5 comments about The Complete Guide to Night and Low-Light Photography.

1. I have to agree with anybody who has a negative review about this book. The author clearly wanted only to portray his "artwork" and make money off it by writing this useless book. Even a novice photographer like myself could get nothing worth while out of it. I am extremely disappointed in my purchase and I wasted a lot of money considering I have not even a handful of new knowledge to show for it. If you want to "learn" and get your moneys worth than I suggest spending your dollar on any of the Amherst Media books.



2. This book is split into chapters dealing with different subjects relating to low light photography. All the chapters are easy (and fun) to read, and the pictures are great. But what I like best about this book is that it will give you very specific advice. It's not some dull, try-until-you-get-it-right advices, but it will tell you exactly which aparture and shutter speed to use in a given situation. Why doesn't everybody do it this way?



3. I received an email about a new edition of this book coming out the 18th of March .
   I ordered it .
   Today I got an email saying I would arrive Friday or Saturday [ today ]
   It came today . It's the 2006 version - it's the same as the other copy I have .
   This book is mainly for film and very little on Digital cameras .I wanted some more information on Digital .
   I'm not sending back but won't be buying from this writer and try to find same stuff on a different web site .



4. As above its a very nice book, most of the topics will work for digital cameras, but its not aimed at digital cameras. Hopefully it will be updated one day.
   
   For the digital age its missing HDR photography and Software post processing and image manipulation
   
   it does mention digital cameras, but they take up 1/2 of one page in the book, and the cameras they talk about have "mega pixel" imaging. A far cry from todays 10 and 12 megapixel cameras.



5. I found this book both very interesting and very helpful. There is a good amount of technique specific information as well as supporting photographs. There are amazing photographs to be taken by just using a tripod and the Bulb setting on the camera. The only downside is the book was published before digital photography really started to take off so all the information is presented using film and film cameras as the media. An updated version of this book could be useful.

5 comments about Nude Photography: The Art and the Craft.

1. The latest photography offering from DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley) is a glossy treatise on mastering the art of nude photography, from selection an approach to perfecting your chosen techniques and post-production tips and tricks. Author Pascal Baetens is a Belgian jack-of-all-trades who has specialized in portrait, fashion, travel, and nude photography in a range of industries (editorial, commercial, and private). The Baetens DK Nude Photography course opens with a historical perspective, followed by a lush academic discussion of nude photography styles. The meat of the book are sections on photography techniques (composition, lighting, posting, locations) and post-production (cropping, reframing, filtering, retouching).
   
   This oversized 250+ page hardcover concludes with a gallery of nude photography featuring the works of ten international artists, accompanied by biographical information, artist's notes, first-person essays, and behind-the-scenes set photos. Works of dozens of renowned artists appear throughout the instructional pages of this text, rendering it well-deserving of the cover price.



2. I saw this book in a bookstore and thought, finally, a book with clear lighting schemes pictured side by side so its easier to compare them. A great book for the modern digital photography enthusiast. A very solid book on honing the craft of photography, nude or otherwise.



3. This book is a sturdy introduction to nude photography. For a person with undiagnosed adult ADD like myself this book was very useful. The chapters are laid out well with a lot of pictures and paragraphs next to them expressing various ideas and inspirations. It's important to convey a sense of direction and purpose when photographing naked people. I'd say the book has a lot of confidence. Try asking someone awkwardly to let you photograph them nude. Probably not going to happen. On a final note I'd buy this book just for the pictures even if I wasn`t into photography. Then it would probably get me into photography. I digress...great book.



4. This is a good book at a great price. The photos are excellent with a lot of techniques and examples to fallow to get a great result. I would definitely buy again...



5. This is the best book I've seen on the subject of nudes yet. The author is thorough and the images speak for themselves. He's a master, brilliant! If I could only choose one book on the subject, this would be it.
   In the last section of the book, the author features other photographer's work and their motivations. That part was a let-down compared to Pascal's work, and the book would've been perfect without it.
   My only criticism of this and every other nude photography book I've seen, is that they portray models, very slim models, who all look alike, unlike everyday women, with weight and flaws and years, which to me shows more beauty than any of the professional models.

