Book two, Photography FUNdamentals. With the huge success of Taking Flight, especially since it was a first of it's kind, we knew we had to do more. And with the help of B&H Photo Video, we even got to release all fo its great information for free!
Moose Press is the only place to get the book, and yep, free!
I actually had a hell of a time with this cover. I wish more people asked about it because I like telling the story behind it. I finished the first version of it, showed it to Moose, and he tells me it's not bold enough. After already putting hours of work into design and video work, it was frustrating to hear. So I made this version thinking to myself, "Bolder."
A much simpler Table of Contents compared to the one I did in Taking Flight but visually still has the same goal, showing off. On the left is a scrolling bar of links to all the headings in all the chapters. Onthe bottom right is the embeded help video. And the bit of awesome, the slide show in the background that moves and changes.
When Dad wrote this one, he decided to actually quote from sources. My favorite thing about digital publishing is screen real estate is so much more vast and flexible. In this case, I did not want to dedicate a permanent space to references that would not appear throughout the rest of the book, nor did I want a section at the very end full of references. So they got my favorite type of real estate solution, pop ups! Why are those my favorite? Because I can customize where they pop up, when, why, how, and what they show. For instance, notice the Trivia Alerts? Those were made to persist every time a user gets to the page, while references are by default not showing. Best part about these persistent states is at the bottom of the page here.
One thing Dad wanted to be huge in this book was interactivity. Aside from Trivia Alerts and images which can be shown full screen and are found throughout the book, we added some really special interactions. On this page is the working aperature. I struggled with how to make it for for a while, until I realized I could simply make a Timeline animation in Photoshop that the user controls. What you see is the result of that.
Really, all of the special animations were a struggle to make work. This one especially because I thought an animation or embeded web page would be necessary. In the end, this is actually a very simple interaction. The table simply changes based on the input.
Two of my favorite additions in this book are on this page. First, the picture changing by f stop was a great idea by Dad. Even having grown up with him, shot with him, worked with him for 26 years, I never fully realized the difference the f stop made on depth of field. Playing with this in app is the only way I have ever seen the contrast made so apparent.
The other addition, which is nice function but not quite as cool, is the Trivia Alerts being able to be hid throughout the book. While we wanted them to be persistent, we realized they are kind of annoying once you have read them and were rereading the book. So this time around, we created a global on/off switch.
