Photo Essays Books

Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera (Updated Edition)

Bryan Peterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 464 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Just Buy It 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

One of the most common misconceptions around is that by buying the most recent and most hitech photography gear one can come up with extra-ordinary exposures.

This book has showed me otherwise. Too often amateurs like me get caught up with the jargon that we simply avoid doing manual shots for fear of missing those magical moments thus we end up doing machine-gun shooting.

Fortunately I bought this book and re-learned the basics properly. At least now I know the fundamentals and have the confidence to experiment further.

The book is very down to earth unlike other photography books who put too much emphasis on the author's ego and style. It starts off with explaining what is what and then proceeds to the different shooting scenarios.

Even now that I've advanced a bit, I still end up going back to some specific chapter to re-read a page or two to explain why a scene is what it is.

Editorial Review:

For serious amateur photographers who already shoot perfectly focused, accurately exposed images but want to be more creative with a camera, here's the book to consult. More than seventy techniques, both popular and less-familiar approaches, are covered in detail, including advanced exposure, bounced flash and candlelight, infrared, multiple images, soft-focus effects, unusual vantage points, zooming, and other carefully chosen ways to enhance photographs. The A-Z format make sit easy for readers to find a specific technique, and each one is explained in jargon-free language. Top Tips for each technique help readers achieve superb results, even on the first attempt.

The Americans

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The definitive "The Americans" 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

We're lucky to have this edition. Robert Frank is an old man with health issues now. That he is healthy enough to oversee this work is wonderful. Everything about this edition - especially in comparison to the 2007 Delpine edition I purchased earlier this year - is first-rate. I wish I had known this was coming out!

The book is a little smaller than the Delpine, but that's the only real negative (if it is one) I can think of. The main thing to me is that the photos themselves are how Frank intended them to look. Gone are the overly-lightened faces that plague the Delpine book. This is a pet peeve of mine that kills many photos in this Photoshop age. This is very obvious in the New Orleans trolley photo. In the Delpine work, the faces of the white passengers are totally washed out, and the black faces are awkwardly lightened (someone apparently thought they were helping Frank's work). That's all corrected here. In this Steidl edition things are shown as they were intended. One can even see details in the face of the man at far left, even though it is partially obscured by a window reflection.

Also, on several photos more of the frame is visible. This was most noticeable to me in the Butte, Montana photo of the woman looking out the car window, with several children in the back seat. A good portion of the left side of the photo is now visible, along with more shown on the top and bottom. The new crop just seems more "right." Not too mention that the face of the child in the middle of the photo is too light in the older edition.

Simply put, comparing the two editions is an eye opener. I first saw these photos years ago in a much earlier edition (I believe it was the 1969 Aperture work) and I still marvel at the depth of the images in that printing. I don't have that edition in hand, so I can't do a direct comparison, but I believe the Steidl images are much closer to that ideal. Franks prefers his images a little on the flat, low-key side. Another difference is that the photos are now printed on a non-glossy paper. I was surprised at this at first, but now I believe it works much better for this book.

In short, if you want an accurate, lovingly-printed edition of The Americans at a reasonable price, this is the one. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

21 Nights

Prince

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Editorial Review:

21 Nights--a first book by Prince and celebrated photographer Randee St. Nicholas is a stunning multimedia volume offering a rare glimpse into the life, lyrics and mystique of one of the most notable and prolific musicians of our time. This beautifully designed photographic essay flows from Prince's sensational, unprecedented, record-breaking, sold-out 21 concerts in 21 Nights at London's 02 Arena in 2007. Giving insight into his dueling worlds of performance and solitude, 21 Nights incorporates Prince's evocative poetry and lyrics to new songs and other selections, and 124 full-color, sumptuous never-before-published images by Randee St. Nicholas. As part of the multi-dimensional experience, it will also include "Indigo Night," a CD--available only with the book--capturing Prince's after-hours, live after-show sessions--rare and profound moments of musical genius.

