January 17, 2006
Canadian Camera Winter Issue
Last week I got the latest issue of Canadian Camera, a preview issue that was sent with my returned slides. A photograph I took of birch trees in snow in Aomori Prefecture in Japan was on the cover. It was cropped from a horizontal to a vertical image and looks good.
Here’s the cover. The guy in the lower left is Doug Boult, who passed away in 2005. The tree photo is mine.
From pages ten to thirteen my article Nature in the Japanese Landscape appears along with eight illustrative photographs. Very nice. Hopefully, camera club members across Canada will see and read my work, and those who have seen my presentations will remember my sparkling personality. Ha, ha.
Now for the critique. The colour reproduction of the photos is okay but not spectacular. The tones have been dulled somewhat, I find. On page thirteen is a photo very similar to one that appears in my little book Water Dance. The colours in the book are much more vibrant and very close to the original slide. The colours in the magazine just don’t do the image justice. But other images, particularly the bamboo trees, came out very nice.
Then there’s the issue of the photo that is turned sideways. Look at the top photo on the right page.
It is actually a vertical photograph with the bottom on the left side. It’s a river flowing past rocks. Reproduced here it looks like a canyon with a dark curtain of water running down the walls. It still looks nice but once you see the error it makes you wonder. Well, perhaps I need to be clearer with my slide labeling.
The only other problem was with the caption for the top photograph on the left page.
The photo is of a pond at a roadside in the South Alps and was taken in autumn. The red and orange leaves floating in the water surely give the season away. The caption was for a green, wet-looking forest in Fukushima Prefecture. It reads in one part, “Fortunately, the rain does stop, and the forest retains its wet shiny look for a while after.” Looking at the photo we see a pond, at least a metre deep. Thank goodness the rain stopped. And how about that wet look? Flooded it seems, eh?
I mentioned those two small errors to the editor and she apologized and promises to correct the erroneous caption in the next issue. I can forgive her because I know she is doing the whole thing by herself. It’s not easy to get everything perfect. I made a few small errors in the captions of my books and it bugged the heck out of me. But most people won’t notice them anyway. Worse was when I was interviewed by a Japanese magazine and I told the interviewer the captions for the photos and watched him write them down, and then later saw them printed in error. Tsubakuro Dake, a well-known peak in the North Alps was labeled Aka Dake, a well-know peak near the South Alps. Anyone who knows his mountains would easily spot the error. No doubt he would think, “Stupid foreigner. You don’t know your mountains.” But I do know my mountains. I know the peaks of the Japanese Alps better than the local mountains or the Canadian Rockies. So that was embarrassing, though I have no one around who has challenged me on that point.
Anyway, the article is nice and it’s a great vehicle to get my work out in the photo community. Now I am preparing for the next article. It has been written, submitted and accepted. I only have to send the photographs now, which have been scanned to disk and are waiting to be picked up at Lens & Shutter. I am looking forward to seeing that one in print perhaps in the spring or summer issue.
Posted by tsubame at January 17, 2006 11:51 PM | TrackBack