Customer Reviews

Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've always been a fan of Julieanne's work, and I had already seen some of her evocative images from 33,000 feet, but I must admit, when I saw Window Seat, I was absolutely blown away!

The author has created something very special here because although her amazing photography is definitely the star of the show, at the same time her insights into how she processed and edited these photos using Adobe Photoshop make the book have great crossover appeal.

The layout of the book is just beautifully done with a clean look throughout and nicely crafted typography. Together they do a great job of supporting her fascinating photography, while not getting in the way of her message. This beautiful layout gives the book a real fine art feel and it's the kind of book that's so engaging, you'll definitely want to share it with others.

I love books that make you want to run out and start shooting, and this is surely among them, but perhaps best of all, you'll never look out your window seat again without thinking of her work and smiling.

Highly recommended for anyone who loves great photography, who admires a very clever eye, who appreciates great design, and doesn't mind learning a little Photoshop along the way. Well done, Julieanne.

I mean no disrespect towards Ms Kost when I say this, but to be honest the images in this book left me uninspired. I should point out that am an aviation photographer and I have done a lot of air to ground work, so maybe my perception is a little different. However when I look thru this book too often I can see the image what she was trying for, but it's just not quite there. Maybe it was the printing which contributed to this feeling (book printing seldom does justice to great photography). Or maybe it was her choice of images... But I was constantly wondering, was there maybe a little better image one or two frames before or after the one she chose for the book. It's a shame really because some of the other reviewers are people who's opinion's I respect, and I purchased the book based upon their glowing reviews. One thing I will give the book top marks for is that she includes the steps she used in photoshop to bring out the image she saw when she took the photo. Something that many photographers refuse to do (or even acknowledge doing).

Look out an airplane window again, for the first time, and study the ever changing cloud formations and the variety of patterns of earth. "Window Seat..." is an invitation to ignore the TV and DVDs in the plane and to marvel at what can be seen from the window. The book has many gorgeous color photographs taken out the window and encourages one to do likewise.
This book now has me not only looking out of airplane windows with a new view in mind but it also has done something else. Instead of watching TV the other night during a lightning storm, I decided to turn off the TV, turn off the lights, look out my window and simple watch the the bright dancing patterns of lightning against a black sky. I even took a few photos out the window. Windows have now taken on a new meaning for me.
Richard D. Zakia
North Carolina

I am convinced that the publishers and/or authors of photography books believe that there is a greater market for how-to books than for books of photographs only, so that they try to force every collection of pictures into the mold of an instructional manual. Usually this leads to a book organized around teaching points rather than subject matter and often this leads to a poor-quality instructional manual rather then a first-class book of photographs. "Window Seat" may have been a book that someone tried to put into such a mold. Fortunately, the pictures are so good that they can't be harmed. Or maybe, someone really had a feeling about developing photographic creativity and decided to give in to his or her soul.

The photographs presented were all taken by the photographer while flying from one place to another. There are pictures of clouds, and foothills, and riverbeds and agricultural fields. There is nothing new about taking pictures of clouds. Alfred Stieglitz made many photographs of clouds, which he called "Equivalents", in the early part of the 20th century. It appears that he wanted to treat the clouds as some sort of abstract form.

I don't believe that is Kost's goal. Instead I believe that like the best photographers she wants to force the viewer to look at the ordinary, pared down to its most basic components. Certainly, I've seen almost the same views out the window when I've flown, but I never really looked the way I do when presented with these carefully crafted pictures. Now, one might think, "Clouds are clouds", but as the photographer says, when you undertake a long term project like this, you begin to see trends, and to organize the landscape into patterns. The feat of Kost is that she makes the viewer see this same organization so that the pictures present an organized, synergistic whole.

As an instructional manual, the pictures are book-ended by a section entitled "The Art of Creative Thinking" and an appendix called "Imaging Techniques". The former is a list of 18 principles ranging from "Listen to what your life is trying to tell you" through "Visualize first, Photoshop second", to "Know when you are done". Some of these principles give Kost an excuse for telling how her life story led to these pictures, while others are little rules for how one should structure one's day for creativity. The appendix will not teach anyone Photoshop techniques, but will show the reader how one creative artist adopted those techniques to her own vision. There are also brief commentaries throughout the picture section that continue the Zen-like quality of instruction. For example, she emphasizes the importance of control in photography, and says she would like to be able to control the plane, but that there are advantages to being a passenger and just seeing whatever passes by the window.

