Gift Idea for Photographer

The Photographer at Work
The Photographer at Work

If you follow this blog regularly, you may have read about my ol’ friend Dietrich. Next month he will celebrate a special birthday. So far so good. But he has a special wish – he doesn’t want any presents except some musical presentation on stage of the venue – if you can and if you want. Um. I have a special handycap when it comes to notes and rhythm – although I love music and my knowledge on temporary music may be well above average. Okay, no more swagging from now on. 😉 I can’t sing, dance or play any instrument – even if I try to clap my hands in rhythm it doesn’t take long and it rather sounds as a kind of applause.

You must know that Dietrich is a multitalent, he can play more than a hand full of instruments, is a master on the guitar (plays Knopfler and Santana like a champ), he can draw and design (what is is actual profession), and supervises CGI-services for international movie productions (for insiders: knows L.A. and New Zealand). On the other hand he is a very humble and friendly chap and an extremely good and trustful friend. So I don’t want to disappoint him (although I know that he wouldn’t blame me for not singing, dancing, playing).

But last month an idea started to grow in my head. For more than a decade we have been together on photo trips around the globe. When on vacation photographers often shoot behind the scenes how the other photog takes an image. One day I put these kind of shots in a separate category and called it “The Photographer at Work”. Until now this our working title for this kind of photos. Why not making a very personal photo book with a selection of the best shots?

Okay, but what about music? An idea crossed my mind when I saw an image I took of him when we where on a photowalk through a narrow gorge in the Alps in Bavaria. I got a bruise on my elbow – nothing severe but some blood was to be seen – in the photograph of him he has a liquid drop on his forehead, and when I think of Bavaria I always think of beer. So I mixed all this and came out with “Blood, Sweat and Beers”. Why not using hook lines or titles or band names, putting them in a funny or matching context to the photos and spicing up this normal photo book with these captions? And I could insert a page with a very personal inscription. So I had a gift for him which was personal and somehow musical at the same time. *happy*

The first two attempts to produce this book unfortunately failed. The first failure was my fault: I was too excited and didn’t do a proper proofreading. The second was the book company’s fault – they used the wrong paper. In my third attempt I turned back to Blurb and produced the book directly from Lightroom – and was satisfied again.

When I handed the book to Dietrich we had a lot of laughs and remembered great times we spent together.

Cover and Backcover
Cover (right) Dietrich alone at Table Mountain near Cape Town, Backcover (left) a wider collection of all my images of him as thumbnails
 Laguna Seca race track on a Champ Car weekend
Dietrich takes all what it needs to make a good photo. Here at Laguna Seca race track on a Champ Car weekend.
Blood, Sweat and Beers in a Bavarian Gorge
Blood, Sweat and Beers in a Bavarian Gorge
Verona and Oder floodlands
With hundreds of tourists under Julia’s balcony in Verona (left). Doing some landscape shooting at the Oder floodlands in Germany’s East.
Two page spread from a trip to the Okavango Delta
Two page spread from a trip to the Okavango Delta (Hippo shot is mine *proud*)