FINAL ESSAY

The final essay edited by Raul Touzon includes 130 pictures with work from every photographer who attended National Geographic Expeditions: On Assignment in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with David Alan Harvey, Kent Kobersteen and Raul Touzon in November, 2004.

Kudos to Everyone for Being in the Book!

It is truly amazing that we have pictures from every photographer who attended our workshop! This was not by chance…I had to do some creative “cat herding” to get everyone on board. Our final picture inventory reveals that we have one photographer with eighteen pictures, ten photogs with ten to five pictures, and 12 photogs with four to one pictures. Meeting the goal I set out for us…every photog from the workshop has at least one picture in the essay.

Kudos to Raul Touzon for the Edit!

One of the scariest parts of this book process to me was the edit. I needed someone – not me – who would be good, fair and trusted by all of us. Raul stepped up to do the edit for us and I am very, very grateful to him for that. …every editor has a point of view. For example, one subjective choice Raul made was to omit sequences such as the very excellent bar scene essays that Lance sent. …every picture is a good picture. As we saw in the workshop, Raul would edit our work very tightly. Each picture in this essay is a good picture. If it were not good, Raul would have left it out. …and the flow of an essay will dictate choices. When given several choices of the “same picture”, Raul chose the best one that worked for the essay. For example, Darius and Tom both had beautiful pictures of the hats on the wall with rainbows. Darius’s was a horizontal picture. Tom’s was a vertical. Due to the page layout in the essay, Raul chose Tom’s over Darius’s. Both are good pictures, but the flow of the essay called for a vertical orientation. Just because Tom’s picture was chosen does not mean that Darius’s picture is not good…it just did not work out for this essay.

Kudos to David Burnham for Scanning Slides!

An aside on picture quality…Ten photographers sent me online files that were ready for printing. For these files, I just need to target them for printing. Thirteen photogs sent me duplicate slides that I forwarded to David Burnham for scanning. Some of these duplicates were fuzzy…i.e. not very good quality. Given that Raul was donating his time to us and I needed to fit our project to his schedule, I did not have time to get new slides and scans. Also, given the large number of scans to be done, and David was generously donating his time to scan 10 to 15 slides from thirteen people at no cost, I did not push him to “finalize” these scans before our edit was done. I felt it was too much to ask to spend his time on pictures that may not be in the book.

What does it Mean to Finalize a Scan?

Once the scan has been done, you load it into Photoshop and assign a color profile and bit depth (Adobe RGB 1998, 8-bit in our case). At this point, you examine the scan to see if it’s any good by using the histogram. A good scan will have a little room in the blacks and the highlights to avoid clipping the data. If the scan is no good (i.e. clips data or histogram is too compact), you have to re-scan. Once the scan is good, you then need to check the picture quality. First, set the black point and white point with a curves layer in Photoshop. This should give you a decent picture on screen by stretching out the data. However, if the slide was too “contrasty” in that you are losing details in the shadows and/or highlights, then you need to re-scan the slide…twice! One pass for highlights and a second pass for shadows. Then, you need to load both files back into Photoshop and combine into one picture using masks. The double scan procedure alone takes an hour or more per picture to do well. O.K. Once you have a decent picture, the second step is to straighten it as most scans are not 100% straight, then crop it to get rid of the black borders of the 35 mm slide. This is how far most commercial labs will go when doing your scans for you.

Onto Printing...

Once you have a decent picture, it’s time to start “printing” which consists of more time in Photoshop with proofing results on a printer/paper combination. There is much more that you can do from here to optimize each image for printing, depending on how much time you are willing to spend. Learning how to print (taking two workshops on printing) was an important technical skill for me to acquire to do a good hard copy book dummy.

About the Layout of the Final Essay...

Following Raul’s essay guidelines, I have laid out these web pages as “spreads”. A spread consists of two pages with one picture on each page. So, for 130 pictures with one image per page, two pages per spread will make the book dummy at least 65 pages. For the book dummies, I plan to do a very simple layout. The pictures will be displayed centered in the page, at the same height, with a 4 pixel black line around them on a white paper background. Each page will include photographer attribution (which will be the name of the photographer and their copyright notice.) I will work in the text of our book on separate pages rather than mixing the text on the same pages as the pictures.

Click here to see the final essay with 130 pictures to be used for the book dummies.

Raul Touzon adds:

"I think we have a strong group of pictures, and I am glad that every photographer is represented. I have one more piece of advice, before doing any dummies, all images should be printed and laid out on the floor, a table, wherever... one thing is to see them in a computer, but another is actually see them side by side making sure the spreads flow and esthetically look ok. I remember one night, at 2:00 am, some four years ago, in San Miguel de Allende when David laid out his images from the "Divided Soul" book on his bed, and Miguel Gandert (another fellow photographer), David and myself looked at how the pictures looked one next to the other."

...and that is the plan! ...Heather