Product Description

A practical and inspiring reference for both amateurs and professionals covering the whole range of photography, from the basics of taking pictures, processing and printing them, to the advanced techniques of the studio and darkroom. This edition includes information on the latest digital tape still cameras, microscopic attachments and water-resistant compact cameras. It shows the reader how to photograph everything from a quasar to a unicellular pond animal magnified 100 times; how to use a camera underwater and how to suspend one from a kite; how to print pictures on everything from a billboard to a bird's egg.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #157187 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

One of my favourite books on photography.
From insects to the stars, the techniques for taking their photograph is all explained in here. In a book containing over 1,250 illustrations, this book would be my first choice for anyone considering a career in photography. Read it and make up your mind. As for those of you who are already more proficient, this is the one book to which you should return again and again in order to re-learn and brush-up on those hard-to-master techniques.

Thoughtfully laid out, this book commences by teaching us the basic principles of the camera and various lenses and the exploded-view illustrations are simply as good as they get. The various heading are far too numerous for me to list here except to say they are even pointers on underwater photography as well as on how to hold your camera still.

An excellent book by any standards and one that really should have already found it's way into the library of every competent photographer.

NM

Good solid introduction to photographic techniques.
This book summarizes all essential techniques for the intermediate to advanced amateur. If you own an SLR and at least a couple of lenses then this book will help you to learn or improve on your technique, and it will explain many technical issues in a clear style and with examples. There are chapters on working with light, on equipment and how to use it, on B&W and on colour techniques, on movement, on composition, on portraits, on studio techniques and on special effects. I like this book a lot and I quite often read in it or look things up to remind myself. If there is a caveat then it is that the first edition of this book was published in 1977, and this means that just a few of the more modern things are missing. (For example, I could not find anything on the difference between circular and linear polarizers. I had to look elsewhere to remind myself that both have the same effect optically, but modern AF SLRs use a polarizing beam splitter to split the light between AF sensor and meter, and you have to use a circular polarizer because otherwise you could cut off the light to either the meter of the AF.) The other slightly old-fashioned point is that about 20% of the book is dedicated to processing and darkroom techniques, which very few people still do themselves. Besides: having done B&W processing myself I doubt that anyone would really learn darkroom processing from this book alone. On the other hand, perhaps it is quite instructive for the uninitiated to learn how films works and how processing is done - even though their photo lab does it for them. On the whole: good read, good reference.

Good broad-based reference
This book is good for those looking for a wide surface treatment of the whole spectrum of photography. Points of disucssion are almost always clearly illustrated with photographs or high-quality drawings, and many specific examples of equipment are given. This book will inspire you to try many different photographic techniques. However, all those nifty photos and pages devoted to escoterica don't leave much room for the basics, and so this book can't be reccomended as a decent manual or textbook for raw beginners trying to improve their photography.