Books by TJ

My recent trip to Plurabelle Books in the heart of Cambridge gave me an excellent opportunity to get my book photograph for this topic. To walk into such a magical second hand book emporium felt almost like being transported into another world. Interestingly almost every book on display is for sale, and many of the 70,000 plus books cost only a pound or two. My choice of main photo was fairly straight forward, as I love the way they have created a dated library room like atmosphere. I wanted to try and capture as much of it as I could in one shot. The big challenge was whether to go for a black and white edited finish, perhaps a soft focus or stick with something closer to what the eye saw at the time. Eventually I went with the latter tweaking the brigthness and contrast, and eventually adding a tungsten lighting effect during editing to "warm" up the picture. I was pleased with the end result and think it works really well and does get the photo pretty close to matching the daylight conditions I took the original photo in, or perhaps the conditions I imagine I took the photo in! :)

I had a few other ideas. I tried the classic pile of books which came out well, and maybe with a bit more thought and attention to detail could have been a real contender. In the shot looking down one of the many isles at Plurabelle I got nice depth of field with Shakespeare right at the forefront. The other idea was to use my mini studio to photograph single books. I really enjoyed trying this out and was very pleased with the results as it was not so easy capturing a single book standing up in a good light. I seriously thought about going with one of them. The book of old London in black and white photographs is fascinating and contains some wonderful pictures from an age gone by. I bought this book from Plurabelle for just £2 so it was nice to work with it. The book by The Charlatans was given to me by The Blonde so once again there was an added incentive in trying to photograph it for the topic. This book was the hardest to photograph as it had a soft cover so I could only stand it up by leaning on the back end of the studio lining so it lacked a little depth unfortunately.