Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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66 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Move Over, John, December 10, 2006
For many years, I always recommended one book as the best for beginning nature photographers and that was "John Shaw's Nature Photography Field Guide". Since the development of digital cameras I've lamented the fact that Shaw has indicated that he does not intend to update the book to cover digital photography. Until now, no book has come close to the Field Guide as an introduction. But now Rob Sheppard has come close. Oh, not close enough to displace Shaw, but close enough to go on the shelf next to Shaw.
Sheppard's book is aimed at digital camera owners. After a brief pep-talk on nature photography, he launches into the customary discussion of gear. He follows up with a discussion of technical factors like exposure, raw processing and white balance. After examining the effects of light and color, he looks at specific nature subjects like landscapes, flowers and wildlife. He then looks further at close-ups and special techniques, like black and white and panoramas. He finishes up with a brief plea for the environment. At the close of each chapter, he provides a set of quick tips that photographers at all levels can apply to improve their pictures. He also includes portfolios and interviews by some of the great nature photographers, like Jack Dykinga.
Sheppard's writing is easy to understand and he tries to inspire the reader to take better nature photographs. Most beginning digital nature photographers will benefit from reading this book. But you may ask why Sheppard doesn't knock Shaw out of the box. It's mainly a matter of technical detail. In my opinion, Sheppard's discussion of lenses, depth of field and close up-photography, among other things, just doesn't provide the degree of technical information that beginning nature photographers need and can absorb.
Sheppard's own pictures as well as those of the guest photographers are excellent, although I wish that the author had made more of an effort to relate the captions of the pictures to the text. In a few cases, like his discussion of close-up photography of moss and lichens, there were no supporting pictures.
This book only deals with the capturing of images. Readers interested in post-processing can look at Sheppard's excellent "Outdoor Photographer Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2" or "Photoshop for Nature Photographers" by Ellen Anon and Tim Grey.
Finally I found one serious error that I hope will be corrected in the next printing. Sheppard says that if you change aperture from f/8 to f/4 you will double the amount of light coming through the lens. It's true that opening the aperture by one stop will double the amount of light but the next larger opening to f/8 is f/5.6, not f/4. Going from f/8 to f/4 will allow four times the amount of light through the lens! Read Shaw for a full explanation.
This is a book I will gladly recommend to every new digital nature photographer. But you will learn still more essential information if you also read John Shaw.
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good,, but not great, November 5, 2007
At first glance, the book is amazing. It is very well written with all sorts of useful advice. It is useful for a beginner, but he never sounds as if he is talking down to anyone. It has plenty of more technical advice for the more advanced, but it never becomes overwhelming. And the photos are simply amazing.
But... I do have one problem with the book, and it is fairly glaring to me. As amazing as the photos are, the author makes little to no attempt to tie them into the text. There is no attempt to use the photos as a way to explain difficult or confusing topics. It is almost like the author wrote the entire book and then simply added a bunch of photos randomly throughout the text. Photographers by nature are visual learners. It would have been much more helpful if the author had use the photos to teach us and let the text add the details instead of relying so heavily on the text itself.
The end result is that many times the beautiful photos seem more of a distraction than helpful examples. This book is very good, but it easily could have been so much better.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Way to Get Started in Photographing Nature, February 3, 2007
This is one of the few photography books I have seen that starts off with simple point and shoot digital cameras rather than recommending you start with the fanciest Nikon from the beginning. In fact on an early page he says get a camera you like 'if you don't like your camera, no matter ... if it gets a top rating from 'Consumer Reports,' you won't use it as much as a camera that you truly enjoy using.'
Some of the best pictures are taken with very low end cameras simply because they are small enough, light enough (and inexpensive enough that you don't care much if they get lost or broken) that you have them with you when you want to take a picture.
Another point I like in this book is that he doesn't spend a lot of time talking about retouching your pictures using Photoshop. If you want to do Photoshop, get a Photoship book. This is a book on taking pictures, and at that it is excellent. His descriptions are good and to the point. His sample photographs are great and illustrate what he is talking about in the text.
Nature Photography is the most popular subject in photography, here's an excellent description on how to do it well.
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