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60 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learn How To See a Photograph!, March 31, 2002
This review is from: Designing a Photograph: Visual Techniques for Making your Photographs Work (Paperback)
Designing a Photograph isn't going to spoon feed you information and teach you technical skills. The emphasis of the book is to teach you how to see when you're photographing. The idea is to explain the different aspects of a photograph to you, visually show you with an example, and then have you explore using a "visual exercise" (a shooting assignment). One previous reviewer was unsatisfied with the book, claiming "We apparently must figure out the results for ourselves." Well that is the whole idea of the book. You will never learn how if someone always tells you what to do and you never learn the process. As a photographer myself who has worked for other photographers, I learned much by listening to their advice and watching how they worked. I truly learned by using what I heard and saw and keeping that it mind while I was shooting on my own. For those interested in photography, the Applied Design section gives you a glimpse of what's involved in being a professional photographer. When you work in photography for a living, not everything you shoot is what you would choose to shoot for yourself. Many of the photographs are from jobs, especially in this section. They are there to illustrate a point. If you find them boring, I suggest you avoid photography as a career because you would most likely not enjoy it. It's not all as glamourous as most people believe. In short, if you are looking for a book to give you rules to follow like a Kodak guide to taking better pictures, this is not for you. It is not a technical guide that will teach you how to operate your camera. There are plenty of books out there to do that. The focus of this book is to teach you the process of designing a photograph and to learn to see on your own.
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85 of 98 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Something's Missing, January 25, 2002
This review is from: Designing a Photograph: Visual Techniques for Making your Photographs Work (Paperback)
If there were a "Truth in Book Titling Law", Bill Smith would have received a maximum sentence. This book does not teach you what its title purports. Once a photographer has learned how to manipulate the controls on his camera for proper exposure and focus, he wants to know how to capture the world around him with a camera in a way that will convey it to others in the way that he comprehends it in his mind. This process requires the photographer first to see in his mind's eye what it is he wants to photograph, be it object, relationship or emotion. Next the photographer arranges the elements onto film or charge coupled device. Most people can learn how to make an exposure that people will recognize as part of the world. The quality of previsualization (to use the great photographer Ansel Adams' word) and composition is what makes the difference between a snapshot and art. The title of this book suggests that it will help you improve the quality of your photography. However, most of the language in this book is vague generalities that defy the reader to extract a useful lesson. Oh, there are some almost useful sections. The chapter "Look before You See" suggests a number of photographic exercises that could be useful. For example Smith advises that you shot a roll of film on a single subject. "Vary the camera angle, the lens, the distance from the subject, and the focus...." But then what. It would appear that we will automatically extract something from what is on film that will help us learn. But he doesn't tell us how varying the camera angle will effect the photograph. We apparently must figure out the results ourselves. Without a little more guidance, we could well end up with 36 shots of nothing satisfactory. I wondered if Smith was saying that a person can't be taught composition but can only learn by trial and error. If that's so, why buy a book? I'm not suggesting that the exercise approach is not one way to learn to be a better photographer, but it needs more explanation. If you're interested in a book that takes this approach, I'd suggest Freeman Patterson's "Photography and the Art of Seeing". But most of the book is even less useful. In the section on lens selection, Smith tells us the choice of lens is determined by subject, use of the photograph, the effect required and physical space limitations. But he doesn't tell us which lens is best for which subjects. Instead he tells us "learn and test the limitations and capabilities of each lens." Smith gives us a photographic history of his development as an artist that I might have found interesting if he had used it to instruct rather than say, "I began a career as a corporate photographer". He finishes his book by with a chapter called "Applied Design" which is supposed to give us insights into specific kind of shooting. The seven pages devoted to interiors look like a real estate sales brochure. He makes five learning points like "Decide whether to style the room" and "Choose your camera format". But he doesn't tell us what choice of format is appropriate for what situation. When I review a book that I can't recommend, I usually recommend another that I think is good. However since most of my work is in landscape and nature photography, I don't have a general composition book to recommend. But I'm certain that even if you were not interested in nature photography, you would learn more about composition from "John Shaw's Nature Photography Field Guide" than you could ever learn from "Designing a Photograph".
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful Supplement to First Edition, 1985, June 29, 2005
This review is from: Designing a Photograph: Visual Techniques for Making your Photographs Work (Paperback)
The first edition of this book is one of my two favorites on compositional matters, the other being Michael Freeman's Image. The first edition stands out among all other books on composition and design in that Smith presents composing from the point of view of Gestalt visualization, presented theoretically by Richard Zakia in Perception and Photography and its update, Perception and Imaging.
The value of this second edition to me is to supplement the first edition with the new photographs. I don't think the second edition stands well on its own.
What the first edition did much better is mainly in the captions to the photographs. In the first edition, Smith discussed at length the visual aspects and structure that were present in each photo to explain how these aspects caused the eye to move throughout the frame. The captions in the second edition are much less devoted to the structure of the image and more like so many others' books in talking more about how he came upon the opportunity to take the image.
The text in the first edition is also more deeply written, while that of the second repeats the first, or cuts some good material.
I have spent several years, intermittently, finding what has been written about composition in photography and other two-dimensional visual arts, and my conclusion to date is rather grim. Using various databases, I have found several dozen books going back to the late 19th century. In general, the best writing on composition is out of print by many years.
I have not been able to find any U.S. art program that teaches composition or design as a stand alone subject; it is almost always blended into drawing classes as exercises and critiques. I'd like to hear that I am wrong about this. Composition is still taught as its own subject in several curricula in Germany.
For photographers, especially amateurs who do not undertake long training programs, a thorough look at the elements, principles, history, and techniques of composition with lots of diagrams, decently sized illustrations of good, bad, and almost, and many comparative problems is long overdue.
The approach that Smith took in his first edition is a significant component of part of what I have in mind.
My recommendation is that if you buy the second edition, then seek out the first to read over and over again with the second edition along side.
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