All Access: Your Backstage Pass to Concert Photography by Alan Hess

Lowest Price: $17.73

Advice, inspiration, and insight for taking remarkable concert photos

Concert photography poses a unique set of challenges to photographers, including night or low-light, inconsistent stage lighting, a moving subject matter, limitations on vantage point, complex exposure situations, and no chance for re-takes. Compounded with those hurdles is a lack of resources on this subject?until now. All Access: Your Backstage Pass to Concert Photography fills this gap and provides you with all the information you need to know, from choosing the right gear and camera settings to negotiating rights to publish or share photos as well as how to best edit your photos in post-production.

• Reveals essential techniques and valuable best practices for dealing with the unique challenges of concert photography
• Features more than 200 stunning concert photographs to inspire you and illustrate the tips and techniques the author describes
• Written by experienced author and well-known concert photographer Alan Hess

All Access: Your Backstage Pass to Concert Photography is an ideal resource if you are determined to learn the skills necessary to capture clear, well-composed, and professional-level concert photos.

Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) (Cleveland Museum of Art) by

Lowest Price: $31.50

One of the preeminent figures in 20th-century Chinese art, Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) revolutionized the tradition of Chinese ink painting, opening the door to innovations by subsequent generations. As both an art historian and a painter, he directed his work toward protecting cultural heritage in times of war and revolution. From traditional-style landscape and figure painting to political artwork manifesting state ideology during the Mao era, Fu's work demonstrates his search for a unique artistic language that speaks for the self and the nation. Using native tradition as an essential element, Fu's artistic modernity defined Chinese art as a discipline distinct from Western and international socialist art of the time.

Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution is the first comprehensive retrospective of Fu's work to be published in the West. The book includes more than 100 artworks that demonstrate his stylistic transformation across several decades. Insightful essays offer the latest scholarship on Fu's life and art, Japan's impact on modern Chinese art, and art and politics in China's turbulent 20th century. Order Here

Mastering Microsoft Lync Server 2010 by Nathan Winters, Keith Hanna

Lowest Price: $34.79

An in-depth guide on the leading Unified Communications platform

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 maximizes communication capabilities in the workplace like no other Unified Communications (UC) solution. Written by experts who know Lync Server inside and out, this comprehensive guide shows you step by step how to administer the newest and most robust version of Lync Server. Along with clear and detailed instructions, learning is aided by exercise problems and real-world examples of established Lync Server environments. You'll gain the skills you need to effectively deploy Lync Server 2010 and be on your way to gaining all the benefits UC has to offer.

• Gets you up and running with Lync Server—whether you are migrating from Office Communications Server or new to Lync Server.
• Walks you through all of the essential stages for deploying Lync Server
• Shows integration with Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server
• Demonstrates how to monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot problems more efficiently

Mastering Lync Server 2010 is a must-have resource for anyone looking to manage all the various forms of communication from one user interface. Order Here

The DSLR Filmmaker's Handbook: Real-World Production Techniques by Barry Andersson, Janie L. Geyen

Lowest Price: $25.08

A how-to guide for getting professional-quality video from your DSLR

Shooting HD Video with a video-enabled DSLR has many benefits and some tricky drawbacks that digital filmmakers and videographers can overcome to get professional results. The DSLR Filmmaker's Handbook helps filmmakers harness the HD video capabilities of their DSLRs to create professional-level video. Packed with professionally-tested techniques, this indispensible book serves as a training guide for the complex steps that must be taken before, during, and after filming.

• Teaches you the key tools and techniques for using your DSLR to shoot high-quality, professional-level video
• Distills dense information about filmmaking and filters it down to easily understood granules
• Shows you what to expect and what to avoid with your DSLR and how to maximize the visual look of your film
• Shares tools and techniques that have been used in real-world, independent movie-making environments

The DSLR Filmmaker's Handbook shows you how to overcome any tricky drawbacks that you may face while shooting HD video with your DSLR. Order Here

Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot by Greg Borenstein

Lowest Price: $23.82

This detailed, hands-on guide provides the technical and conceptual information you need to build cool applications with Microsoft’s Kinect, the amazing motion-sensing device that enables computers to see. Through half a dozen meaty projects, you’ll learn how to create gestural interfaces for software, use motion capture for easy 3D character animation, 3D scanning for custom fabrication, and many other applications.