3 comments about Paul Fusco: RFK.

1. Robert F. Kennedy was in line to become the president of the United States in 1968. But it wasn't to be. "RFK" is a look via photographs at the life, death, and legacy of the man about whom so many felt so strongly, four decades ago. With a tribute from currently serving Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and essays from educated speakers, "RFK" is a grand choice for community library photography collections.



2. This is a profoundly moving book. Each photo is a revelation. I've never looked at individual photographs so long or seen so much in my life. A real experience.



3. Really touchy pictures: words are not necessary. I don't know if in Italy this book will be published, so I decided to buy it from Amazon to make a present to my dad.
   My brother, that's a photographer, has remained with his mouth shout as he has seen such a phoenomenal talent as Robert Fusco is.

2 comments about The Art of Black and White Photography: Techniques for Creating Superb Images in a Digital Workflow.

1. This is a welcome volume for B&W photogs and a useful read for color photographers from another fine German photographer/author. This is Hoffmann's first instructional book to be published in English, although he has had numerous articles on image design/composition published in the magazine "Leica Fotographie International", or LFI, which, by the way, is not published by Leica-Camera GMBH.
   
   Hoffmann emphasizes the possibilities in tonal manipulation in digital and analogue photographing. The point of his presentation is always to show how manipulating the tones and, therefore, contrast, contributes to the design of the image with respect to the photographer's intentions. He spends a significant amount of space on showing how to elicit mood in various kinds of photographs (content).
   
   His chapters start with, what I find to be, rather interesting summaries of the chapter topic's history, significant practitioners, and current directions. Then he examines several of his own images in detail. His commentary on an image concentrates on the visual structure and on the darkroom and/or digital manipulations necessary to realize his intentions. The only other book that comes to mind for nearly such excellence in pictorial descriptions or captions is the first edition of Bill Smith's "Designing a Photograph," which sets the standard for applying the Gestalt visual psychological approach to analyzing image structure.
   
   Rather differently from the other two top volumes on image structure currently in print, Michael Freeman's "The Photographer's Eye," and Harald Mante's "The Photograph," Hoffmann spends significant time looking at the various genres of photographic subject matter and then covers composing/design from the point of view of visual tensions and abstract structure. There is overlap with both of the other volumes, but also depth and emphasis that is his own. Color is not part of the subject in this book, but color photographers will benefit from Hoffmann's insights into tonality, contrast, and structure in images.
   
   This book, IMHO, sort of completes the circle of really good books on photographic composition/design at the intermediate level. With this book, the years 2007 and 2008 have been the best in a few decades for the publication of outstanding books on design/composition, and it is interesting to this reviewer that the three best are by an English and two German photographer/authors . It just does not seem that US practioners are taught the nuts and bolts of visual design to any degree of depth and ability to articulate their thoughts about image structure. The ability of even world class US photographers to discuss the reasons that their images work in structural terms is relatively rare.
   
   I like this book enough to make a triumvirate of this one, Freeman's book, and Mante's book for readers interested in sophisticated, analytical approaches to visual design and image structure. The only thing I would wish for is that more of his photos be accompanied by those delightful little thumbnails with his structural line diagrams. The more of these there are in a book, the more an interested reader packs away in one's mental image databank for later resurrection and use.
   
   Some asides before I finish. Hoffmann gets more visual mileage from aircraft vapor trails than anyone else I know of. Most of us regard these as intrusions into the tranquility of our landscape images. But, in the venerable tradition of divorcing content from an image's abstract structure, and the role of structure being to support the content, Hoffmann integrates these features into his images so forcefully that to remove them would ruin the image. Bravo; Mante would be proud.
   
