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.

    It is hard enough to find thesequalities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.It wasn’t until local historian John Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives from a Chicago auction house and began collecting and championing her marvelous work just a few years ago that any of it saw the light of day. Presented here for the first time in print, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer collects the best of her incredible, unseen body of work.

    Here is everything you need to know: from the most practical advice (the fundamental facts about light sources) to the most sophisticated nuances (how light is measured through photometry), from the basics of the camera (which button controls which function) to the finer points of framing with an LCD viewfinder, featuring a selection of Ang’s most inspiring images. For users of film cameras, Ang explains the differences between types of film and details the various methods of processing and darkroom techniques.Ang delves into the development and transformation of photography by digital techniques. For the digital-camera contingent, there’s a specificity of previously unavailable information about the cameras and about processing, digitizing, and outputting the images. Ang also discusses subjects usually ignored in manuals but of interest to all photographers, including critical theory, the presentation of images, the function of the human eye in the perception of images, and ethical and copyright issues.Fundamentals of Photography is an essential book for every photographer.

    Coco Chanel started a fashion revolution with her liberating inventions in sportswear and jersey, iconic suit, and little black dress. The Little Book of Chanel follows the great designer's evolution and innovation, from her impoverished childhood to her present-day legacy. With its detailed photographs of Chanel's designs, fashion photography, and catwalk shots, this is a fitting tribute to a legend.

    These are the ruins of America, filled with the echoes of the voices and footfalls of our grandparents, or their parents, or our own youth. Where once these structures were teeming with life--commuters, workers, vacationers--now they are disused and dilapidated.Ghostly Ruins shows the life and death of thirty such structures, from transportation depots, factories, and jails to amusement parks, mansions, hotels, and entire towns. Author Harry Skrdla gives a guided tour of these marvelous structures at their peak of popularity juxtaposed with their current state of haunted decrepitude. Like a seasoned teller of ghost stories, Skrdla's words and images reveal what lies beyond the gates and beneath the floorboards. There are the infamous Eastern State Penitentiary and Bethlehem Steel factory in Pennsylvania, the Packard Motors Plant and Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, and Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion from the 1964/65 World's Fair. There is the entire town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a trash fire set inside an old mine in 1962 morphed into an underground inferno that incinerated the town from underneath; more than forty years later, the subterranean fire still rages. The town is empty now, just as the many other abandoned places in this chronicle. Ghostly Ruins is a record of the souls of yesteryear and a chronicle of America's haunted past.

    Collecting the testimony of more than 260 artists, record producers, designers, and journalists — including John Cale, Debbie Harry, Joe Strummer, Maureen Tucker, Gerard Malanga, Lou Reed, Johnny Rotten, Danny Fields, Legs McNeil, Bob Gruen, David Byrne, Iggy Pop, Tommy Ramone, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Cherry Vanilla, and Malcolm McLaren, former manager and ringleader of the Sex Pistols — Punk brings to life the profound effect punk music had on global popular culture in the words of those who created it. With reverberations in style, fashion, attitude and philosophy, the birth of punk music released the greatest shockwaves in the popular culture since The Beatles. Punk tells the story through the words of the people who were closely tied to the mania and through hundreds of contemporaneous color and black-and-white photographs.

    Tuscany has its grand cities—Florence and Siena—but their distinctive elegance is found on a more intimate scale in numerous small towns and villages.There is a richness in these small places, of architecture and artistic life, which lends them an interest and complexity shared by no other rural communities in Europe. Their sense of civilization is deep and ancient, but it is the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance which have left their mark, tempting travelers and settlers from abroad from the time of the Grand Tour to the present day. Here is the village of Settignano, where Michelangelo lived and which also boasts the glorious Renassiance garden of the Villa Gamberaia. Piero della Francesca's lovely Madonna del Parto decorates the tiny cemetery chapel of Monterchi. The medieval towers of San Gimignano loom over the town's squares and streets like the backdrop to some surreal stage set.James Bentley has chosen thirty-seven villages and small towns, both for their intrinsic beauty and for the part they have played in Tuscan history and culture. Page after page of Hugh Palmer's magnificent color photographs evoke the beauty and the wonder of this land. For the visitor, there are specially compiled listings of hotels, restaurants, and festivals to complete the tribute to Tuscany and its villages.

     In this visually stunning book, award-winning journalists Betsy Mason and Greg Miller--authors of the National Geographic cartography blog "All Over the Map"--explore the intriguing stories behind maps from a wide variety of cultures, civilizations, and time periods. Based on interviews with scores of leading cartographers, curators, historians, and scholars, this is a remarkable selection of fascinating and unusual maps.This diverse compendium includes ancient maps of dragon-filled seas, elaborate graphics picturing unseen concepts and forces from inside Earth to outer space, devious maps created by spies, and maps from pop culture such as the schematics to the Death Star and a map of Westeros from Game of Thrones. If your brain craves maps--and Mason and Miller would say it does, whether you know it or not--this eye-opening visual feast will inspire and delight.

