Author Brenda Tharp’s inspiring approach has garnered fans all over the world, as she teaches that magical skill no camera can do for you: learn how to “see.” Readers expand their photographic vision and discover deep wellsprings of creativity as they learn to use light, balance, color, design, pattern, texture, composition, and many simple techniques to take a photo from ordinary to high-impact.Featuring more than 150 stunning, all-new images, Creative Nature & Outdoor  Photography, Revised Edition is for anyone who understands the basic technical side to photography but wants to wake up their creative vision.

    The narrative also explores the experiences of the loved ones he leaves behind, on his ship and at home on land, as well as of the mermaids who jadedly witness his destruction. At the heart of the story lie the dubious value of maintaining dignity to the detriment of intimacy, and the erotic potential of the worst-case scenario. Julie Gfrörer’s delicate drawing style perfectly complements the period era of Black Is the Color, bringing the lyricism and romanticism of Gfrörer’s prose to the fore. Black Is the Color is a book as seductive as the sirens it depicts.

    

    It consists of 143 paintings of small size, rarely larger than 20 x 30 inches, many of them now considered icons of 20th century art, most of them seIf-portraits. The reasons for this ostensible narcissism were closely bound up with Kahlo's biography, with the country and epoch in which she grew up, and with her decidedly eccentric character. It was no coincidence that the major enigmatic minds of the 16th century, namely Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, were among her favorite painters. For Frida Kahlo never displayed her wounds directly--be it the physical wounds caused by accidents and illness, or the psychological inner wounds. Hers is a subtly enciphered symbolic language, rich in metaphors drawn from almost all the world's cultures. Aztec myths of creation. Far Eastern and Classical Greek mythology, and popular Catholic beliefs all mingle in Kahlo's pictures with Mexican folklore and the stuff of quotidian life, with Marx and Freud. Andre Breton, one of her many admirers among the European avant-garde, once described Kahlo's art as a "colored ribbon round a bomb." Exotic and explosive, sensuous and fascinatingly vital in terms of artistic statement. Kahlo's paintings shed a complex and often frightening light on her soul, her "inner reality." as she called it. If the incessant commercial marketing of Kahlo's paintings over the past decade had obscured a clear view of her extraordinary oeuvre, this present monograph attempts to make amends "Frida Kahlo: The Painter and Her Work returns to the heart, to 42 select masterpieces, reproduced in full and in detail. The painterly quality, the beauty, and theimmense wealth of details in Kahlo's paintings is laid out before the reader's eyes, as is the abyss in which the artist found herself.

    He is also drawn to the mystery and unexpected beauty found in abandoned architecture. Here Vanden Brink captures and illuminates in stunning black and white images abandoned structures such as mills, bridges, grain elevators, churches, and storefronts-structures that once were important and useful. With text by historic preservation expert Howard Mansfield, this collection of photos grants permanence to places that may soon vanish forever.

    It also draws in the characters of the Bloomsbury Group - a band of friends with a revolutionary approach to art and culture - including Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Leonard Woolf.

    After Congress viewed photos of Yosemite, President Lincoln was moved to sign a bill that paved the way for the U.S. National Park Service, which was founded in 1916 and is now celebrating its centennial. In Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America's National Parks, photographer QT Luong pays tribute to the millions of acres of protected wilderness in our country's 59 national parks. Luong, who is featured in Ken Burns's and Dayton Duncan's documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea, is one the most prolific photographers working in the national parks and the only one to have made large-format photographs in each of them. In an odyssey that spanned more than 20 years and 300 visits, Luong focused his lenses on iconic landscapes and rarely seen remote views, presenting his journey in this sumptuous array of more than 500 breathtaking images. Accompanying the collection of scenic masterpieces is a guide that includes maps of each park, as well as extended captions that detail where and how the photographs were made. Designed to inspire visitors to connect with the parks and invite photographers to re-create these landscapes, the guide also provides anecdotal observations that give context to the pictures and convey the sheer scope of Luong's extraordinary odyssey. Including an introduction by award-winning author and documentary filmmaker Dayton Duncan, Treasured Lands is a rich visual tour of the U.S. National Parks and an invaluable guide from a photographer who hiked - or paddled, dived, skied, snowshoed, and climbed - each park, shooting in all kinds of terrain, in all seasons, and at all times of day. QT Luong's timeless gallery of the nation's most revered landscapes beckons to nature lovers, armchair travelers, and photography enthusiasts alike, keeping America's natural wonders within reach.

    My list goes: The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, The Doors, and then I stall on the fifth. Creedence? The Band - although they're mostly Canadian. Simon and Garfunkel? Jefferson Airplane? The Lovin' Spoonful? But I plump for The Monkees."-Robert Forster In The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll, Robert Forster takes readers on an exhilarating trip through the past and present of popular music - from Bob Dylan, AC/DC and Nana Mouskouri through to Cat Power, Franz Ferdinand and ... Delta Goodrem. To accompany Forster's acclaimed writing for The Monthly, there are some stunning new pieces - 'The 10 Rules' and 'The 10 Bands I Wish I'd Been In' and an appreciation of Guy Clark - as well as a reflection on The Velvet Underground, a short story about Normie Rowe and a moving tribute to fellow Go-Between Grant McLennan. Funny and illuminating, The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll shows a great critic at work.

