Customer Reviews

Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Kirk has a cool sense of humor. Apparently someone took him to task in a review of his first book for using expensive equipment in a book aimed at beginners. What does he do? He goes to a hardware store, buys a $12 work light and proceeds to do an entire demonstration about light qualities with that light and some tissue paper! The cool thing is that it works. Like a lot of other photographers I started learning about lighting with flashes on Strobist.com but everything is so geared to battery operated lights and "outdoor at twilight" kind of images. I really wanted a source of good information about the kinds of lights professionals use in studios. I found a lot of really good information here. Kirk covers every kind of light from florescent lights to expensive studio flashes. It's all good information because, even if I can't afford the best lights right now I can start planning for some of these things when my career blossoms.

The thing that makes these books (The Minimalist Light Series) fun for me is the way they are written. Kirk has a way with words that makes the whole subject of lighting easy to understand. There are no "carved in stone" formulas or rules. His example photos are not formulaic. The range of different things he lights and talks about makes it more interesting.

To sum up: If you liked his first book you'll really like his second book. If you didn't read the first book don't worry, it's not necessary. You'll quickly learn with this one.

It's fun to find a writer who isn't always serious.

So, before I get started, I have both of Kirk's book in this series of Minimalist Lighting. Not to mention I follow his work on Flickr, via the strobist group there, and his page is a reflection of the information he provides in his books.

While I have owned a DSLR for two years now, I spent over a year just taking snap shots, and not getting into the real potential of my camera. I found David Hobby's blog online, I started with the strobist approach to using my camera, Kirk's first book about location photography was an early purchase. What he showed in that book made sense and really helped me up the quality of my photos.

The this year I bought a small studio set up and a month later this book came out. The information he provides makes sense and really helps me for comfortable using the gear. Again, I am not a pro, nor do I know Kirk. This is just a hobby for me and he helps make it more fun. My kids also appreciate it as I do not take as long to get the shot I am wanting.

The best part is how easy it is to read and how it is easy to relate the information to just doing it.

Great Book for someone new to the field, easy to read, and for the price it will not break the wallet.

I highly recommend this for students and people who are just getting into photography.

I'm a contract copy editor (not a photographer) who had the great good fortune to land this manuscript in near final form for review. What an attractive, well-written, occasionally humorous tome. Nearly all the pictures were taken by the author, and there's not a clinker in the lot. Mr Tuck is a born educator, not a boring educator. He's made warm, wonderful use of friends, family and even fruit to demonstrate studio lighting approaches and outcomes from those approaches. He also tells how to select studio space and equipment. There is a ferocious amount of information here well organized, depicted and presented and based on a lot of high quality experience. Enjoy it!

If you like doing a lot with less then you should really enjoy this book.
Sometimes we think we need more to do more and here are examples of how to do more with alot less. One of the best things about Kirk's book, is the explanations. I read this book and a group of us got together and recreated the shots. Now the others had go buy their own copy.

Get the book TRY the stuff right out of the box, don't wait and then do it.

I have been a fan of Kirk for a while. This book is an excellent resource, with the typical humor found in his writings!

This is a great book for portraits to product shots. I actaully used things in this book to help shoot a gourmet Pizza restaurants new menu items!

As someone else mentioned, it's very reasonably priced and WELL worth the investment. I highly recommend it!

Aimed at a broad spectrum from somewhat knowledgeable amateurs to starting pro photographers this, along with Light, Science & Magic, is a must have book. I usually think that if I learn one good tip from a book it is worth the price. After shooting professionally for twenty years I came away with a number of tips. For the starting photographer I would judge the book is worth a million dollars by my scale. It is simply full of great tips and step by step primers on a variety of very useful and profitable scenarios.

Get this book!!!

Following after the very useful Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography, "Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography" steps beyond the mindset of "Here's the light we have, let's shape it a bit, throw a little more here and there..." into "We start with no light and build it from scratch in the studio."

The 250W "work light" is about as minimalist as I've seen in a live studio...

Kirk does an excellent job of working through various scenarios from "minimalist on the cheap," using items from the local grocery and hardware stores, on up into working with the "real lights" of a studio photographer, and explains the reasons for them at every turn.

This is an excellent sequel. I hope there's more coming.

I am not a pro but I enjoy photography as a serious hobby. Just recently I got into studio lighting and Strobist style photos. This book is very helpful for people who want to know how to work with studio lighting. Kirk explains different types of studio lights, the pros and cons and also how to do different setups for portraits and product work. I found many great tips in this book and it was very enjoyable and easy to read.

