other packages such as Corel Photo-Paint. However, this book shouldn't be used to learn those packages, again because the discussion is superficial. Use the book, instead, as a cookbook as you try to create similar effects.

The visual aspect of this book is very impressive. There are, admittedly, a couple of these fantasy nudes that I wouldn't want to meet in a dream on a dark and stormy night. Women, I think, are a bit like sunsets. Each is different, and yet each can be beautiful in her, or its, own way. The author captures that beauty and accents it in various ways to produce striking images.

Jim Zuckerman is a professional photographer and writes for those using the same advanced technology. He doesn't seem to be addressing today's amateur with a digital camera. I don't believe he used a digital camera to produce any of the photos in this book, written in 1998. Even so, an amateur who knows a little Adobe Photoshop or a similar package should be able to produce similar effects by following his discussions.

This book is about digital effects. That is, there's no discussion of photographic technique. The photos are assumed to be already taken.

Why should you buy this book? First, to admire Mr. Zuckerman's work, and much of it is very good. Second, you may get ideas that can be applied to your own photos. They don't even have to be nudes. You can apply these techniques to the clothed, to children, to sunsets, and to the family pet. I rate it as a three instead of a five, because it's not written for digital photographers like me.

Rating:
Summary: Nuditity but not pinup artistry
Review: It is a book for you who want to see how you can use software such as Painter (formerly known as Fractal Painter) to transform photos into your fantasies. It is about techniques and creativity but it is not a show-off of fantastic illustrations. The illustrations are far removed from artist like Vargas, Vallejo, or any of the old pinup masters. So, if you look for something like that don't bother. It is not a book of mastery of photoshop either, it really is more of a book using computers to twist and deform images, transform and filter them.

The main theme is nuditity, without that the book would have no interest at all to many. However if you skip the pictures and read the text you can find some valuable tips and tricks, but you need to be able to bear with that you don't like or aren't interested in.

If you want nice pictures look elsewhere, if you are after pinup artistry look at the various pinup books about artists such as Vargas, if you want "modern art" psychadelic pictures you may want to look in this book...