Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography & Creative Thinking is a photo documentary of a business trip taken by Julieanne Kost from the window seat of the airplane as she shares her personal innermost thoughts, fears, triumphs, weaknesses and her passion for photography. This book isn’t a how-to on digital photography or Photoshop, as the title may lead you to think, but it will stand out for the sheer brilliance of the photography within its pages.
The first section, "The Art of Creative Thinking," describes just that. With Kost’s 18 -point perspective, she explains how she works and helps open readers' mind to the tools, goals, progression, and success they can achieve with the medium of photography through exploration, discipline, and control.
The center section, "Window Seat," is her portfolio of airplane window-seat photography. It is filled with nearly 80 pages of creativity. She captures each subject perfectly and though she does not explain the digital or Photoshop process she uses, she shares a sequence of images and explains why they were chosen for the book.
I see color palettes and gradients. I tried once to convey perceptions of time, starting with dawn—cold, crisp, gently, awakening—moving into daytime—bright mountains, green farmland, blue water glistening, light performing a circus act through 15,000 feet of cloud layers—and finishing with sunset—a perfect gradient of white, yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, deep blue, even deeper blue, and the darkest black you can imagine. This is almost like covering an entire day, but it doesn’t work if you leave one place, fly for 14 hours, and arrive the same day somewhere else just two hours later. (Maybe I’ve just discovered another wrinkle: our assumptions about time expressed through the concepts of morning, day, and night.) (pg. 81)
The appendix is where Kost shares how she uses some of the digital photography tools and which she likes best. This section gives a broad view of imaging techniques.
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