    Now he presents an exquisite collection that captures the full range of his work and the magic of chance encounters in New York City. Hayes's "frank, beautiful, bewitching" street photographs "unmask their subjects' best and truest selves" (Jennifer Senior, New York Times): A policeman pauses at the end of a day. Cooks sneak in cigarette breaks. A pair of movers plays cards on the back of a truck. Friends claim the sidewalk. Lovers embrace. A flame-haired girl gazes mysteriously into the lens. And park benches provide a setting for a couple of hunks, a mom and her baby, a stylish nonagenarian . . . How New York Breaks Your Heart reveals ordinary New Yorkers at their most peaceful, joyful, distracted, anxious, expressive, and at their most fleeting--bringing the texture of the city to vivid life. Woven through with Hayes's lyric reflections, these photos will, like the city itself, break your heart by asking you to fall in love.

    After being denied financial aid to cover her last year of art school, Margaret finds salvation from the straightlaced world of college and the earnestness of both hippies and punks in the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking group she encounters at the Imperial Café, where she makes the transformation from Margaret to Madge. At first she mimics these new and exotic grown-up friends, trying on the guise of adulthood with some awkward but funny stumbles. Gradually she realizes that the adults she looks up to are a mess of contradictions, misplaced artistic ambitions, sexual confusion, dependencies, and addictions.   Over Easy is equal parts time capsule of late 1970s life in California—with its deadheads, punks, disco rollers, casual sex, and drug use—and bildungsroman of a young woman who grows from a naïve, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout into a self-aware, self-confident artist. Mimi Pond’s chatty, slyly observant anecdotes create a compelling portrait of a distinct moment in time. Over Easy is an immediate, limber, and precise semi-memoir narrated with an eye for the humor in every situation.

    But what if your canoeing partner brings along a satellite phone to use in case of an emergency? And, struck by the novelty of anywhere-on-earth communication, he proceeds to use the phone to check in with his law office, his wife, kids, sisters, father, and friends? Noted wilderness traveler and author Ted Kerasote deals with just such a situation as he journeys along the Horton River through the largest ice-free, roadless area left on Earth, a stunning wilderness of grizzly bears, caribou, and migrating birds. Between navigating rapids, slipping around musk ox and grizzlies, and being pinned down by Arctic storms, the two friends prod each other into a finer understanding of love, marriage, parenting, and the meaning of solitude in an increasingly wired world. Contrasting his own experiences with those of the regions earliest explorers--Sir John Franklin and Vilhjalmur Stefansson--Kerasote provides a compelling and humorous take on how travelers from any age adjust to being away from their civilizations and how getting "out there" has inevitably changed but has also remained the same--especially if you shut off the phone.

     Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling novel, The Goldfinch, introduced millions of readers to a painting that becomes a lifelong obsession. Painted in 1654 by Carel Fabritius, the work is of a small bird, chained to its perch. This mysterious portrait, a masterpiece of the Dutch Golden Age, has been lost and found, adored and abandoned, for nearly four centuries. Now more famous than ever, this painting is the subject of its own book—a look behind the scenes at its creation and the tumultuous life of its creator. This gripping, true story of adventure, romance, and artistic fervor has never before been told and will enthrall readers of the now famous novel. Set against the vibrant backdrop of Holland in the seventeenth century, when it was the economic capital of the world, the book is populated by a glittering crowd of the wealthy and young, high society with appetites for success and excess. Holland was the center of the art world as well, boasting both Rembrandt, (Fabritius' mentor), and Vermeer (his rival). And there is Carel Fabritius himself—handsome, talented, hell-bent on greatness, but unable to escape tragedy. Yet through The Goldfinch, he achieves immortality. Deborah Davis is the author of the best-selling Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X, Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball, Gilded: How Newport Became the Richest Resort in America, and the prize-winning Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation. Cover design by Adil Dara

    On one page is a specific part of the world as it was 5, 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. On the facing page is the same place as it looks today. Each stark visual comparison tells a compelling story -- a melting glacier, an expanding desert, an encroaching cityscape, a natural disaster.Earth Then and Now reminds us that nothing is without a cost. Highly topical and thought provoking chapters in this book include:Environmental change Bearing witness to the effects of global warmingIndustrialization Revealing the hidden costs of "progress"Urbanization Showing the effects of our spreading citiesNatural disasters Reminding us of the power of natureWar Using comparisons to show the impact of armed conflictTravel and tourism Illustrating the predatory nature of development. Concise captions explain the facts and then allow the reader to draw personal conclusions. Anyone concerned about the environment will enjoy and appreciate Earth Then and Now.

    First there were the rats in the pantry, then the floods, then the fires, then the visiting cougar. Life in Bull Canyon was daunting and dangerous. Often Lin wondered just what in the world they were doing so far from their customary home on the open seas. Bull Canyon joins the canon of great tales of homesteading, told in the warm, funny, and insightful voice of a true storyteller.

    Then, the 50 projects are divided into five sections: Ageing and Distressing; Working with the Base; Working with Colour; Handpainting; and Crackle, Gilding and Decoupage. There are step-by-step images showing how to achieve the finished look, before shots and inspirational photography showing the effects used on walls and doors, furniture and floors. Learn how to bring old second-hand furniture bang up to date, or how to give modern pieces a softly aged appearance, as well as ways to treat and transform floorboards, doors and plastered walls. Whatever the style of your interiors, Quick and Easy Paint Transformations will show you the best way to makeover your home."