Customer Reviews

Photography at Night: Getting the Most from Low-Light Conditions

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As a primer on the technical aspects of night photography, this book is short on details and rather disorganized.

The chapter on equipment and the properties of different B&W developers is useful. There are detailed sequences of pictures demonstrating the effects of different levels of exposure and development on various kinds of film. Sometimes, pictures are worth a thousand words.

The book falls short when connecting the pictures and instructions. Metering is described as being important, but no information on how to meter properly is provided. Furthermore, there is no information on reciprocity failure for different films, other than a vague suggestion about doubling exposure time. This leaves the reader wondering exactly how long exposure time should be. The digital camera section is also disappointingly short, mostly containing information on how digital cameras work.

This book's strength is in its photos. The first 40 pages consists of portfolios from different photographers. Detailed captions describe the circumstances of each photo shoot and how the photo was exposed. Finally, some information that could really help amateurs!

The last section is a list of assignments. At last, the author provides detailed information on how to meter a scene, how to determine exposure, and how to pick a camera angle for shooting. Why wasn't this information provided earlier in the book?

In conclusion, buy this book for the great photos, not for the instructions included.

One thing I learned after owning a few photography books which I never fully read after a quick skim-through, was that one should always check out the sample photos in a photography book before buying it.

When I first saw the title of this book, "Photography at Night," I was excited, because my night photography had always been plain and boring. But as I sat down by the café and started reading the book, I was so glad that I hadn't just bought it out of sheer excitement.

I have two major issues with this book: first and foremost, the pictures in the book are just not good. I'm sorry maybe I don't have the proper "artistic" eye, but the pictures in this book look poor-quality and *plain and boring* to me. Many of them are amateurish-looking (the picture on p.86 looks just like one taken by my 8-year-old niece!), while others are blurry or have barely visible subject matters (e.g., pp.6-7 and p.92, among many others). If you are thinking of buying this book, I recommend you flip through it first (esp. chapter one "Professional Portfolios") to see if you agree with the author's artistic taste or not. For me, these are exactly the pictures I don't want to take. As a photographer, I want to take night photos that are pleasing to look at and don't strain the audience's eyes or make them nauseous.

Second, which is an issue particular to my needs, this book is almost all about film photography. A lot of attention is devoted to selecting the different film types. If you are a film shooter, chapter 3 could be of value to you. For digital shooters, you'll only find four pages of superficial coverage (e.g., "how a digital camera works").

The saving grace of the book is chapter 4, which gives the reader a few specific assignments along with advice on how to look for things to photograph as well as how to meter properly or how to work with depth of field. As I read through the assignments I found them quite interesting, so I jotted down two or three of them which I thought would be worth doing. For me, the book would have been worth buying if the author had expanded on the materials in this chapter and made the book more instructional rather than showcasing "inspirational portfolios" (from the back cover) that don't necessarily inspire the reader.

Of course, given that I'm not, nor will I ever be, a professional artist, let alone a successful one, my harsh criticism of the book only reflects my learning needs as an amateur photographer. I know I like photos that are sharp-looking with an easy-to-understand vision or message, whether it's a shot of the Eifel Tower against a moon-lit night sky or a picture of tulips in the suburbs of Amsterdam. You may be the type of artistic person who appreciates the "vision" in this book. In that case, you may like this book.

Richard Newman's Photography at Night is more for inspiration and motivation than it is technical. Unlike several other night photography books, it shows that interesting pictures can be made at night with black, and that there's more to shoot at night than skylines and lighted architectural studies.
By far the most important part of the book is Chapter 4, the Assignment section. It inpsires you to get out into the field or street and try various techiques and subjects such as street photography, fire, high contrast using ortho film, silhouettes and strong backlighting, and others. The portfolio section at the front also is interesting to study.
This book would be an excellent companion volumn to one of the several night photography introductions on the market. "The Complete Guide to Night & Low Light Photography" by Lee Frost and "Capturing the Night with Your Camera" are two excellent works that present the nuts and bolts of night photography in great detail. Not much about digital in either, however, if you are looking for something that goes into that.

I purchased at least 100 photography books during the past 40 years. This book is in a class all by itself. While the cover of this book is very eye-catching and promising, the contents of the book are very amateurish: the photographs are terrible, and you won't learn much from this book. I can't believe this well known publisher published this book! I returned it to the store where I purchased it and got a refund.