I am a playwright. My professional life has been dedicated to the depiction of conflict. If the drama is not a conflict, it can only be a lesson. The drama’s antagonists are called characters; our knowledge of their character is limited to their actions: they made this or that choice, and it resulted in this […]
Beauty is alluring, truth is essential, and art is surely humanity’s purest reaction to these ideals. But what of that other irrepressible human trait—curiosity? Well, for me curiosity is the fuel for science, which in turn is the art of understanding truth and beauty. And this beautiful book presents a perfect fusion of these paragons, […]
Photography is more popular than ever before, with billions of photos shot and shared each year. If photography has never been so popular it is largely because it has never been so simple. Sophisticated modern cameras make it easy to shoot and upload photos, while editing software can give dramatic results. The downside is that […]
GETTING STARTED WHAT IS A DRONE? A drone is a type of unmanned aircraft either controlled remotely by a pilot on the ground, or by a series of onboard electronics, or by both. Drones have their roots in the military, whereby governments could perform aerial combat operations without risking the safety of their pilots. Today, […]
INTRODUCTION With such labour-saving advances in digital camera and software technology, many of us are increasingly passive about photography, readily accepting the benefits of automated digital production without fully understanding the fundamental principles. We often view our photographic work only on-screen, making review, reflection and development much harder than it need be. Left to dominate, […]
Shigeru Miyamoto, senior executive director of Nintendo Corporation and general producer of the Legend of Zelda series I started working on the first Legend of Zelda project with a small staff in a corner of Nintendo’s development office in Kyoto. It was the mideighties, and the Famicom [Editor’s note: Famicom is the Japanese name for […]
The Goal of This Book The goal of this book is to help you greatly increase the quality and beauty of your photography. The book covers the essential elements of portrait photography—from common mistakes to the needed equipment, we lay a foundation of how to use the tools of the trade. We then get into […]
Learning botanical illustration from scratch can be a daunting prospect, so we have tried to simplify matters. Together with examples and explanations, we have set out step-by-step exercises for you to follow, with notes on how to tackle each project. Most are quite simple; others are moderately easy and a few are more challenging. This […]
By opening this book, you’ve taken a flying leap into the frightening, mysterious, largerâ€thanâ€life universe of classical music, where 100 people dressed like 18thâ€century waiters fill the stage, doing some very strange things to hunks of metal and wood, filling the air with strange and exotic sounds. We can sense the hair beginning to rise […]
Advancing Your Photography Photography is my life. It happens to be how I make my living, but before I ever became a professional, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I collected books by photographers I admired and subscribed to every photo magazine available; I was a fanatic. However, I never […]
Late on a hazy night in 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda told me he wanted to write a hip-hop concept album about the life of Alexander Hamilton. For a second I thought we were sharing a drunken joke. We were probably drunk, but he wasn’t joking. We had bonded a year earlier over a shared love of […]
To be in the visual arts, one must have two great desires. One is to produce art work. The other is to learn. Learning is to improve skills. to expand abilities, to understand hard work, to meet goals, and to enjoy the trip. It begins when we can see, hear, touch, and ask questions. It […]