Victor Schrager

Schrager works in a studio, carefully using a large-format plate camera and lighting that gives his work with a painterly aesthetic. He chooses books according to scale, shape and colour. He ensures the horizontal surface is of a different shade or hue to the vertical so his images are bisected either subtly or blatantly. Schrager photographed little else than books for 5 years - the project became an obsession.

I set up the books in various lengths from the camera to allow me to show different depths of field by focusing on books farther away from the camera or books closer to the camera. I used a zoom lens (55-200mm) on manual focus to change the aperture

and depth of field in the photographs.

f/4.5

1/60 secs Original

For this photograph I increased the saturation, brightness, exposure and set the posterize level to 9. I decreased the contrast and the offset level slightly. I duplicated the background layer, set the blend mode to "soft light", changed the opacity to 20% and moved the layer slightly to the right to create a softer image. I then cropped the image slightly to focus it more towards the centre of the image and the different depth of fields. I believe this is the most successful image because of the larger variety of different depth of fields and the range of colours.

Edited

f/4.5 1/125 secs Original

I did exactly the same to this image but did not posterize it at all. Instead I used selective colours on the Cyan of the book closest to the camera and increase the cyan percentage to around 50% to enhance the colour of the book. I also did this for the reds in the image.

Edited