   Too, the basic structural architecure of many of his images rests upon the grid formed from the golden ratio approximations of breaking the height and width into 5/8th and 3/8th divisions. One advantage of this choice versus the preference of US photographers for the Thirds Rule is that the Thirds method breaks the space into nine identical rectangles - a recipe well on the way to boring space management. Yet, as shows Charles Bouleau in his seminal book, "The Painter's Secret Geometry," even relatively simple visual architectures in the hands of someone with excellent training and inspired talent yield captivating, dynamic images, while the plodders among us achieve less subtle and interesting results.
   
   I hope it will not be so long before Hoffmann gives us a volume on design in color photography.



2. Black and White is not dead - it has its advantages over the world of color. "The Art of Black and White Photography: Techniques for Creating Superb Images in a Digital Workflow" is a complete and comprehensive guide to the craft of taking photos in the style of black and white. Chapters discuss when black and white should be used rather than color, how to avoid the cliches so often associated with black and white, applying new technology to improve an old art, and much more. For anyone enthusiastic about photography, "The Art of Black and White Photography: Techniques for Creating Superb Images in a Digital Workflow" is a must-have.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch

5 comments about Thin.

1. This book is the most honest book ive ever read on eating disorders. I have quite a few family memebers with anorexia and bulima. I watched them waste away, go into to hostpitals and come back from the time i was 5 untill 19. Most have recovered, or are still in recovery. One of my cousins put it to me this way "once an anorexic, always an anorexic" even though she is at a good weight (still 5 lbs underweight) and is now 29 she still has trouble and daily struggles. Most books ive read in this subject all kinda have the same ending, they are finally hospitalized, recovered and then last page is "THE END" which is far from the truth.
   Lauren Greenfield has truly Captured the Day to Day life with older, teenagers and young adults suffering from eating disorders. The details are graphic and the photographs in this book actually made me cry, but it was a eye opener. I reccomend this book to anyone who has a loved one or friend that has an eating disorder. Alot of people do not understand or can even commprehend why anyone would choose to starve themselves, This book can really give enlighting information to the desperate person trying to cope/understand their loved ones eating disoder. To anyone who is curious and just wants information in eating disorders. This is the book! the author holds nothing back. Excellent is all i can say! buy this, you will not be dissapointed. I hope this review was helpfull.



2. I have read this book cover to cover twice already & watched the documentary numerous times. The stories the girls share are believeable & heart-wrenching, & if you have or are suffering from an ED, you can really relate to them. The photos just pull you in & you want to know more & more about each of these women.



3. I read "Thin" a day or two after seeing the documentary, and it gave me a better sense of who the 4 women focused on in the documentary, especially of Brittany, the youngest of the four girls. Diary entries by Polly and a letter written by Brittany to her mother were honest and touching. The book also gives us a look at a number of other Renfrew patients who were not in the documentary except in the background. One of them is a woman whose eating disorder began in middle age. There are older women, women of color and a woman who is an overeater who was grateful that the underweight patients (the majority of the patients) were so welcoming to her (which I guess makes sense; it was their own bodies that tormented them). The photos are graphic, but not lurid or sensational; the photos are stark (some of them) but they are haunting as well; you won't forget these women soon. The text includes a lot of the statements made by the four patients who were the focus of the documentary, but it includes other stories told by residents that we don't get to meet in the film.



4. I saw the documentary first years ago and recently I picked up the book. The book is way better in my opinion. It was hard reading it because it was very graphic and depressing. I pray for these women to get better.



5. Based on the Lauren Greenfield's HBO documentary of the same name, Thin graphically presents the stories of several women receiving residential treatment for eating disorders at the Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, Florida. The intense emotionality of these stories is captured best by eating disorder specialist Dr. Michael Strober who describes them as "gripping, poignant, bewildering, heart wrenching, incomprehensible, inspiring, sickening, disturbing, repellent, touching, infuriating, and so much more" (page 159). Greenfield's amazing photojournalism speaks as loudly as the words voiced by the women themselves in conveying the insidious, shocking, tragic, and lethal nature of eating disorders. Each and every page bleeds with the pain and despair of women who are literally dying to be thin.

No comments about Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric:The Lost Manuscript.