    Her story—thousands of photo negatives and prints found in a storage locker and sold for pennies at auction—has stirred millions around the world. Maier was a painfully private woman who now speaks powerfully through the photographs she took only for herself. This new collection offers readers a chance to follow Maier as she travels the world, including images of France, Italy, Malaysia, Yemen, Puerto Rico, and America. These eye-to-eye portraits, published for the first time, are the single constant in her lifetime of photographic work. Maier is often cast as a quirky, antisocial character, moving on the outskirts of real connection. But these photographs show something more. Printed with the latest technology, the book utilizes a modified four-color process that produces images akin to traditional silver gelatin prints. Combined with 15u stochastic screening, Maier's 96 photographs in this volume are spectacularly sharp, full-range black-and-white reproductions.

    Smiles of recognition turn into grins of enthusiasm as more people discover them and dream about making their own private retreats or family play spaces. And it's nice to remind ourselves that treehouses are built into the oldest and most forgiving, living things on earth. Also, history records treehouses as being built as deliberate follies, as challenges for arboreal designers, for merrymaking, and for keeping the spirit of fairy tales alive. But treehouses can also be social places. We will visit many that were built to entertain, to hang out with friends, or as guest houses. Trees welcome all types. Master treehouse builders Peter and Judy Nelson, with David Larkin, have embarked on yet another treehouse-discovery expedition across America, this time adding the investigation of backyard playhouses to their agenda. Now, in The Treehouse Book, they reveal their findings, illustrated and described in the most complete volume yet. From casual treeshacks made from discarded lumber to multitiered feats of fancy, they found shelters representing myriad builders-interesting characters ranging from childhood fanatics grown up, to weekend carpenters, to those who want their grandkids to have the best clubhouse on the block. Detailed how-to information, including plans and drawings, is woven with behind-the-scenes tales of each structure's occupants and stunning interior and exterior photographic explorations.

    Delve into Jim and Jamie Dutcher's amazing wolf photography documenting a pack of wolves at the edge of Idaho's Sawtooth Wilderness, illuminating their complex social hierarchy. Here is the alpha pair, leaders of the pack, often the only couple that mate. Here are the pups, born with eyes shut in the spring, tousled by their mother through the first six weeks of life. Here is the omega wolf, lowest ranking wolf in the pack, whose subservience, often playful, alleviates pack tension. Here are moments of cooperation and moments of snarling dominance, moments of communication and affection. Here, too, are heartwarming moments of connection between the Dutchers and the wolves, caught in pictures that remind us how close the links are between wolves in the wild and the beloved family dog. Short chapters introduce the wolves as individuals, describe the Dutchers' years of coming to know them, and address the complex conservation issues surrounding the near-extinction and now replenishment of the species in the wild. Sidebars explore myths about wolves, including Native American spirit stories, European fairy tales, and modern ranching hearsay.

    For the first time ever, readers will plumb the fascinating depths of this immense archive from the earliest photographs collected in the late 19th century to the cutting-edge work of today. Both iconic and never-before-seen images from virtually every corner of the globe, every species of wildlife, and amazing human achievements in exploration, adventure, science, and more are showcased and placed in historic, artistic, technical, and journalistic context.Following this lavish visual journey, readers will be awed by a behind-the-scenes profile of the entire collection, its size, its richly diverse character, and its special collections, ranging from delicate and beautiful Autochromes to the famous Alexander Graham Bell collection to the amazing stratosphere collection. Fine artwork and imaginative illustrations are also featured.Finally, a listing of photographers whose work is represented stands as a fitting tribute to those without whose tireless and brilliant efforts the Collection would not exist.

    She took their cookware, their furniture, their photos, their decorations. She left Rafael alone in an empty all-white apartment. The only thing she didn't take was their bull terrier, whom she'd named after her favorite shoe designer: Jimmy Choo.With only Jimmy for company, Rafael found inspiration in his blank walls and his best friend and started snapping photos of Jimmy Choo as he trotted and cavorted around the house in glee. Then, when Jimmy collapsed in happy exhaustion next to the white wall, on a whim Rafael grabbed a marker and drew a new world around his ginger-eared pup. Suddenly, Rafael felt his long-dormant inspiration—for drawing, for art, for life—returning.The result? Hundreds of charming and cheeky images chronicling the owner and dog's relationship and adventures, including poses in a Star Wars stormtrooper helmet, passed out with liquor bottles, and as the shark in Jaws. Mantesso's Instagram feed quickly garnered fans from all over the world and caught the attention of major media outlets like Today, The Huffington Post, USA Today, and the Daily Mail, as well as Jimmy's namesake, the luxury shoe brand Jimmy Choo Ltd.Now, Mantesso presents a definitive selection of new and classic images of Jimmy and includes the backstory of how the two became such great collaborators. As heartwarming as it is hilarious, A Dog Named Jimmy will delight animal lovers everywhere.

    The quintessential boom-and-bust highway of the American West, Route 66 once hosted a thriving array of boom towns built around oil wells, railroad stops, cattle ranches, resorts, stagecoach stops, and gold mines. Join Route 66 expert Jim Hinckley as he tours more than 25 ghost towns, rich in stories and history, complemented by gorgeous sepia-tone and color photography by Kerrick James. Also includes directions and travel tips for your ghost-town explorations along Route 66.Explore the beauty and nostalgia of these abandoned communities along America’s favorite highway!

    He defines the forces which have shaped the Arctic’s history and introduces the players in politics, business, science and society who are struggling to mold its future.The Arctic is coming of age. This engrossing book tells the story of how that is happening and how it might happen—through the stories of those who live there, those who study it, and those who will determine its destiny.