Author, Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers	September 2006
	I’ve always been very diligent about making sure that in each new version of the book I filter through the new features to write just about the features that are important to photographers. I have always tried to make sure that there is a really comprehensive update. It’s not just a book with a new name on the front with the same old pictures and the same old techniques.

I’ve learned that you’re a professional photographer mostly for fashion and beauty clients. Are you first and foremost a photographer or a digital imaging expert?

I would say probably foremost I consider myself a photographer, writing about Photoshop.

How did you get into fashion and beauty photography?

I arrived in London wanting to work as an assistant and it just so happened that I worked with all fashion photographers. It was a market that I got to know fairly well, and specifically I got to make good contacts with hairdressers and people like that. I’ve done mainly hair and beauty work throughout my career.

Did you study photography in school?

Yes, for about two years, I think.

Right out of high school?

Yes, at about 18. In high school I did photography as a hobby. I decided at about 16 that I wanted to be a photographer, not really knowing what that entailed. That was my ambition.

Did you have an interest in the digital side of photography early on?

That was something that obviously wasn’t around when I first started. I saw a demo of the very first big high-powered computers around 1987. Right away I knew I wanted to get involved in that side of photography.

What made you a successful photographer?

I would say not giving up. It’s a very tough industry for people to survive in. There are more obstacles now than when I first started in the early 80’s.

What kind of obstacles?

These days, it’s incredibly competitive. Everybody wants to be a fashion photographer, even more than before. It is not the way I did things, but it seems these days that to get your reputation going and to get established in the industry you have to do a lot of free shoots. Many magazines only take free submissions. It becomes very costly and difficult when you’re really just an assistant and not earning a great salary. You have to pay to get all the equipment, materials and resources together to put together a shoot and get a story done and then you get it published, and don’t get paid for it. If you want to become established and make a career you have to somehow find the money to do all this work. As I say, it’s not how I got started and I have never been happy with the direction the industry has taken. The industry is also a lot savvier to usage rights and to proper contracts which are imposed on people. It’s a real battle for photographers to deal with all of that and have any money left at the end of the day.

Where do you do most of your work?

I have a large office in North London. I do all my research work and production from there. I’ve got six computers around me.

Do you work out of a studio as well?

I don’t actually own a studio. I rent out as I need to. When I’m doing a shoot I always go to the same studio and pay a fee on a daily basis.

Do you travel much?

Yes, a lot, especially when I am asked to speak at various conferences around the world. My photographic style is studio work. I occasionally do something on location. If I do go on location it’s usually to go to another studio. I’ve been over to other countries and shot at studios there, but always indoors.

Was it difficult to make the transition from shooting film to shooting digitally? Did you welcome that transition?

It’s been about ten years since the first digital cameras appeared. In that time there’s been a lot of change, and an awful lot of hiccups and things to overcome. Even people who were experts in these things found it quite difficult to adapt to using the technology in the early years. More recently I think it’s become a lot smoother. There is a big difference between shooting analog and shooting digital, and many work flow considerations that go with the transition. Many people have been led down different paths in learning how to do things. Everybody has been kind of making it up as they go along, me included. Fortunately, with my association with the Photoshop team, I’ve had more of the expert advice.

Have you been involved in digital imaging from the beginning, around 1987?

I was only an observer. I was interested in it since 1987 but I couldn’t afford to get involved in it back then. The only way to get into digital imaging back in the late 1980’s was to have a big advertising budget and be able afford to pay for an operator with the system to do all the researching for you. It was very much a skilled profession. I think at the time there were only about ten digital retouchers in the whole of London. I remember a time when there was only about four or five offices that you could go to get digital researching done. It was very small in number, a very specialized service, and very expensive. My own business went through its own struggles around the late 80’s and coming into about 1990. I was pretty broke around then and was having a hard time trying to keep my business going. I couldn’t afford the equipment, so that probably delayed my entry into digital, which is a shame. If I hadn’t been struggling to keep my head above water I probably would have been able to afford the Macintosh computer in the early stages and get started sooner. But as it happened I was working with Photoshop 2.5, and soon after that Photoshop 3.

What has digital imaging done for your photography career? What opportunities has it given you?

I think that it gave me the freedom to really control the output of my pictures; I could control what happened after I pressed the button. That’s the best way to summarize it.

Did it give you the opportunity to be more creative?

I think so. It gave me more opportunities and you can use those to be creative or to make a complete mess of your efforts. You see plenty of examples of a bad use of Photoshop, where people haven’t necessarily improved their work creatively even if they think they have. But from my point of view I think that understanding how to use the tools sensibly and skillfully has given me the opportunity to be more creative. I’ve enjoyed the freedom Photoshop have given me.

