69 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Detailed & Helpful for Intermediate Amateur Photographers, April 12, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: The Lighting Cookbook: Foolproof Recipes for Perfect Glamour, Portrait, Still Life and Corporate Photographs (Photography for All Levels: Advanced) (Paperback)
I am an intermediate amateur photographer and have a different perspective than the "beginner" from Alaska who wrote a review below. About the book "cover[ing] too much material in too little detail," I disagree. All of the photographs have either a detailed verbal description of how the lighting was set up, or a verbal description and a diagram. About the book requiring a "lot of gear and equipment," the back cover says that the author "begin[s] with an inventory of ingredients found in a well-stocked commercial studio," which is fair warning for the buyer. With some imagination, as another reviewer wrote below, an amateur photographer can make do with not-too-expensive equipment (e.g., for the first "recipe" on pages 24-26 the reflector can be a shiny collapsible auto windshield sun reflector that costs $5 at Wal-Mart). I liked Bidner's describing the different styles and lighting techniques used by six professional photographers (Bean, Branman, Farkas, Lane, Thien, Wegner). I don't think I'll ever spend as much money or time (e.g., 10-11 hours photographing a small crystal sailboat, pages 117-119) on photos as the six photographers, but nevertheless this book gave me some great ideas.
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66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
You can't beat it for number of examples, May 29, 2001
This review is from: The Lighting Cookbook: Foolproof Recipes for Perfect Glamour, Portrait, Still Life and Corporate Photographs (Photography for All Levels: Advanced) (Paperback)
I bought this book while searching for a book that would help me get started in portraiture. Although this book covers portraiture, it is probably not quite what I was looking for, but is good in its own right.
The book begins with the first section, "The Well-Stocked Studio," and describes cameras, lighting, and accessories. This is valuable information for a serious photographer wanting to get more advanced, but is overwhelmed at all of the equipment and what it does. Other sections are "Basic Portraiture," "Corporate and Industrial Shots," "Product Shots and Still Lifes," and "Specialized Techniques." Each section presents about a dozen different examples of techniques in that area, detailing the equipment used. Each technique example is covered in a few pages with excellent photographs, a pretty good diagram of the lighting arragement, and an "ingredients" list. The book is also sprinkled with valuable side notes.
To duplicate every example in the book, the reader will need an extraordinarily extensive studio. However, the book starts with simple techniques involving one or two lights and reflectors, and builds upon that. Even the more extensive lighting techniques are helpful in developing your skill at visualizing how a scene should look and how you would choose lighting to achieve that look. Moreover, the less advanced photographer could duplicate the techniques with a couple of battery-powered flashes, a couple of slaves, and using an umbrella, walls, or poster board as reflectors.
I tend to judge the value of a book by how quickly I read it versus its cost. Unlike "The Photographer's Guide to Using Light," which I read in a couple of hours and cost about as much, I found this book to have excellent value as far as the amount of information for the money. You could probably not sit down in a day and go through this whole book. In fact, I read a little at a time over a few months.
As for portraiture, I'm still looking for a book that specializes in portraiture technique. Even though this book does have a section on it, it lacks information on actually posing the subjects.
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39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent starting point, March 17, 2002
This review is from: The Lighting Cookbook: Foolproof Recipes for Perfect Glamour, Portrait, Still Life and Corporate Photographs (Photography for All Levels: Advanced) (Paperback)
If you are interested in doing mainly portrait photography, but need to learn more about how to properly and effectively do lighting setups, this book is an excellent place to start. The book has several diagrams of exactly how the lights were setup, along with actual photographs that were taken using each setup.
It talks briefly about how to deal with different types of people, and includes a short part on photographing pets as well. There are also sections on lighting still life photography, although this is not the main focus of the book. If people portraits are what you are interested in doing, this book will be an excellent reference. However if you are more interested in photographing still lifes or pets, I'd recommend that you either find another book, or use this in addition to another resource.
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