Customer Reviews

Contemporary Landscape Photography: Professional Techniques for Capturing Spectacular Settings

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I purchased this book a little over a month ago and it has become my favorite technical read. I've been taking landscape SLR pictures since the 60's but only switched to digital photography a few years ago. This book has truly opened my eyes to the marvels of this new technology. The over view of Post-Processing techniques is a great summary of what can be done with the data the camera collects. The heart of this book is truly "professional techniques" for landscape photography that can benefit anyone, even point and shoot owners. My only caution here is you'll really want a DSLR after getting this book. I am lucky to live in upstate New York only a few miles from the southern boundry of the Adirondacks so I have the opportunity to visit the same sites as the author. Bottom line: great, easy read with something for everyone.

This beautiful and easily readable book manages to convey a great deal of very useful information which will be helpful to the near-beginner in photography as well as to the advanced amateur. Mr Heilman's motto is "perfect pictures every time" and if the precepts in this book are followed, that's a realistic objective.

While there are entire libraries of books dealing with aspects of landscape photography, it's hard to think of one of them which includes so much information in a concise and easily readable publication as effectively as "Contemporary Landscape Photography".

The book focuses on digital photography techniques and, to a slightly lesser extent, digital processing of images. Much of the content is equally applicable to film photography. Included are many gorgeously reproduced images which illustrate the techniques described, and are also inspiring examples of what one can aim for in one's own photography.

As a single source of information on digital (or film) landscape photography and image processing, this is the book to get. Read it for enjoyment - read it for inspiration - read it for instruction - and return to it again and again. You'll be very glad you did.

In "Contemporary Landscape Photography", Heilman tries to cover *a lot* of material, with a wide range of topics including equipment, exposure, composition, field work, and post processing (among others). Sadly, it misses the mark on basically all of these. As a book which is clearly meant for beginning and novice photographers, this book does such a poor job at explaining many fundamental concepts that it would do more to confuse that audience than educate.

First the positives. The print quality of this book is quite good, and the images are almost all excellent. If you like landscape photography, you'll find some inspiring pictures within. The images in this book are by far the best thing inside. Sadly, beyond that, I didn't find much to like about this book.

The opening chapter, "Equipment & Techniques", suffers from a problem I've seen in other beginner photography books: forward referencing (i.e. where jargon is used before it is defined; and sometimes it's not defined at all). A good novice photography book needs to establish fundamental concepts first, and only then discuss topics that build on it. This book doesn't do that.

I'm always bewildered when I read books like this one that start out talking about equipment (including features like high ISO noise reduction; metering modes; histograms; etc), before even describing what the photographic triangle is. If you're a beginner, what good does it do you to read about how different cameras have exposure compensation features in 1/2 or 1/3 stop increments, when you haven't even read anything about what a stop of light even is? The overall content on equipment was mediocre at best (perhaps it's best described as an "overview"). Don't expect to learn much here. The basics are described, but with less detail than you'd find in many other books.

Later on, this book tries cover the exposure triangle, but I have never read such a horrible description of this. A firm understanding of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO is absolutely critical in photography. Many books are dedicated entirely to this important topic, and this book doesn't come close to explaining the topic adequately. The descriptions are very terse, there aren't enough examples, and the material is disorganized (in fact in some cases it's actually useless). There is an entire page dedicated to an EV chart that nobody is ever going to use, and adds nothing to the explanation of photographic exposure. Heilman starts doing reciprocity calculations talking about equivalent exposures before even explaining what's going on. How is a beginner going to know f/22 is 3 stops away from f/8 or why that matters?

Another example of a poor explanation in this book is the description on metering modes. The whole topic of 18% reflectance is just butchered. Instead of just saying that light meters consider everything as a middle "gray" tonal value (and hence the need to compensate when your scene is really darker or lighter than this), there's some very confusing text saying sky/trees/grass are 18% gray, and things "average out" to gray in such a scene, but in other scenes get over or under-exposed. The text makes it sounds like the author just "knows" what the reflectance value of things in the photograph are (and you should too), rather than understanding how a meter works. There's also some inaccuracies in the text (albeit usually inconsequential, like calling the shape of a histogram a "bell curve", when few histograms will actually exhibit that shape).

