Customer Reviews

Life in the Wild: A Photographer's Year

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Professional UK photographer Andy Rouse is well known for his outstanding nature photographs, and this book is filled cover-to-cover with them. The accompanying text is informative, including plenty of tips and insight on how the author captured the images. Andy's witty anecdotal style is a pleasant departure from most other books of the genre, making Life in the Wild a thoroughly enjoyable book to read as well.

Highly recommended!

HI, I just wanted to put my side of a review that I just read from a US reader. All of my comments in the book are tongue in cheek and have generally been read that way by the thousands of photographers that have enjoyed this book in Europe. If they aren't then it is solely down to our difference in humour between the US and Europe. I do not have a negative view of other photographers, far from it in fact, like I said everything has to be taken tongue in cheek. So I really hope that you enjoy LIfe in the Wild and that it makes you laugh, as that is it's intention - to lighten a subject that is often far too serious.

This book features beautiful photographs, including both those taken on Rouse's home turf (England) and others taken in locales ranging from Brazil to Madagascar. Each chapter describes one month of a typical year in Rouse's life, focusing one or two photography projects Rouse tackled that month.

Photographers will get some good tips by reading this book, although note that at the time Rouse wrote this book he was almost exclusively a film photographer rather than digital. Also, as the book went on the author became more involved in medium format photography and began to leave 35mm behind.

The fly in the ointment is Rouse's own personality. His comments towards the other photographers he meets along the way are snide, sneering, and condescending. This is true whether the other photographers are snapshooters, ecotourists, advanced amateurs, semi-pros or professionals.

Thus, in his international travels Rouse is hampered by other photographers in India, but in the end he wins because he was riding on the fastest elephant. On a boat trip to the Farne Islands he stays dry because (he thinks) the captain selected the best seat for him.

To cite one example of Rouse's annoying egotism, in South Africa he encounters a group of ecotourists, and is irritated at them because they arrived at a leopard kill first. "We nicknamed them brainlackers, but only in private, as they always gave us nice chocolate biscuits for elevenses."

In short, I enjoyed the pictures, and did read the book through to the end. I did find the author's egotism to be annoying, however.