I have to hand it to David duChemin. The guy nearly fell to his death in Italy a few months ago, and what does he do? He takes the experience and runs with it.
I’m not saying that he’s using his own near death experience as some kind of marketing ploy. Quite the contrary; he’s using it as some kind of life ploy.
I can’t even begin to imagine what goes on inside your head when you’re lying for weeks in a hospital bed with feet broken into more pieces than a dropped wine bottle. However, I can imagine that it makes you long to recover so that you can delve even more deeply into life when you’re able to walk again.
With that in mind, it’s therefore fitting, and probably not coincidental that his brand new eBook is called A Deeper Frame: Creating Deeper Photographs & More Engaging Experiences.
Although photography is inherently a two-dimensional medium, because of it’s exacting visual representation, we’re often disappointed when our pictures fail to translate the three-dimensionality that we see with our eyes. There are ways to get around this barrier, and this is essentially what A Deeper Frame is all about.
Using such concepts as color, perspective, camera optics, stunning illustrations, and even your own experiences, David lays out how to bring that depth back into your imagery so that you can draw your viewers in and engage them with the subjects that so engaged you. He wants you to make imagery that doesn’t just get looked at, but felt, seen and heard, just as you remember.
Some of the techniques that David presents are really just the techniques that the master painters used to solve these problems centuries ago. Again, it’s probably no coincidence that the place where David had his accident is the same place the many of these master painters practice their craft.
If you’ve read David’s eBooks before, then you know that he’s not just a brilliant visionary photographer, he’s a great writer as well. He’s even better now. I don’t imagine it’s because he had so much more time to edit it while lying in bed, though. I’ll bet that it’s got something to do with the quality of time that he’s had to reflect on more than just photography and what words to cut or change.
One of my favorite passages in this book comes right near the end, when he says:
Don’t look for depth, look for the things that move us. Don’t settle for the moment in between moments when there’s a more captivating one around the corner. Don’t settle for mediocre light when the storms are rolling in and waiting 30 more minutes will give you drama that makes the scene more much engaging. Is it hard? Of course it is. We can make all kinds of excuses for why we couldn’t wait longer, couldn’t get ex- actly the right camera angle, or missed the moment. But no one is moved by our excuses. No one sees the ones we missed.
For those of you who read David’s Pixelated Image Blog, or who tuned into David’s #duchemin0627 chat on Twitter yesterday, you know how enthusiastically open he is to interact with his readers and fellow photographers. He’s definitely the read deal. I’ve never met the guy, but in my mind, he seems like someone who can influence us all, and not just in the ways in which we make photographs.
Whatever caused David to survive his fall, it probably has something to do with the fact that he’s still got a whole lot more to say. A Deeper Frame is only the beginning, I’m sure. After already devouring this one, I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Speedy recovery, David!
As with all the Craft and Vision titles, get A Deeper Frame: Creating Deeper Photographs & More Engaging Experiences for only $5.
Or use the following discount codes, good until July 2 at 11:59 EST:
DEEP4 gets you the PDF version for only $4
DEEP20 gets you 20% off 5 or more books from the Craft and Vision collection
DEEPER12 gets you 12 Craft and Vision eBooks for only $40. That’s 34% off, or essentially 4 books for free.