Thomas Birke

Inspiration from My Bookshelf #2

TODAY: Peter Bialobrzeski - Neontigers

-

(this series is about books I have in my bookshelf that inspired me a lot)

I don’t even know how I first took notice, but when I discovered the Neon Tiger works of Mr. Bialobrzeski, I was instantly hooked. It didn’t take long for me to buy the book. It is at least something, since I could never afford a print. I flipped the pages a thousand times, tried to reengineer what he would have done to obtain that look and find the locations. I still didn’t found out completely, but the quest helped me tremendously in defining my own style and find new locations. All I could imagine is: a) he uses low contrast print film, like portra NC and b) overexposes a lot, probably more than two stops than what I would expose. And c) probably some color correction in Photoshop, it seems like the black contrast got exaggerated in CMYK to obtain the details while maintaining the overexposed look. But that doesn’t really matter, lets take a look at the cover:

The book consists of 113 Pages, has been published by hatje cantz (ISBN: 3-7757-1394-8) and contains 40 Images. It features an Introduction by Florian Hanig, which I would copy one to one for my first book ;). The printing quality is very good, you can make out lot’s of details when you look closer.

The locations are amazing, and I wonder how he obtained them. In his book, Mr. Bialobrzeski talks about using PR Managers of hotels and a lot of own scouting, maybe that is one way. Maybe I get a chance to ask him one day. Let’s take a look at my favorite pages:

See more inspiring images at his website! http://www.bialobrzeski.de/ (this also contains images not in the book)

For a complete reference of contained Images look: index 1 index 2 index 3 index 4

And finally, an image I found on the web, that shows him during work. Seems like he uses an older Linhof 4x5.

If you would like to buy the book, it is currently only available from some used book sharks at Amazon.com and Amazon.de - maybe you could try your luck on eBay! - The original price tag has been €39,80 in Germany.