Perfect for hobbyists, makers, artists, and gamers, Making Things See shows you how to build every project with inexpensive off-the-shelf components, including the open source Processing programming language and the Arduino microcontroller. You’ll learn basic skills that will enable you to pursue your own creative applications with Kinect.

• Create Kinect applications on Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux
• Track people with pose detection and skeletonization, and use blob tracking to detect objects
• Analyze and manipulate point clouds
• Make models for design and fabrication, using 3D scanning technology
• Use MakerBot, RepRap, or Shapeways to print 3D objects
• Delve into motion tracking for animation and games
• Build a simple robot arm that can imitate your arm movements
• Discover how skilled artists have used Kinect to build fascinating projects

Compiling Autumn: The Making Of Discordance Axis "The Inalienable Dreamless" by Andrew Childers

Lowest Price: $8.00

The story behind "The Inalienable Dreamless", Discordance Axis' final 23 minute run for the sea recorded to tape in 1999 and apparently still of vague interest to collectors of obscure failed grindcore bands from NJ. Andrew Childers, writer and editor at Grind And Punishment, covers the making of the last Discordance Axis album through interviews with the entire band, engineer John Du'va, Aaron Turner at Hydrahead and a variety of artists who were impacted by the record. Order Here

Money Well Spent?: The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History by Michael Grabell

Lowest Price: $14.99

The 2012 presidential campaign will, above all else, be a referendum on the Obama administration’s handling of the financial crisis, recalling the period when Obama’s "audacity of hope” met the austerity of reality. Central to this is the ’’American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009’’—the largest economic recovery plan in American history. Senator Mitch McConnell gave a taste of the enormity of the money committed: if you had spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, it still would not add up to the price tag of the stimulus package.

A nearly entirely partisan piece of legislation— Democrats voted for it, Republicans against— the story of how the bill was passed and, more importantly, how the money was spent and to what effect, is known barely at all. Stepping outside the political fray, ProPublica’s Michael Grabell offers a perceptive, balanced, and dramatic story of what happened to the tax payers’ money, pursuing the big question through behind-the-scenes interviews and on-the-ground reporting in more than a dozen states across the country. Order Here

Visual Inventory by John Pawson

Lowest Price: $32.31

John Pawson's career as an architect and designer spans a variety of sizes and programs: from bowls to bridges, and monasteries to Calvin Klein stores. In addition to his acclaimed design work, he is the author of Phaidon's successful Minimum, a book that paired images and captions to illustrate the notion of simplicity in a beautiful and inspirational manner. Visual Inventory presents some of the images from Pawson's personal collection of over 200,000 digital snapshots. The book opens with an essay explaining the importance of photography as a tool for Pawson's work, and the images are set one per page with illuminating captions. Covering a huge range of subjects, the photographs form a remarkle body of reference material. Some of the images illustrate a particular idea out form, material or space; others reflect the author's interest in returning repeatedly to certain subjects, capturing the changes brought by different weather, light conditions, seasons and patterns of use. Each image has been chosen for the book because it is useful, offering a lesson in visual thinking. None of the photographs in the book have been cropped or altered; it is the selection, arrangement and captioning of the images that make this book unique, valule and attractive to any architect, designer, artist or student who wants to see the world around them with a stronger eye. Order Here

Scott Campbell: If You Don't Belong, Don't Be Long by Al Moran, Justin Theroux, Richard Price

Lowest Price: $26.37

Adored by celebrity patrons and admired by his peers in the industry, Scott Campbell is known not only for his amazing technique and vision as a tattoo artist, but also as a respected fine artist on the contemporary scene. Both Campbell’s artwork and tattoo work are informed by timeless trends of “new antiquarian” style, nineteenth-century hand-lettering, kitsch, and classic tattoo “flash.” 

Campbell is considered the tattoo artist of both the trendsetter and the daring celebrity. However, though Campbell has tattooed celebrities from the late Heath Ledger to visionaries like Marc Jacobs, it is through his distinctive aesthetic that he has become a celebrity in his own right. 

Campbell renders fleeting trends into timeless masterpieces not only on canvas and in sculpture, but also on skin. This book captures both, exemplifying how his tattoo work informs his artwork and vice versa.  Order Here

Bonnaroo: What, Which, This, That, The Other by Bonnaroo, Carol Mann Agency, Holly George-Warren

Lowest Price: $13.57

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