Light, Space & Time - Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity

Join us in welcoming David duChemin, a Canadian photographer, author, educator, amputee, and adventurer to the Central Library to launch his new title Light, Space & Time - Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity!

We will have copies of his book for sale at the event, followed by a presentation and a book signing.

About the book:
A book about the craft of camera-using and the creative struggle of picture-making. Learning how a camera works is not difficult. Once you understand how to focus and expose, the rest are details. So why is it such a challenge to make photographs that feel like they do what we hope for? Could it be we're asking the camera to do the work that all along has been ours to figure out? Is it possible we've been thinking too much about the camera and not enough about our own creativity? In an industry that obsesses over the gear and all too often ignores the deeper questions around creativity and expression, this should come as no surprise.

It’s true, the camera sees differently than we do. As our creative collaborator it can do things that we simply cannot. It can see much faster (1/8000 of a second) and much slower (8 seconds, or 8 minutes) than we can. It can cut the light in half, or double it. It can magnify, compress, and otherwise transform our field of view through lens and aperture choices. Learning to see as the camera does is, itself, an exercise in creative thinking and imagination.

The journey of mastering this craft is not so much about bending the camera to our will, but working with the many different ways the camera is able to see the world in order to create photographs that express the way we see and feel about it. That effort is more creative than it is technical. Crucially, this journey is also about learning to give ourselves the permission to create photographs that are truly our own, to risk and experiment, and to explore and play. Too often we hold ourselves back.

In Light, Space, and Time, photographer, teacher, and author David duChemin helps you learn to look in the same way as the camera does, and to think in the same language as the camera speaks. In 20 powerful essays, and featuring more than 100 beautiful photographs, David explores the place of the human behind the camera in the act of picture making, and he does so with the same inspiring heart, soul, and voice that he has brought to his previous best-selling books. Books that teach not only how to make photographs, but how to think like a photographer. Throughout the book, David encourages you to move beyond the functions of your camera to embrace the creative choices those functions make possible. This exploration provides new frameworks for thinking about your decisions, presents new ways to see and look, raises new questions about the challenges we face in being creative, and offers new answers as you carve out your own unique path forward. Most importantly, David will inspire you to head out with your camera and play with the possibilities held by every intersection of light, space, and time that eventually becomes a photograph.

The result of all this? Freedom. Freedom to find new ways of wrestling with the challenges we all face when collaborating with the camera to make something that is truly our own. Freedom to embrace your fundamental creative nature, to overcome the fear of trying something new. Freedom to work as an artist more at ease with a process that's inherently messy. And freedom to make the kinds of photographs you’ve always wanted to create.

Sponsored by Sony Canada

David duChemin is a Canadian photographer, author, educator, amputee and adventurer.  A former comedian turned humanitarian photographer, duChemin now spends his time behind the camera focused on wilder subjects. To his great delight and surprise, his books—among them Within The Frame, The Visual Toolbox, The Soul of the Camera, and The Heart of the Photograph—have been published in over a dozen languages and are celebrated for their focus on vision and creativity. His work and teaching can be found at DavidduChemin.com, and his books can be found on Amazon or your local bookstore. David's latest book, Light, Space & Time, Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity, has just been released.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Central Library, 800 3 Street Southeast, Calgary, Canada