Caffeine Priority: For something a little different, why not look at cute animal photos?
posted Friday, January 27, 2017 at 7:00 AM EDT
Wake up with IR! Here's today's cup of Caffeine Priority...
Touchstone of Simon & Schuster publishing was kind enough to send me a pair of books: "Life Works Itself Out (And Then You Nap)" by Keiya Mizuno and Naoki Naganuma and "Flying Dogs" by Julia Christe.
Both books feature some excellent images and the former also includes bits of wisdom, history and quotes to accompany the cute images. The book, translated from its original Japanese, is around 150 pages of cats, collective wisdom and quotes; it is a difficult combo to top. The book has been a best-seller in Japan and it will surely be a hit with any photographers who consider themselves “cat people.”
If pure photography is more to your taste, then Flying Dogs will be very enjoyable to peruse. The book is a collection of great photos of a wide array of leaping dogs. The photographer, Julie Christe, is an extremely talented German photographer who had to come up with a clever photographic process to give the illusion that dogs were flying through the air while remaining perfectly safe for her furry friends.
As you can imagine, capturing images of animals can be tricky for several reasons. One of the bigger challenges is that you cannot direct them or rely on them like you can most human subjects. Getting a dog to cooperate is tough, but the results are excellent. Using powerful lighting, a wind machine and a lot of patience, Christe has been able to capture hundreds of images of a wide variety of dogs who, despite being only a short distance off the ground, look as though they are flying.
It’s a very fun book to look at and I think it will appeal to photographers as well as dog lovers because a shutterbug will appreciate the difficulty and technical challenges associated with the images. For a behind-the-scenes look, visit this website and watch the video below.
Caffeine Priority is a series of short photo-tidbits to ease you into your day and give us a chance to share a bit more of what life’s like here at IR. We're more like a group of friends testing and talking about cameras and lenses than the buttoned-down, big-corporation world that some of our photo-friends at other companies work in; hopefully, these little snippets will share some of that. So... grab another coffee and join in the conversation with us down below!