What has been the biggest change in digital imaging over the last ten years? Is it affordability?

That’s true; the affordability is one big change. When I first started it was very expensive to get any kind of computer system together that could do the sort of work that we wanted to do, using Photoshop. The cost factor makes it a lot more accessible and just about everybody knows what Photoshop is.

Definitely.

It’s universally understood. But I think the other major factor has been the growth and ease of digital capture. That has absolutely increased the number of photographs that are taken, not just by professionals, but by everybody. It’s quite remarkable. A huge explosion has taken place in the way that we use images. We communicate with images more now by taking a photograph of something and attaching it as an email and sending it to somebody. There are lots of ways that people are using pictures that is actually changing our lives in quite a profound way. We are relying on digital images almost without thinking about it. It’s like the internet. The implication for Photoshop, in terms of the processing side, is having to adjust quite radically in order to keep up with the way people are working. When I first started it ten years ago, I was just processing maybe one or two pictures in a day. It was little bits and pieces, you know, a picture at a time. Recently a photographer friend of mine was here taking some pictures in London and he was shooting something like 1500 to 2000 pictures a day, and bringing them onto a computer and editing them. So the number of pictures that we’re dealing with in a year has probably grown hundreds of times, if not a thousand times more than what we probably would be working with ten years ago. That’s the big difference.

You mentioned earlier your involvement with the people at Adobe who make the Photoshop program. Do you have an active role in the development of new versions of Photoshop?

Well, I’m one of the alpha testers who they confide in and will discuss new features with before they send them up to the more general list of testers. I’ve known the Photoshop team probably over the last ten years and so I’ve got good friendships there and trust has been built up over that period. They trust my feedback on certain things. Therefore, I do have a tendency to sort of guide new features and prioritize what I think would be most wanted.

So you come up with ideas?

Yes. I can’t reveal stuff that’s going on at the moment, but there are features going on now which will be going into the next version of Photoshop that are a result of things I have communicated or suggestions that I’ve made. You know this happens with other testers as well. You can sometimes pinpoint features that actually grew out of an idea that was seen at a seminar or through seeing one of us working using Photoshop.

I read that you’re a member of Pixel Genius. According to the website Pixel Genius is a collaboration of industry leading experts dedicated to creating products and service for the photographic and digital imaging industries. I read that you helped develop Photokit Color. Is that a plug-in for Photoshop?

Yes. It is kind of a fun plug-in but with some practical uses as well. It’s got features there, for example, which automatically color corrects things. It also has things like color turning, for doing special coloring techniques, or cross processing film effects, color overlays and in the more recent version that I’ve just produced and released this year you can do more film-like effects. You can get Technicolor looking images, and infrared effects as well. So it’s kind of like a toolbox, since a toolbox has these special effects you can apply. It uses the tools in Photoshop to create these layers for you in your image. We released that product in April this year.

Have you released others?

Yes, we’ve released a product for sharpening. I wasn’t involved in designing that one myself. It is a sharpening plug-in for Photoshop that’s become very popular and has been selling really well. It was designed by Bruce Fraser, who is a fellow Photoshop author and founding member of Pixel Genius.

Do you enjoy collaborating with the other Photoshop experts?

You know the fun of doing this stuff is that you have the opportunity to make connections within the industry worldwide, and sometimes those connections can lead to partnerships like Pixel Genius. We get on very well and have become friends with each other. We created a company from scratch, and it’s been a great success. I think that it’s positive and useful to have collaborations with fellow experts because you can learn from each other. The interesting thing about the industry is that everything is changing so much all the time. You have to be prepared to admit that tried-and-tested techniques that you’ve clung onto and used for many years sometimes just go out of date and you have to re-learn to do things all over again. For the most part, I find people in the industry are really willing to share, very open, and great fun to hang out with.

How nice that you don’t have to go into an office everyday and do the same thing over and over again.

I know, but it is a constant challenge. Every time I write a new book I have to look back and sometimes I’ll say “I can’t do that thing anymore,” or “that advice is out-of-date.” Sometimes the old ways completely contradict the new ways of working, and so you have to change your view about certain things. But I do find it interesting. It’s nice to know that it’s never ever going to be static; it’s always going to evolve.

Was it your idea to write your first Photoshop book or did that idea come from someone else?

The idea actually came from Andrea Bruno, who was with Adobe in the UK at the time. I believe she was head of Adobe Europe at that particular time. I met up with her once or twice and she knew that I’d been writing for some of the UK magazines and she just said to me, “Look, why don’t you write a book about Photoshop for photographers, because it’s one of our big growing markets." I think at that time there were maybe twenty or thirty Photoshop books around. At first I thought, does the world really need yet another book on Photoshop?

