Customer Reviews

Creative Black & White Photography

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Les McLean has produced a wonderful book to inspire darkroom and lightroom black and white printers of every ability. He is a great photographer and master printer who is happy to share the secrets of his trade with the rest of us.

McLean is an ex Geordie miner and rock and roll player who has spent 30 years honing his skill becoming one of the foremost black and white printers. He learnt his art by his own trial and error. He now teaches in England and the United States and has, at last, been persuaded to write his first book. He debunks many of the esoteric theories and concentrates instead on the essential practical techniques needed to make expressive prints.

This book was revelatory. Its central theme is to learn to adapt our seeing by pre-visualising how our photographic tools see and record what we chose to photograph. He first demonstrates how to produce an expressive negative and then leads us to techniques to turn it into a fine print.

Although most of the book deals with traditional methods, Les recognises that the two techniques can work together to take our image making into new directions. He shows how simple it is to use and configure Photoshop to produce digital negatives and apply darkroom techniques to produce sensational images.

This is certainly the best black and white book I have read. It has blown away the cobwebs, witchcraft and confusion of other manuals. I eagerly await his next book.

I found this to be a pretty good book for nature and landscape photography. The cover is very misleading. It is a wonderful cover photo and I expected to see a lot more people pictures of that quality inside the book. There is much more weight given to scenics.

The information on manipulating the black and white image is well presented.

This book is very well written and contains numerous good ideas about making a good black and white picture. Unfortunately, with the changes in technology and digital imaging, the book is now outdated. I hope the author has the opportunity to rewrite this book to encomapss digital technology.

This is a very good book for black and white film shooters, but the information on digital is not current. This is a problem with many older photography books in a digital age. Since I no longer use film, information on developing and printing is no longer applicable to me.

I like the author's photographs very much and was able to get a lot of good ideas from his work.

This book would be okay if I still used film, which I don't. The author barely touches on digital and the information on the subject is way out of date.