Sean has granted me permission to post the following for anyone who might be interested in our free LensWork Holiday Catalog on CD.

Our LensWork Holiday Catalog on CD is packed with content samples and filled to the brim with specials! Why on CD? Because more than half of our products are now multimedia, and best if experienced in their native environment!
Hear photographers and watch video samples
Includes hours of high resolution audio and video samples
Sample pages from several of our books
Sample portfolios from LensWork Extended
Sample audio clips from our new Photographers on Photography audio CDs
Easy to navigate
Fully indexed with hyperlinks
Links directly to the LensWork online store for easy shopping!
Requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader version 6 or greater

LensWork and LensWork Extended subscribers will receive a catalog on CD with the current issue, but if you are not a subscriber and would like to receive a free CD we're happy to mail you one.
Request your free catalog here. (http://www.lenswork.com/catalogrequest.htm)
Thanks!
Brooks Jensen
Editor, LensWork Publishing
Written Sunday November 13, 2005

Brooks -

I really like the November/December issue of Lenswork. The portfoliio by Robert Swiderski is gorgeous, and Roman Loranc's landscapes are also very nice. And the East Africa portfolio from Nick Brandt is fabulous.

Wonderful issue - thanks for the inspiration!

The portfoliio by Robert Swiderski is gorgeous,


The composition was pretty good, however, being digital images they really lacked the full tonal range that could have been expected under the circumstances. Sad, he could have done better, if he had only used quality materials to work with.

Thanks Brooks, I appreciate the offer.

Thanks for the heads up! Great offer! :)

Brooks,

The latest issue of Lenswork is amazing! I really like the interviews that went with some of the portfolios. The image of the elephant and exploding dust is stunning! I keep going back to it. Thanks for such an inspiration and good reading!

BWKate

Agree with earlier comment about Swiderski's portfolio. Given the opportunity to do an "inside" look at a church, then to resort to basically street photography techniques with the further limitations of digital seems like such a waste. Film could have enabled control of the overblown highlights, for example.

The other two portfolios just blow me away, especially Brandt's. His attitude of trying for a portrait of the animals puts his work head-&-shoulders above so many other wildlife photographers.

I agree that the latest issue is terrific. There's one true, blue traditionalist (Loranc), one hybridizer (Brandt), and a digitalist (Swiderski). The homogenizing element is Lensworks uncanny skill at rendering such disparate work as more or less equally tack sharp and tonally expansive which I don't for a minute believe is the case with the actual prints. I think Loranc's photographs are amazing (I've seen several of them in other places, but never an actual print). Brandt work is what's been observed above..and bravo! I disagree with some others, thought, about Swiderski. I think he did amazing work for such a novice (which I wouldn't have realized without reading about him.). I think the photographs would have been a lot different had he used a view camera, but I'm not sure they'd have been better. The opportunity to photograph churches can summon up some pretty conventional sorts of imagery; I like the somewhat more candid and "handheld" looking approach he used.

As to the CD (which I received with my copy of Lenswork in the mail), it was fun to finally put a face with the voice of so many audioblogs. Hi Brooks!

As much as I enjoy LensWork, the "free catalogue offer" just seemed to me like any other catalogue of the sort that fills all of our mailboxes this time of year, except I had to wait for Acrobat to load in order to view it, and it couldn't go into the paper recycling bin.

Thanks David for the feedback. One of the reasons I am interested in this is to determine if I want to get the Lenswork Extended or not - so I am looking at the quality and ease of use this product presents. I am a bit disturbed by all the digital artists that seem to be making their way into the pages of the magazine, however.