5 comments about The Business of Studio Photography: How to Start and Run a Successful Photography Studio.

1. I am a professional photographer who has been using my home as a studio. This is a good book as a guide for what the title implies, but it also spends a lot of time on things like film. I know, many pros still shoot film. I'm only saying some of his formulas are outdated. It's my own fault for not looking at original published date. So just be aware of this.



2. This is a really good book if you're trying to start or enhance a portrait and/or wedding photography career. It is aimed primarily at those trying to start a portrait studio, and there migh be better wedding-oriented books. But since that's my core business, it hit the nail on the head. Lots of good insights and tips, and I have quite a few page corners turned down for later reference. I recommend placing the book in the bathroom, so you can hone your photography business and marketing skills on a regular basis!



3. This is definately full of great information that anyone starting a photography business needs to know. Well written.
   -Pam



4. Easily the best recommendation for starting a photography service. Contains great advice and samples of documents needed to run a studio. Read it twice and then keep it on the handiest shelf.



5. I have heaps of books on photography. I have been in business previously as a professional photographer in another country. I liked to think I take decent photos and could make a living. However, reading this book brought me down-to-the-ground in a most positive way.
   
   There is a really big difference between taking great photographs and being successful in the photography business. Many people get into photography as a business because they've taken some good photos, people tell them so as well, and they love it, so they reckon they'll be successful. Well, being a good photographer is only the start.
   
   There are so many practical aspects to running a business that you simply must know if you are to be successful as a professional photographer. Things like marketing (OK, you can spend your hard-earned dollars with Marathon Press, going to seminars, etc, but they won't teach YOU the things YOU need to know about YOUR area, mostly what you do is copy others who've already paved a way and you are now their target market when it comes to enhancing their image among their peers.), things like pricing, things like looking at all the various DIFFERENT things you will be photographing. You can't just do great weddings and think that you'll be successful and make a living as a wedding photographer, not as a start up business.
   
   That's where this book shines - it is for START UP BUSINESSES. I learned more from this book than I did in college when I studied photography business marketing (no offense to Orange Coast College). Oh, guess what else? H&H, a professional lab in the U.S., bought this book as a Christmas present for their clients one year - they said it was the best thing they could do to help their customers make money in the photography industry. That's saying something!
   
   This book has helped me get a very level-headed and grounded business plan together over the course of the last little while, and I am confident now that I can 'hit the ground running' in my business, without going through all the mistakes that I made in the previous business. This is really important because in business it's sink or swim.
   
   I recommend this book to everyone who thinks they want to be a professional photographer and everyone who already is.

5 comments about A Privileged Life: Celebrating Wasp Style.

1. I think the editor and the author had one too many G&T's when they thought up the name for this book. It's more of an obituary than celebration. But go ahead and take of a look at it ( borrow unless you want something as embarassing as this on your coffee table); especially since it has the stunning photo of C.Z. Guest, at her prettiest, on the cover. That is really what this book is -- nice photos of (sometimes attractive) waspy-looking people looking like they are having a good time. Admittedly, we all love to look at family and celebrity photos. However, textual content disappoints: it is thin and boils down to the whistfulness/bemoaning of times gone side-by-side with photos(but we all KNOW why there are no images of women in those days gone by at Yale/Harvard/Princeton and no images of people of color except that Ralph Lauren advertisement shot). There are historical/social realities that the author and the book requires us to have amnesia about in order to elevate the lifestyle (and the supposed instrinsic virtures that go along with it) portrayed in this book. This lifestyle, devoid of any consciousness, is depicted as admirable and its merits attributed to the Privileged as defined by the author. It is curious that the author seems to want to claim some Hollywood icons (who couldn't be more remotely a member of her set) as one of her own. But this is her book afterall, and she was able to talk some publisher into producing it. I recommend you buy The Preppy Handbook by Birnbaum, et al. -- a lot more fun and astute, written by real smart kids (at the time) -- they intuited what was on its way "out" would only endure and continue to inspire if everybody thought they could get in.



