TWIP

29 June 2008

TWIP Photo Book Reviews #13 - Face to Face

Posted by Scott under: Photo Book Reviews

Publisher: O’Reilly

This book is about taking pictures of people; not just portraits, but also people at events, and even, in a few cases, people in the landscape.

The book is divided into five parts. Part I includes a portfolio of pictures from Carnevale, in Venice, with the author’s pithy comments like “Choose a creative angle. Break the traditional rules of composition and look for unique angles.” There is also a short portfolio of pictures from Mongolia, in which the author mentions different pieces of equipment he found useful in taking the pictures.

Part II includes 19 chapters, each a bit of photographic philosophy, like “Adding Props”, together with several photos that are said to illustrate the point and a few hundred words of explanation.

There are parts on outdoor and indoor photography that provide several tips on photographing in these lighting conditions. The book concludes with a section on using Photoshop, wherein the author describes several techniques that can be used to manipulate images for a different effect.

Sammon is an enthusiastic author and that comes through in the writing. He is also takes interesting, colorful and exciting pictures in exotic places that will catch the reader’s eye, including Venice, Namibia, and ranches in the American Southwest. Yet, after the pleasure of reading this book, I realized that I was looking at a book that combined a portfolio of photographs (some of which I recalled from other Sammon books) and a bunch of tips. I like to see instruction built up in a structured fashion rather then as tips. For example, Sammon gives a lot of tips about depth-of-field, but never gives a comprehensive explanation of the subject.

Moreover, it seemed to me that this was the same ground that Sammon had covered in several of his other twenty-seven books. If you’ve never read a book by the author, this volume may be a lot of fun, but if you’ve read one of his more general books, you may find this book repetitious. The tips seem to be aimed at the beginning photographer, rather then the advanced image maker. For the expert, it may be useful to be reminded of some of the tips, but there will be little new here.

I suspect that publishers believe that there must be reference to Photoshop to make a book applicable to digital photography. Pitching the Photoshop section of the book to more manipulative techniques, rather than mentioning basic exposure and color controls, might lead new photographers, who appear to be the main audience for this book, to conceive of the software as a tool mainly for image alteration. Moreover, Sammon’s instructions sometimes utilize destructive adjustments, like dodging, rather then the more generally favored adjustment layers.

If you’ve never read a book by Rick Sammon, this one will certainly be a lot of fun. If you are looking for some kind of advanced advice, you probably won’t find it here.

This post sponsored by Lensbabies.