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Tim Parkin
Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.
Books by British landscape photographers are fairly thin on the ground. We have a handful from the end of last year that we're going to review but there is one book from one of our featured photographers that we thought you'd like to know about.
You can see our interview with David Baker as our featured photographer here and also an interview with him after he had started his Sea Fever project for the Masters of Vision exhibition here.
Shortly after the Masters of Vision exhibition, Dav Thomas and David Breen approached him about a book of the Sea Fever work for their Triplekite book publishing business. The result is something quite special and a book the like of which just doesn't get published anymore.
You see in the 1960s there was a passion for oversize photography books, probably started by the Sierra Club books documenting the American wilderness. These books were about the size of an A3+ page and a double page spread worked out as about a 16"x20" print.
The results made for stunning browsing. For the Sea Fever book, they have done the same thing but with the advantages of modern press technology the quality of reproduction is stupendous.
Just to give you an idea, the size of the image needed to provide a double page spread is over 10,000px!
The Book
The result is an immersive book that really shows off the power of the images in David Baker's collection. Showing the collection to some of our guests at On Landscape it has been the almost universal reaction that they haven't seen the energy of the sea captured in quite this way before.
Here are a few spreads from the book to show you the size and impact of the images.
A lot of people will probably say they don't like double page spreads but in the context of conveying the emotional power of the images that David has taken I think they work exceptionally well. There can be few better ways to become immersed in a scene than to hold a 16x20 print in front of you!
We've talked about Triplekite before so you know they're doing good work and the printing in this is impeccable again and have reproduced every nuance of David's images. I'm very pleased that they've started this "Discover" series of oversize books and look forward to the next instalment.
As for David's work - I can definitely recommend it and it's inspiration for anyone considering project work.
You can buy "Sea Fever" from the seafeverbook.co.uk dedicated website for £25 or you can pay an extra £60 for a limited edition version with a signed and numbered A3 print.