Customer Reviews

The Photographer's Guide to Light

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This book is a welcomed addition to the many books available about photography and lighting. It certainly increases the selection of books available to us as photographers. The book is broken down to three sections: introduction, outside lighting, and inside lighting. The first main section includes landscape, nature, urban, and outdoor portraits. The second includes portraits, architecture, and still life.

Don't be fooled by the introduction which is very well written and pretty informative. The book falls short from there in delivering on the high expectation brought by the introduction. The landscape and nature sections were interesting, but not the best. Outdoor and indoor portraits were hardly informative.

After putting back this book, I thought what's new? If you are an amateur photographer this book will probably introduce very little new information, mind you anything that you can use. That being said if you're new to photography you may like this book over other books that try to cover the same topic at a basic level. In fact, the author himself acknowledges in the introduction that the subject of lighting is so broad that it would require volumes of books to cover. Therefore, one must ask why didn't the author focus on one or two areas of his interest, landscape and nature for example, instead of trying to cover a massive topic in one short book? If you are looking for one great book about lighting check out Light Science and Magic which focuses on still and portraits photography.

If you are an experienced photographer, this book may be of little use to you as it covers a lot of things which are covered in other books and you may already just know from experience.

However, I found it to be very helpful when I was starting out. At the very least helped me to articulate issues with lighting. So if you are trying to get past 'beginner' and have a grasp on composition but are still having trouble, give this book a read.

Very well written and quite easy to follow. I was pleased with the book and gained a lot from it in relation to lighting technique.