21 Nights takes the reader from the passenger seat of a limousine zipping through the streets of London to his sleeping quarters in a luxury hotel. In between we see him and his phenomenal band of musicians, singers and dancers backstage in the make up room to onstage, bathed in purple lights and a fog of gray smoke. Like a movie-in-a-book, readers are taken on his journey from London to Prague, in a style that takes glam rock to a new level.

Then there is poetry and lyrics that reveal the heart and soul of Prince--in addition to his incomparable talent. Going beyond the catchy hook, he expresses himself on everything from the destructive forces of war, greed and superficiality the life giving energy of love, beauty, and--of course--music.

Tompkins Square Park

Q. Sakamaki

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Editorial Review:

Summer 1988. Tompkins Square Park, which long served as a makeshift home for the homeless and a center for social unrest, erupted in violence when the New York City Police and hundreds of rioters clashed over ideological differences. Residents of the Lower East Side, historically home to diverse immigrant communities but facing gentrification, united to protest the 1 a.m. curfew the city was attempting to enforce on the park, in effect banishing the homeless and closing off many areas of the park that were once public. Over the humid night of August 6, protestors carrying signs that read "Gentrification is Class War" and chanting "It's our fucking park, you don't live here!" clashed with police armed with riot gear. The violence lasted until the next morning. The August 6 police riot—so called because the consensus was that the police overreacted to the protestors—and subsequent Tompkins Square Park riots were the manifestation of a larger concern of the over-gentrification of the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side has a long history of liberal, and at times radical, movements that attracted artists, intellectuals, anarchists, activists, squatters, immigrants, and even exiles. Many in the community, unlike in other more passive communities facing gentrification, stood up and worked together with the homeless to protect housing rights and human rights, as well as their own lifestyle. By 1991, the estimated 300 homeless people living in Tompkins Square Park were gone and the park was forcefully closed for renovations. Twenty years after the police riots, the park now boasts one of the best dog runs in New York City. Tompkins Square Park is about the resistance and struggle of people in the Lower East Side literally to exist as the community faced drastic gentrification in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. It focuses on the eponymous park as a symbol and stronghold of the anti-gentrification movement, for the riots proved to be a trigger to further radicalize the community's political movement. Living near the park, photographer Q. Sakamaki witnessed the change from the beginning to the end. With striking black-and-white images, he captures the scene of one of the most political and avant-garde movements in New York history.

Material World: A Global Family Portrait

Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In honor of the United Nations-sponsored International Year of the Family in 1994, award-winning photojournalist Peter Menzel brought together 16 of the world's leading photographers to create a visual portrait of life in 30 nations. Material World tackles its wide subject by zooming in, allowing one household to represent an entire nation. Photographers spent one week living with a "statistically average" family in each country, learning about their work, their attitudes toward their possessions, and their hopes for the future. Then a "big picture" shot of the family was taken outside the dwelling, surrounded by all their (many or few) material goods.

The book provides sidebars offering statistics and a brief history for each country, as well as personal notes from the photographers about their experiences. But it is the "big pictures" that tell most of the story. In one, a British family pauses before a meal of tea and crumpets under a cloudy sky. In another, wary Bosnians sit beside mattresses used as sniper barricades. A Malian family composed of a husband, his two wives, and their children rests before a few cooking and washing implements in golden afternoon light. Material World is a lesson in economics and geography, reminding us of the world's inequities, but also of humanity's common threads. An engrossing, enlightening book. --Maria Dolan

True Norwegian Black Metal

Peter Beste

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"When we're on the road, all we watch is VBS, and our favorite series is Norwegian Black Metal." (Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters) Documentary photographer Peter Beste has spent the last five years working in the milieu of the Norwegian black metal scene. This scene, with its notorious events of murder, church arson, and self-mythology, is absolutely sealed to outsiders. The international black metal fan base is one of the most devoted, fanatical, and proprietary in the world. Beste's access and insight into this world is unprecedented and has yielded an amazing photographic journey, along with a very popular documentary series on VBS.tv, also available on YouTube. Beste, together with Johan Kugelberg, noted writer, editor, and collector of documentary photography, has brought the images into a hermeneutic narrative that makes for a compelling experience along the lines of Anders Petersen's Café Lehmitz, Ed Van Der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank, or William Klein's Life Is Good and Good for You in New York.