There is a Zen principal that says if you seek enlightenment, you will not be able to find it, but that if you just let things come, enlightenment will also come. Don't read this book looking to develop your creativity. Instead, look at the pictures, slowly and carefully, and enjoy them. Read what the author has to say but don't try to mine the words. To your surprise, you might enjoy the pictures. And when you are finished you just might find you've tweaked your creativity.

I stumbled across this coffee table photo book while browsing the astronomy & space section at Borders. The images were so captivating I could hardly put it down. Unlike a 2004 work of the same title by Gregory Dicum, Ms. Kost showcases REAL aerial photos taken by herself while a passenger on commercial flights. Mr. Dicum substituted SPOT images and other high resolution photos taken from high flying craft. What makes Ms. Kost's portfolio so breathtaking is that her memorable images were marvelously processed with Photoshop's CS & CS2 software programs. The finished products will knock your socks off. Moreover, value is added by the author outlining some of her methods in teasing out dramatic effects in certain pictures that would otherwise underwhelm due to defects and unwanted artifacts. Julianne prefaces her enthralling collection by sharing her ideas in a section called, "The Art of Creative Thinking." I especially liked her points, "Collaborate with other creative people, especially the quiet ones" and "Fix what you complain about the most."

Take a look at the image of a riverbed on page 62 and compare with the "before" version on page 126. Or the jawdropping photo sprawling across pages 90-91 and its earlier incarnation on page 126.

If you've spent hours peering out from an airplane window and have attempted photographing some of what you see, you're well aware of the possibility this volume can hold for you. It fired my imagination in reviewing some of the images I've taken over the years that were unfortunately marred by reflections or incorrect exposure. Now they can be corrected and transformed! It's stimulated me to renew active interest in learning more about the Photoshop Elements program I own. I am so persuaded I may ultimately take the plunge for CS2 when I have the money to do so.

For collectors of the aerial photography genre, be advised these are pure art: Clouds and landscape, contrasts and colors, as if one was touring a gallery in the sky, with Julianne the gentle docent, informing us ever so subtly of what it took to create this otherworldly blend of technologies. As such, there are no identifiers as to locations captured, although a great many were obviously taken in the American West, where the haze is less than it is in the eastern US. Julianne instead wants us to accompany her on her aerial journeys. The thoughtful, inutitive reader will take flight from there.

This book is a breath of fresh air in a sea of Photoshop saturated ink. Anyone who has attended a Photoshop event knows Adobe's hard traveling graphics evangelist Julienanne Kost. Here is someone who loves Photoshop and loves to share that love with all who attend her workshops. When I first heard of this book, I knew it had to be good. The surprise was that it was less about Photoshop 1-2-3s and all about creativity. I read her book by the light of my seat reading light on a return flight. I was tired and expected to quickly fall asleep. Instead I found her insights to be profound. She shares many thoughts and insights for those whom look at a blank screen and wonder if your creative well has run dry. It hasn't.
The photos she has taken from the aircraft are great and since I take a lot of those as well, I am looking forward to my next flight so I can practice some the the lessons I read about.
Do whatever it takes to get this book. Eat beans for a week, buy a few less cups of Starbucks. Whatever it takes, get her book and READ it!! Sorry about that - you do actually have to read it. You won't be sorry.
Dave Huss

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 among photography books for the shear brilliance of 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 one's mind to the tools, goals, progression, and success one can obtain 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 does not explain the digital or Photoshop process she uses, she shares a sequence of images and 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.

If you're looking for a how-to book on digital photography or Photoshop, Window Seat is not for you. But if you're looking for a fascinating concept of images, insight into streamlining your digital sight, and letting your imagination run, then, Kost's book will do exactly what she wanted.

