The Complete Guide to Light & Lighting in Digital Photography (A Lark Photography Book) [Paperback]

Michael Freeman (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Lark Books; 1st edition (October 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579908853
• ISBN-13: 978-1579908850
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 9.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #156,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #82 in Books > Arts & Photography > Photography > Lighting

More About the Author

Michael Freeman, professional photographer and author, with more than 100 book titles to his credit, was born in England in 1945, took a Masters in geography at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and then worked in advertising in London for six years. He made the break from there in 1971 to travel up the Amazon with two secondhand cameras, and when Time-Life used many of the pictures extensively in the Amazon volume of their World's Wild Places series, including the cover, they encouraged him to begin a full-time photographic career.

Since then, working for editorial clients that include all the world's major magazines, and notably the Smithsonian Magazine (with which he has had a 30-year association, shooting more than 40 stories), Freeman's reputation has resulted in more than 100 books published. Of these, he is author as well as photographer, and they include more than 40 books on the practice of photography - for this photographic educational work he was awarded the Prix Louis Philippe Clerc by the French Ministry of Culture. He is also responsible for the distance-learning courses on photography at the UK's Open College of the Arts.

Freeman's books on photography have been translated into fifteen languages, and are available on other Amazon international sites.

They are supported for readers by a regularly updated site, http://thefreemanview.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent content, a lot of production errors, July 24, 2007

By 

Mark Dalrymple (Leechburg, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Complete Guide to Light & Lighting in Digital Photography (A Lark Photography Book) (Paperback)

This is a beautiful book filled with lots of good information, in an easily digestible "one topic covered on each two-page spread". This makes the book easy to pick it up, read a couple of small sections, then put it down and go on to do something else. The writing style is more intricate than most mass-market books, which is actually refreshing compared to the more simplistic language that's used in books these days. The glossary is very good, covering a lot of jargon used in the book, and in the industry in general.

The one thing that mars this book are numerous production errors. There are missing illustrations, such as a caption saying "compare these two photos", and there's only one, or one that was comparing one scene with different lighting areas highlighted, but one of the photos was a duplicate of an unrelated photo appearing elsewhere on the page, and some pages there were words run together, like a badcutandpasteerror with InDesign. I would also be happier if some of the "compare these two photos" things had indications of the specific things to notice (see how the highlights of the llama's ears contrast with the bowler's tutu), so I know whether I'm missing something obvious, or it's a production error running the same photo twice.

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good content, but shoot the editor, September 6, 2007

By 

R. Burns (Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Complete Guide to Light & Lighting in Digital Photography (A Lark Photography Book) (Paperback)

My copy has the same ISBN number as listed above, but has a different cover and is listed "First Edition" 2007. I'm assuming that the book ordered here is virtually identical.

I found the content quite excellent. It explains light color well, bit depth and dynamic range well. It gets a tad bit repetitious comparing different lighting sources, although does point out important differences. The book does well to bridge the gap between Photoshop tuitorial and visual results; it will not tell you how to use Photoshop, but has many Photoshop screen captures discussing the effect of adjustments. There is a good section on High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging.

The book does have an undue amount of typos. If you can look past them then you can enjoy this book. In some cases the typos are extreme: there are four consecutive pages that show different lighting positions on a still life object; 80 images in all. However, the caption key for each picture describing the setup is exactly the same for each image! Somebody forgot to change the captions, so those pages are completely useless. I did email the author about this and received a nice reply and copy from the editor; they promised an update on their website. Time has come and gone, and the update page is still empty - I imagine they are either off slapping together a new book to sell to you, or maybe someone actually did shoot the editor...

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great book, needs editing, January 14, 2008

By 

Mike vS "Photo Tyro" (San Jose, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Guide to Light & Lighting in Digital Photography (A Lark Photography Book) (Paperback)

This is a great book, with lots of good ideas for how to set up lighting in differing situations. I've already improved my lighting using ideas from this book. What made this a tough slog is that the illustrations sometimes don't match up, and for a photography book, the illustrations tend to be kind of important.

I went on the publisher web site, and haven't found an errata, but will keep looking in the hopes, since cleaning up the figures (and adding the missing ones obviously referred to) would make this a great overall book.