No, I'm not posting the text here, but I will tell you that I'm working on some material that deals with visual perception and photographs. This is one of the more interesting chapters to research, and it's flavoring some other parts of the book.

Expressive photography relies heavily on getting the photographer's vision into the image, as opposed to simply recording the moment in time. That vision can be brought out in myriad ways, and involves more than simply knowing how to work a camera. By choosing locations, exposure, points of view, and cropping, the photographer can manipulate reality, either enhancing it or lying about it, all without any editing.

So, this chapter on which I am working discusses how lighting, color, angle and many other factors help images tell a story. Since this is a book on using Photoshop, I'm also dealing with editing images to take advantage of perception and emotional response, as well as visual cues that are based in both culture and physiology.

There is quite a bit of information about this on Teh IntarWebz, and it's... um... eye-opening.

Ok, book deal is on, twitter is twittering, blog is... running... ?

Now I need your help. Spread the word! Do you know anyone who is interested in Photoshop? Get them to hit my blog and ask questions, post comments, send me email, whatever. Sign up for a Twitter account and FOLLOW ME.

Why?

Because you love me.

And I will be whoring myself by giving out little prizes here and there. You might get a copy of the book for free when it comes out, or you might get some advance excerpts in PDF format. I might even throw out some actions, scripts and brushes that will be featured in the book.

For those of you who are not into Photoshop, I'll have something special for you, too! I just don't know what, yet. Maybe it will be something cool from the cra... amazingly interesting collection of cra... uh... I might send you something I have lying around here. Guaranteed to be of crap value or higher.

Well, the book was accepted, and is likely to run under the Real World series. Still not able to give many details, but my writing partner and I will be busting some serious ass to make the November publishing deadline (which in practical terms means we are done writing by early October).

If you are at all interested in Photoshop, stop by my regular blog:

http://blog.lightningsymphony.com

And while you're at it, twitter me!

http://twitter.com/sjv


And yes... if you email me directly from the blog, I will try to answer Photoshop and digital photography questions. You can also drop by the Photoshop or Digital Photography sections on allexperts.com. Find me there, here, or elsewhere!

For the past several months, I've been working with a remote writing partner on a Photoshop book. We are sending out the proposals on Monday, so it's anything but a sure deal. However, we've been writing for a few months and have a pretty solid chunk on which to go.

We're both Photoshop prerelease testers, and the book will deal with new stuff in future versions, so I can't provide much detail here. If you are a Photoshop enthusiast, though, you just might want to start checking my new blog:

http://blog.lightningsymphony.com

Of course, if photography and Photoshop are not to your liking, then you'll find it one huge waste of time. So I suppose I ought to start adding some benes, shouldn't I? How about a new wallpaper every couple of weeks?

I used code from http://freelayouts.com. However, the background image is my own photography. You can see more at http://lightningsymphony.com