The photograph, on page 90 and 91 that adorns this small passage below is a brilliant picture of earth and sky mixed.
. . . I wanted to walk out on the wing of the plane to look all around. (pg.91)
At a quick glance, to this reader, it looks like an image of a human heart and arteries. That pretty much explains my feelings of Window Seat: Kost has taken to heart her love of photography and used every artery available to produce a book that will not only open an artist's eyes to the beauty of photography, but will also give that artist a taste of what it's like to capture what no one else sees.

Julieanne Kost's "Window Seat" is a partly successful hybrid between a Photoshop tutorial and a coffeetable book. This book tries to break somewhat new ground by bringing together technical and inspirational material. However, the concept doesn't really gel. Contentwise the different parts of the book fall a bit short of my expectations.

For a start, there is nothing particularly revelatory about Kost's 15 guidelines for developing one's creativity. As documentary evidence of how she, as an individual, tries to stay at the edge, these guidelines are a useful complement of the case study she is presenting. But I find them too middle-of-the-road - lacking psychological (or spiritual) depth on the one hand and photographic incisiveness on the other - to be of much value to a larger audience.

The most substantial, middle part of the book is devoted to photos taken from a window seat during countless airplane journeys over a period of six years. I'm not going to criticise Kost's pictures. I think that, within strict parameters, she has done a very good job. But that does not mean that this is great art (as the book at various points seems to suggest). To stay within the ambit of the discipline of aerial photography, the "Window Seat" pictures are closer to the beguiling, seductive, National Geographic-like vision of a Yann-Arthus Bertrand than to the forbidding, epic grandeur of Emmet Gowin's photographic testimony of our earth's surface.

Interspersed in the photo portfolio are a few pages in which Kost explains how the project emerged and took its final shape. Again her account remains somewhat at the surface. For example, she tells us that editing a portfolio is terribly important and difficult but "finally it came down to the images I (and my editor) thought worked best". Not very helpful. I would have loved to see how she sifted through the images on her digital lighttable because that would have told us something very key about her artistic vision. But then you probably get a very different, less manicured type of book.

Finally, the Photoshop tutorial - the final part of the book - feels disjointed thematically. And it doesn't really help us to better understand Kost's creative process. To a certain extent, it is useful to know about the tools of the trade. Whether a photographer uses a digital camera or a large format view camera makes a difference, because it tells us something fundamental about how that person looks to and moves through the world. But are we any more enlightened if we know how he or she performs a RAW-conversion or, for that matter, how many minutes a sheet of film is kept in the developer? I don't think so.

I can imagine there is an untold story behind "Window Seat'. In daily life Julieanne Kost is a "Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist" at Adobe. Her job is to spread the word about the marvelous abilities of Photoshop as a creative and productive tool. Every trainer will tell you: what better way to evangelise, to convince an audience than to develop an inspiring case study? The book tries to make us believe otherwise, but it seems to me the tool came first and then came the idea to graft a creative project on it to showcase the tool's abilities. From that vantage point, the book makes eminently sense and Kost goes beyond the call of duty to present us with a "de luxe" case study.

Gowin once said that to do something new - to be really creative - we cannot really be in the know about what it is that we are doing. It's that profound sense of searching and questioning that I am missing in this book. As an inspirational case study of how an amateur photographer conceived and executed a project and in that process relied on a creative software tool it does a wonderful job. As an artistic statement it misses the mark. I'd give 3,5 stars to this book.

So I stole this book from my girlfriend to read. Read a photography book? Yeah. READ. Not only does Julieanne have magnificant photography in this book but she details in a very candid and fun style why and how she made the pictures.

Reading the book will inspire you to look at photography a little differently. While the book isn't a "how to edit photos" book, it will give you some good ideas on areas to experiment with when editing your own pictures.

The pictures are truly inspiring and run the gamut from the abstract color gradients to the defined wheat fields, partially harvested. For those who like coffee table books as conversation starters, this book will easily draw attention to itself - no matter where it flops open to - and a love of Photography and Photoshop. The pictures paint a familiar portrait for anyone whose flown on an airplane, staring out the window.

Along with the photography, the author also describes a number of the Photoshop techniques she used to bring the pictures to life, with a number of before and after shots. She also lets you in on - I'm guessing all of - the "secrets" to capturing images from the window seat of an airplane.

Really, really, really cool.