Here's another bad example of explanations. There's a topic about "flash and artificial light" and it basically talks about light painting without describing exactly what it is or how it's done. It goes only as far as saying you use artificial light, like flashlights, but doesn't describe what's really going on. This topic also just pulls out the term "flash compensation", and of course, there's nowhere that's described (and why that's different than ambient light exposure). If you've never heard of this term, you'd be left scratching your head.

The next section of this book is what you might consider the "artistic" part of the book. There is some very vague and poorly described topics on composition, some rhetoric about learning from masters and finding a "style", and some generally unhelpful text about lighting and weather. There are also some topics on creative techniques like long exposures, panning, and depth of field, etc. Like just about every other topic in this book, each idea is only a page or two long with really shallow descriptions that fall well short of being useful in practice. Take a topic like "Evoking Emotion" on page 76. There's so much that can be said about this. Use of tones, colour, and textures can be used effectively to convey a mood, but how and why these work is basically only given a sentence or two of treatment. Half the text is about "being in touch with your emotions", but that's not going to translate to good photographs by itself.

Chapter 3 is entitled "On location", and this might better be described as "filler material". Here you'll find dozens of short 1 or 2 page sections on an array of different shooting conditions/subjects like sunrise/sunset, clouds, the moon, weather, etc. Most of the text is extremely generic and repetitive, and almost entirely void of useful content. I'll give you an example of what to expect. On page 136, the topic is "Majestic Mountains". There are 4 paragraphs that basically can be summed up as saying "I hike a lot, and landscapes are beautiful. Every mountain is unique, and it changes with the seasons and weather. Try different focal lengths and shoot from different perspectives." There appeared to be no real purpose to this part of the book.

The last section is on post-processing. Like the section on equipment, this section also fails to be instructive. Basically, if you don't already know how to use Photoshop, you're probably going to be lost with the descriptions of how layers are used for various operations; if you do know how to use Photoshop, you'll learn nothing new.

Overall, I'd say that although there's a lot of different topics covered in this book, it's obvious that none of these topics is given the treatment they deserve. If you're a novice, I highly suggest you skip this book, and get dedicated books to teach you about technical fundamentals, composition, and post-processing instead. There are plenty to choose from, and you'll learn far more, and have way fewer gaps in your understanding than if you tried to take it all in by reading this book. Not recommended.

A great source for fine tuning your skills. His explanations and illustrations were very easy to understand and apply to practice.

I purchased this book based on a favorable review in a local photography magazine. Overall, I was impressed with the photographs, the general knowledge of the author, and many of the unique techniques the author listed in the book.

My only criticism is that the author used up 30+ pages covering photographic equipment and software which will be obsolete long before the book has outlived its usefulness. As an alternative, the author could have focused more on discussing the equipment generically instead of specifically.

A good book, clear, concise, and camera settings with photos. Most photo subjects covered, descriptions coincide with the photos. You can mine for nuggets here.

What can I say one of the best tutorial books written on digital photography with great easy to read charts and the explanation of Hyperfocal has made my results even more stunning, and even for a novice this is highly recommended reading if this book does not have an effect on making your knowledge or results better I will be a stunned. Highly highly recommended.

A couple of decades ago, John Shaw was the 'go to' author for nature photography. Great images and excellent details of equipment selection, preferences and technique garnered a huge following among film-based photgraphers. But now John is writing eBooks on Photoshop and Lightroom, and the equipment side of the craft has languished.

Unitl now... I've been a big fan of Carl's work and now his book really steps up and fills the gap. The book includes coverage of digital Nikon and Canon equipment with no seeming preference. These two manufacturers are the accepted tools of most nature photographers, not only for build quality, but also for their comprehensive offerings of lenses, macro gear, filters, etc. Of course a lot of the material applies to both film and digital, but the emphasis is clearly on digital, including some techniques for Photoshop.

This book is full of useful information for anyone who takes outdoor photos. The insight and information provided has been more than I expected. There are explanations along with photos and I have learned a great deal from reading and re-reading this book. I would recommend it for anyone from the amateur to the professional.

Good basic guide on landscape photography. It covers the basics and keeps things on a simple level but gives you the knowledge to be able to fine tune your work. I would recommend it to others.