This book was NOT written for professional photographers looking for that last 1% of technique that might propel their work into the stratosphere. It was not written for the advanced amateur photographer who has read all of David Hobby's Strobist posts and done all the exercises on that site. Nor was it written for the "gear geek" who is an expert on all the different models of Chinese flash triggers. Sorry. Not written for them. It was written for the many, many people who want to take their photography from simple, on camera flash, or available light work to a new level by making use of different kinds of light sources. You are the target reader if you own a good camera and lenses but you've been a bit reticent to buy some stands and lights because you think the learning curve may be steep. Or because you've gone to many of the sites on the web that profess to teach off camera lighting only to be put off by the jargon and the clubby atmosphere of the self styled "experts" who seem to have endless free time to post advice.

When I started out many years ago there were many books about how to pose wedding shots and about composition and color and exposure but there were very, very few sources of information about how to get started in studio lighting. In those days the information was either found in the advertising materials made by the manufacturers of various lights and accessories or it was hard won by assisting commercial photographers in their studio and, for better or worse, copying their techniques and their purchasing prejudices. I really wanted a book that would take me thru, step by step, from setting up and using one light to creating product photos and portraits using as many lights as I needed to use to get the effect I wanted. There were only so many questions you could ask your mentor before they tired of answering and told you to get back to work mixing chemicals in the darkroom.

While some reviewers have recently taken me to task for not writing a more demanding book I think they miss the mark. I wrote this book so you would know the difference between different qualities of light, different kinds of lighting tools, how different lighting accessories make different looking light. How much you can do with inexpensive tools and how everything works together. I've show real world examples from my work to illustrate the points I talk about. While we all would love to have a studio full of the latest and most advanced gear the reality is, pro or hobbyist, very few have the budgets for everything they want. I thought I owed the reader the honesty to show that many of the lighting techniques they see pros doing with tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment can be done for much less.

I also did not presume that important theories such as "color temperature" or the "inverse square law" were universally known and understood by people just beginning their lighting journey. I took the time to tell the reader and to show you, the way the color of light effects a scene and how to control it. How, in the real world, we can make use of some physics to even out light. How the size of lighting modifiers makes things look different.

A true studio pro already knows everything I put in the book. They use the same ideas and techniques in one form or another every day. But the students I've taught are always amazed at how much use we get from every day things like clothespins and welder's clamps. They are amazed at the kind of results you can get from bouncing some sunlight in through a window and into a diffuser. If you read the reviews from a year ago you'll see that most people really understood my intention and they benefitted from the information offered. They get that step by step immersions into any part of the craft need to start at the beginning and move through the basics.

If you are looking for a cutting edge textbook or the latest cool techniques you'll need to look elsewhere. If you want to learn how to make a technically and aesthetically nice portrait, we've got that covered. If you want to find out about the latest HMI lights for shooting fashion you'll need a different book. If you want to find out how to feel at home in your own home studio then this is the book for you.

There is a benefit and a loss in the ability to have regular people review everything on the web. Some lack an understanding of the targets for a book or a product and, since it doesn't fit their needs they downgrade it. I wrote this not because I feel that they have been unfair in their subjective appraisal of this book but because I think people need to be very aware of who this book is aimed at.

Everyday hundreds of thousands of people who were schooled in engineering, marketing, fashion design and construction pick up the hobby of photography. Most are happy to just record life as it unfolds around them. A smaller subset wants to learn more about using light but they don't want to spend months piecing together disparate and sometimes conflicting information from myriad websites. They'd like an introduction to the subject that's unified. By a writer who's owned and used lots of different equipment and who spent years and years teaching students and young pros in real world techniques. That's who this book is for. Please consider this as you decide whether or not to move forward with the purchase of this book. If you are too advanced in your practice of photography and lighting you'll probably not be challenged. If, however, you are just settling in and researching what this lighting stuff is all about then this book may be just what you were looking for. Thanks. Kirk

For someone who wants to do some basic studio work, is smart enough to want to start small and inexpensively, this book is perfect. There are other books that can help you more with lighting concepts and posing techniques, but Tuck's book focuses on what core equipment you'll need, and more importantly why.

There is acknowledgement throughout that you can go high-end, as Tuck himself has done much of the time, but also you can buy $1 clips and $10 shower curtains too. After reading this book and trying out some of the ideas and setups, I became much more comfortable using anything that worked for reflectors, diffusers, and absorbers, and found that the resulting portraits were all the client really cared about, not how tony your name brand stuff is. I think the confidence that a proven professional like Tuck has to use multiple tiers of equipment rubs off on the reader, and in doing so, will come across as confidence with your own clients. For people trying to make money for the first time with photography, I think this confidence is a critical component (and probably explains why so many beginners over-spend on equipment).

The pictures in this book are well-placed with the narrative (not a lot of flipping pages back and forth), and are instructive, especially the numerous wide-angle shots of the equipment setup with the subject placed - much better than the typical line drawings that cannot convey height or angle very well. The writing is natural and always seem to go to the next question I had.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book!