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

Peter Menzel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

It's an inspired idea--to better understand the human diet, explore what culturally diverse families eat for a week. That's what photographer Peter Menzel and author-journalist Faith D'Alusio, authors of the equally ambitious Material World, do in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, a comparative photo-chronicle of their visits to 30 families in 24 countries for 600 meals in all. Their personal-is-political portraits feature pictures of each family with a week's worth of food purchases; weekly food-intake lists with costs noted; typical family recipes; and illuminating essays, such as "Diabesity," on the growing threat of obesity and diabetes. Among the families, we meet the Mellanders, a German household of five who enjoy cinnamon rolls, chocolate croissants, and beef roulades, and whose weekly food expenses amount to $500. We also encounter the Natomos of Mali, a family of one husband, his two wives, and their nine children, whose corn and millet-based diet costs $26.39 weekly.

We soon learn that diet is determined by largely uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization, which can bring change with startling speed. Thus cultures can move--sometimes in a single jump--from traditional diets to the vexed plenty of global-food production. People have more to eat and, too often, eat more of nutritionally questionable food. Their health suffers.

Because the book makes many of its points through the eye, we see--and feel--more than we might otherwise. Issues that influence how the families are nourished (or not) are made more immediate. Quietly, the book reveals the intersection of nutrition and politics, of the particular and universal. It's a wonderful and worthy feat. --Arthur Boehm

On Photography

Susan Sontag

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Medieval European Scholar Ideas 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 16 people found this review helpful.

First this book should not ne taken seriously, it's meant to be just being critical about photography thats all, secondly even though author is American she sounds like European middle age scholar minded critic. Third, she doesn't know about fine art photography in depth, she only criticises and about 20-30 very famous photographers she knows of, she didn't taken into account most (almost all) modern photographers. Most of the time she sounds like a 19. century European painter just lost his job because of rising of photography, but also wants to learn about new technique called photography with a great frustration and misses his old job a lot.. Sontags background about philosophy and sociology didn't help much for a healhty criticsm of photography..

Good try for a criticism of fine art photography, I think every serious fine art photographer should read this book, because it teaches the way how the fine art photography could be criticised in a wrong way, and this book does a damn good job.

Editorial Review:

Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave”essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching “Brief Anthology of Quotations.”

Creature

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Words are inadequate. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Reviewing a book such as this is probably as difficult as it is to describe having seen in person the animals that Andrew Zuckerman saw and photographed. He offers 175 full-color high definition images assembled in a coffee-table book that commands attention with its stunning cover shot of a black panther. Other images include those of bears, mandrills, parrots, and baby leopards. No text is provided nor is any necessary because it would be intrusive and thus a distraction. Literally, Zuckerman's art speaks for itself with and does so with visual eloquence. Any words of mine are inadequate except to say "Magnificent!"

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, December 2007: December seems to be the classic month to celebrate the coffee-table book--those oversized tomes that sit out on display, easily enticing anyone within arm's reach to flip through the pages. One of my favorites of the season--and one you'll want to keep out all year long--is Andrew Zuckerman's Creature, a photographic safari of astounding studio shots of an ark's worth of animals, ready for their close-ups against a stark white backdrop. Mesmerizing, inspiring, and ultimately very, very cool. Badgers, fruit bats, and bald eagles never looked so good. --Brad Thomas Parsons

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005

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Total reviews: 103 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990—2005. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Portraits of well-known figures–Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet–appear alongside pictures of Leibovitz’s family and friends, reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early Nineties, and landscapes made even more indelible through Leibovitz’s discerning eye. The images form a narrative rich in contrasts and continuities: The photographer has a long relationship that ends with illness and death. She chronicles the celebrations and heartbreaks of her large and robust family. She has children of her own. All the while she is working, and the public work resonates with the themes of her life.