2. This book breaks the cardinal rule of WASP style-- discretion! The book is basically all about the author, how very WASPy her upbringing was, and what paragons of style her various family members were. As if being born in a rich New England family was some sort of personal achievement. I agree with another reviewer that it could have been really interesting minus the self-absorption and plus information to make it relevant to readers who aren't personal friends of the author or her family-- some discussion of history, architecture, design and so on. As it is, flipping through for five minutes at the bookstore or library should be plenty to get the full effect, there's no need to buy the book.



3. This book came fast, and was in perfect shape! Service couldn't have been better.



4. The bookstore owner and I thought it was a parody, especially given the cover photograph. We paged through this book looking for evidence of humor or perhaps even depth in the analysis of the privileged life. We found neither.



5. I found this book disappointing. it is a very shallow superficial look at a really interesting subject. It goes into no depth whatsoever, and the only wasps she knows anything about or portrays are her small new england family. It seems to be a strictly commercial try at making a little money with virturaly no real research or information.

5 comments about Twilight: Photographs by Gregory Crewdson.

1. 
   I can't believe another reviewer called this book contrived and insincere. That is absolutely ridiculous. This collection of work is quite sincerely attached to feelings of strangeness and otherness in everyday life. If you think those feelings are shallow and relegated to teenagers (and I find it very insulting that someone spoke of teens that way), then it's a sad, sad world.
   
   It is mysterious and strange and wonderful. Everyone can appreciate that.



2. While Gregory Crewdson may be the most overhyped, overpaid photography around today, he is also a master of this type of color, creative, fictive scene. This work is deliberate, deep, and strange, and includes a good essay by Rick Moody. It is a modern masterwork, for sure, and while Crewdson's retrospective book "1985-2005" is average at best, this cohesive body of work is well worth the price.



3. These photos are 'quiet' but intriguing. The lightings in these photos are amazing. Sometimes it is hard to believe that these are photos and not drawings.
   
   I personally like photos/movies shot under low budget -- and these settings were certainly not cheap -- but if you don't mind that, this is good book to have.



4. I love this book, its so inspiring. The title "twilight" is a time of the day when things seem real but at the same time they dont. The thing I love is that the illustrations look like photographs in a way, which is the piont their trying to make.



5. The book is fantastic! However to my horror it was packed very badly and the book arrived scratched and a damaged. Amazon expects me to pay for all shipping costs to get a refund of the book value only. Since I live in Australia the return shipping would surpass the value of the books sent. I emailed Amazon with this issue 2 weeks ago and NO REPLY!
   
   
   DO NOT BUY FINE ART BOOKS FROM AMAZON!!

5 comments about One Hundred Flowers.

1. This is a beatiful book with extreme close-ups of many different types of flowers. The large size also is a plus so that each image looks grand and brilliant.



2. There are many varieties of flowers presented here in beautiful and detailed images. Very little text accompanies the images, but enough to chase down further if other information is needed. It is the images which are the prime focus -- and rightly so.
   
   If I could wish for anything, it would be for more. And more. The design makes me wonder about why each specific flower/composition was chosen, and how many were not. I tend to want to see groupings and images that elaborate on one another.
   
   Receiving this book is like being given a gorgeous and lasting bouquet.



3. I just gave this book to my mother, who paint flowers, and she just love it. A lot of excelent models for painting.



4. As a fashion designer, I look for inspiration everywhere.
   I felt attracted by the picture on the cover and I wasn't dissapointed at all when I received the book.
   The author capture trough his vision the simple beauty of nature and gave me that sense of movement and fragility that I was looking for while working with the colors and textures of my next collection.
   A real treasure.



5. Zen of Watering Your GardenHi I am the Author and editor of a book that has good to great photographs. All are not as great as these. But my book has a wide array of not just flowers but other wonders to be found in Mother Nature's vegetation. Each photo is paired with an aphorism, poem or thought to encourage the viewer to see where one can easily immerse themselves in the garden process and achieve an inner peace. Matt Cohen