But, were there any books specifically for photographers?

No. They were written by people who weren’t photographers. It seemed odd that Photoshop was a program that was about manipulating photographic images, yet as far as I could see there wasn’t anybody out there producing these books who was actually a working photographer or even working with very nice photographs, for that matter.

What makes your book special?

I would say it goes back to what you were saying in the very beginning; it’s that I’m a working photographer. You know all the books I’ve written so far I’ve written while I’ve been working on shoots and putting all this stuff into practice. So I am a photographer who understands what it is that photographers want to get out of Photoshop and I think that’s what gives me the edge. I don’t write about something in an abstract way. I always describe how to use these techniques in a way that actually makes them applicable.

Is digital editing the main focus of this book?

Yes.

What other things do you cover in the book?

Image editing is the central part of the process, but I also look at the work flow as you can use it in Photoshop with lots of pictures. I do spend quite a bit of time talking about image management, which is equally important.

The book comes with a free CD. What does the CD contain?

The CD contains a selection of movie tutorials, which I’ve recorded and which complement the book contents. There are approximately ten movies on there all together. They cover some of the work flows and some of the techniques that apply to the book. You can read them in the book you and then follow them on the CD. You can listen to me talking you through the steps that are used and you can see it taking place on the screen. They are useful teaching aids. Many people have said that they find that having the tutorials there absolutely enable them to learn a lot more efficiently.

I’ve heard this book has been translated into many languages. Do you know how many?

I’ve lost count. There’s some in progress at the moment. I know for sure it’s been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Finnish. I think a Korean version is being translated at the moment and possibly Russian as well, because there have been discussions about that. So, quite a few languages.

This is a best selling book and it’s very highly regarded. What has been the key to your success with your series of Photoshop books?

I think building a trust with the readers, and perhaps not taking them for granted. I do put a lot of effort into each new book that I produce. I’ve been fortunate to work closely with engineers and to know the details about each and every new feature that’s put into the program. That has given me a lot of heads-up information, which has not been available to everybody who’s written Photoshop books. I’ve always been very diligent about making sure that in each new version of the book I filter through the new features to write just about the features that are important to photographers. I have always tried to make sure that there is a really comprehensive update. It’s not just a book with a new name on the front with the same old pictures and the same old techniques. I buy other books that come out to compare and see how they look. I look at the index and check out some of the new features and find that only about a third of the new features have really been covered. I feel quite proud of the fact that if I do a new version of the book then it does actually have really just about everything you need to know about Photoshop for photography in there without taking any shortcuts. I try to do that with the images as well. I go through every single page in the book and if it needs changing or improving then I will do so and update it accordingly.

Are you more proud of your photography or your writing?

I think I’m a true photographer because obviously I’ve got loyal clients who like the work that I do and I enjoy the photography that I create. If you were forcing me to be honest, I wouldn’t try to claim to be the world’s best fashion and beauty photographer. It’s given me a good living, and I do pictures I’m proud of, but I know I’m not in the top range of famous or acknowledged fashion photographers. I never reached that pinnacle of fame, whereas with the writing I have. I have become well-known for it. As a writer, for example, it feels great to know that I can go to any country where there is a conference going on and I can basically turn up and they can promote an event with my name and that’s the draw.

What’s next for you? What do you have planned for the next two or three years?

I’m guessing I’ll be working on writing books, and I won’t neglect the photography. I want to keep that going and to keep working as a professional photographer. I will carry on with the development of the software plug-ins as well. I’m going to have to rationalize at some point and start filtering down what I do.

I wondered how you found time for so much.

Yes, and I’ve got other priorities.

Like a new wife?

Exactly, and that’s important. Camilla and I got married in New York City last year. It doesn’t have to be all about work, I do like to enjoy my life as well. When we go on holiday I can just leave the computer behind and not think about it for a week or two. I enjoy doing that. Ultimately, I’ll keep being a working photographer, but without the stress of trying to run a highly demanding busy photographic career and a busy writing career. It’s not healthy trying to do too many things.

How long have you been married? I think I read that your wife is a make-up artist?

Yes, Camilla is a make-up artist. We met over 3 years ago, and we got married last year.

There is a model with beautiful make-up featured on the cover of your most recent edition. Did your wife do the makeup on that model?

Yes, she did. I was actually thinking about us doing another picture for the next cover. I am a beauty photographer after all, and so having a picture of a good looking model, nicely finished off like that, is an advantage. I always tend to think, well, hell, that’s my specialization, I should be able to go and do a decent cover for my own book.

I agree! Is your next edition in the works right now?

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This article by Jacqui Tavis
j.tavis@elsevier.com