Customer Reviews

Landscape Within: Insights and Inspirations for Photographers

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Even though this book has weaknesses, I feel that it's an important book for any advanced landscape photographer to read, and perhaps other advanced photographers as well.

The book has two different parts that are only vaguely related. One part is a collection of Ward's landscape photographs. The other is a philosophical examination of creativity and vision in landscape photography. It is this series of essays that I find most intriguing.

The author initially discusses the nature of photographs; that they are not real and that they capture time. He suggest that while most landscape photographers are interested in the grand vistas, most might be better served by concentrating on the intimate landscape because there are more opportunities there for discovery. He also suggest that one of the best procedures one can follow in landscape photography is to go slowly and delay taking the photograph as long as possible to let your vision crystallize. Eventually the author takes a semiotic approach to landscape photography. (Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols as means of communication.) Ward notes the importance of realizing both the connotation and denotation of photographs as signs or symbols. Along the way, Ward provides a history of landscape photography, with particular emphasis on developments relating to creativity and vision.

One of the main problems of Ward's essays is that they never do reveal to us what the nature of photographic vision and creativity is. That may be because this is something unknowable and ineffable. Yet thinking around the edges of these profound ideas may help the photographer to develop them, and that makes this book worth reading.

It's a sign of the difficulty of the subject that I often felt Ward had not made the right choices in the design of his book such as leaving the discussion of how we perceive things to the last rather then presenting it in the beginning of the book.

Turning to Ward's pictures, which are scattered throughout the book, they are terrific. They demonstrate a vision and beauty we could all emulate. I have said elsewhere that editors feel that books of great pictures do not sell, and so they ask great photographers to write "how to" books. That conclusion was too focused. Books of great pictures do sell, provided that the pictures tell a story, or that there is a synergistic effect in the way that the pictures are presented. But Ward seems to reject that approach. Although quotes from the text appear alongside his pictures, the pictures do not illustrate the text, except in the broadest possible way. And Ward refuses to provide technical data on his pictures, saying this is a "why book", not a "how to book". He seems to be challenging the reader to construct his or her own book!

The bottom line on this book is that there seems to be no silver bullet for creativity and vision. Perhaps the author should have called this a workbook, because even after reading the stimulating ideas, one will have to do plenty of psychological and, dare I say, spiritual work to develop the landscape within.

Read Obregon's review carefully.

For me, this is the most intelligent book on (landscape# photography that I have read, so dense that it requires more than one reading. The content of the book deserves 5 stars, but I am knocking it down one star for its omissions and layout flaws.

Too many of the images are too small, and the location of none of the images is identified. That is a major frustration for me personally. The 2 pages at the end containing technical information on a small sampling of the images in the book are of little or no value except to photographers shooting LF film -- a rare breed, so in effect those pages are worthless to the majority of potential readers of the book. The author cites other authors and books throughout but lists no bibliography, a major oversight IMHO.

Ward has an excellent eye and technique. His images are pleasure to review, but far too many of them are not much larger than large postage stamps. Fortunately, the printing is first rate so that with nose in book even those images are worth studying. He also makes at least 3 cross references to images with place names where the page numbers are given as #000); without place names given to the images, the cross references are useless.

Well written and stimulating. Enough so that I will purchase his follow-up book: Landscape Beyond: A Journey into Photography.

There's no question that the images in this book are fantastic. If you enjoy landscape photography, you'll find dozens of inspiring images throughout the pages of this book. However, this book is not about how to create such images. In fact, in most cases, the pictures are completely divorced from the text, and could have just as easily been all put at the end, rather than scattering them throughout the book. Ward himself says in the text that this is not a "how-to" book, and describes this as a "why" book.

The text of this book has a very academic, and clinical style, and I found it really dry. There is a lot of discussion on historical aspects of art and photography, and the relationship between the two. Ward explains how the attitudes towards photography has evolved over time based on photography's unique ability to capture both the objective and subjective. For me, there was so much of this book dedicated to historical details that I frequently lost interest.

One of the better sections of this book talks more specifically about issues concerned with taking landscape photos, describing why taking pictures of grand vistas is so difficult, and suggests focusing on "intimate" images without a horizon to develop your skills in composition first. This was an interesting section to read, and there a few reasonable examples given to support the text.

From there, the book goes back into dry, academic writing. There's a discussion of how and why photographs evoke an emotional response, with references to psychology and history and some thoughts about the creative process. There is a short "technical" section of the book, but this is certainly not what you'd consider "instructional". There is is some discussion of filters, contrast, 18% reflectance, etc, but this could have been omitted from the text since there isn't enough information to really help someone that wasn't familiar with these topics, yet it would be uninteresting to those that know about those things already.

The book finishes with some (more) history, and some textbook-like descriptions of how humans "see". Overall, it was hard to find much in this book that helpful to my understanding of photography. I did love the photos, and there were a few nuggets of information scattered throughout the text, but overall, it was far too dry (and with too much history) for it to be interesting to me.

This is the finest book ever written on Landscape photography along with Galen Rowell's "Mountain Light". It is not a how-to book; more a why book. It is targeted at the practitioners of the art more than the novice.

This is an extraordinary book. It covers so much and pushes the reader to a deeper understanding of the creative process.

I am giving this book as a gift and it was shipped poorly and now embarrassing to give. I am upset with the quality of the book but wish I just went to the bookstore and picked one out that didn't look like it was from a garage sale.

The photographs in this book are terrific. Obviously Ward is a gifted photographer. But he (or the publisher) commit the unpardonable sin of not identifying the locations of most of the images. This omission is most disappointing. I recognize certain images as having come from Zion National Park and other locations in the American Southwest, but why should the reader be left guessing? Compounding the sin is a writing style that appears to be trying to be helpful and inciteful but which in fact is devoid of any real content. So, for example, under a stunning photo of a slot canyon, quite possibly Antelope Canyon in Arizona, we find this drivel: "If an image is abstract or ambiguous, the feelings and meanings we get from this are not all expressible in words." Certainly he was not able to express in words anything interesting or useful here.