Customer Reviews

The Quick & Easy Guide to Photographing Your Artwork

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a decent book on photographing artwork -- but not the the most comprehensive. The strengths of this book are that Mr. Saddington (1) discusses the use digital media, and (2) makes the process of photographing artwork very user-friendly by providing great visual references throughout. The user-friendly aspect is the book's strongest selling point, especially for artists who are new or novices at photography, or visually oriented (i.e., no patience for reading instructions that come with few or no pictures). Mr. Saddington's book provides pictures of what makes a bad negative exposure/photograph, and provides a concise explanation for these results, and does the same for an example of a good negative exposure/photograph. He also provides illustrations of setting up equipment and artwork for photographing. The weakness of this book lies in the general details provided ... unfortunately, Mr. Saddington provides a limited amount of helpful hints and leaves out specific details for for problem shooting ... I base this opinion on my comparison of this book with a book called "Photographing Your Artwork" by Russell Hart. If you buy Mr. Saddington's book, I'd recommend supplementing it with the purchase of Mr. Hart's book. The two books complement each other. Where Mr. Saddington's book lacks in details, Mr. Hart's book fills in the information gaps. On the other hand, Mr. Hart's book is very text heavy and has very few illustrations ... so if you're a visually-oriented person, Mr. Saddington's book would easily compensate in the area of illustrating this very important process. Again, Mr. Saddington's book is decent, but it should be used as a supplemental reference, especially for the visually-oriented person.

Although the information given was essentially correct, it was not up to date regarding use of digital cameras.

This book should have been thoroughly updated before being reprinted.

Regards,

Gregg Puckett

Actually I give this book zero stars. It is one of those books that pads the pocket of the author but is stingy with the information it gives. It is too general and does not really deal with problem solving the technicalities involved with taking slides of your own art. I wanted to know on which side of a slide to place a mask. The book failed to give this important piece of information. I found that I had already bought a more comprehensive book, so I feel that I wasted my money buying this book.

This book has good illustrations and diagrams, but is out of date. With only a brief section on digital photography this book looks older thatn its published date of 2003.

The author recommend using halogen work lamps that produce extremely uneven lighting with a stripe of strong horizontal light right in the middle of the works photographed. Even if using 4 of these lamps, there is no way to get even lighting on the works.

Also the digital photography discussed is totally outdated and useless.The Quick & Easy Guide to Photographing Your Artwork