Customer Reviews

Texas Wildlife Portfolio

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Full of beautiful and candid photos of Texas wildlife; both exotic and commonplace. A great book for lovers of animals or photography or both!

Texas Wildlife Portfolio has some of the most wonderful, captivating, charming and technically excellent wildlife images I have ever encountered. The quality of the image reproduction is also quite good, especially considering the work's modest cost.

The Portfolio does not aim at being a zoologic text, but presents a few interesting bits of information about each animal in clear, concise, and accurate text.

How then can I give this painstakingly crafted work only three stars?

Because it truly is more portfolio than book. It is a wonderful way to thumb through some of the moments in the lives of Texas critters; however, having shared that moment, it is difficult to share it with someone else, as the work has neither table of contents, nor index.

Unforgivable.

Initially, in spite of this lack, I was going to give it four stars, as the images are so very fine, but, having spent the past five minutes trying, fruitlessly, to re-find the picture of the Horned Toad, I truly do think that an image collection of this nature requires a better retrieval scheme than thumbing through the pages.

Not that thumbing through the pages in unpleasant, but it means looking at many wonderful images with only the negative thought of "nope, that's not it."

What prompted the search was that I wanted to show a child the picture of the Horned Toad - an animal which I spent hours playing with as a child myself (and enjoying it more than the Horned Toads did, I am sure). They have essentially vanished from central Texas now (I lay blame on the fire ants - "far ants" as they are called in the Lone Star) and I wanted to share the Dragon Lizard - which is what a Horned Toad looks like - with someone who has never seen one (but who still might).

I know beyond doubt that there is a Horned Toad picture in there - on the righthand side, very warmly lighted - but I simply cannot find it. Likely a page might be stuck to another; the only way is going to be to go through it a page at a time.

One of these days real-soon-now I plan to go thorough and make my own index. That will probably only take a couple of hours, but it will mean a couple of hours of not doing something else, but the "something elses" are usually more pressing.

But I will. The images are too fine to not share, but they can only be shared if they can be found. Otherwise, the work can only be used to pleasantly pass the time - perhaps whilst waiting in a dental office.