Henri Cartier-Bresson Here and Now, by Clément Chéroux
If there is one photographer that every photojournalist or street photographer knows, it is Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB)! This books takes you through all of HCB’s life: what event shaped him, who he met and was influenced by, his travels to Africa, Cuba, China, India, Spain etc, his work as a reporter for the Communist Press, how surrealism attracted him and influenced his work – the list goes on. Reading this book, you come to understand both how interesting a life HCB lead, but also the historical events that his images document and reflect.
I can’t figure out exactly why I find HCB’s images so stunning. There is obviously his mastering of composition long before all the rules were invented. And his talent for being at the right spot at the right time and on top of that hitting the shutter exactly at the decisive moment. But there is more to it than that. A touch of surrealism that adds a strange glow to his images that continues to fascinate me. No matter how much I analyze the images, the effect on me somehow escapes me just when I think I have it all figured out! And I guess this is exactly where a good photographer and a master of photography separate: the ability to make you look not only a second time, but again and again.
This book is a wonderful collection of 500+ of his images, and as a photographer looking over the should of a master, this is the part that I like the best. Others may find the story of his lift more interesting – for example how he 3 times escaped as a prisoner of war and later became a communist. And later decided to work for many years solely doing photojournalism. This part of the book I also enjoyed, but the pictures! I can wholeheartedly recommend this book if you find his work fascinating like I do.
PS: HCB is quoted for saying that: “In any case, people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing”. This remark is more relevant than ever, where YouTubers constantly battle to what extend photography gear matters and if the rule of thirds is to be applied always or sometimes.
I got my Nikon AF-S 85mm 1.8G lens over at mpb Europe for 334 EUR used – this was October 2021. The lens was rated by mpb to be in excellent condition, which in my experience is close to brand new! The same lens from new in Denmark is around 500 EUR, but mind you that here in little Denmark prices are per usual some of the highest in Europe. But still, I find that I save a lot buying used gear in good to mint condition.
Nikkor 85mm AF-S 1.8G lens
The first that I noticed when mounting the lens is how big it is in terms of circumference. It protrudes beyond the f-mount size significantly as the images above and below show. I knew the 1.4G lens is a “dramatic” lens in terms of size, but it surprised me that the same can be said about the 1.8G lens.
The 85mm 1.8G mounted on a Nikon D750
The lens does not have a golden ring on the nose, so apparently Nikon does not think this is a professional grade lens; my guess is they left this to the 1.4G lens instead. The body is made up of plastic, and the f-mount is metal as we know it. The feel and appearance of the lens is quite good considering we have left the days of “all metal, all glass and made in Japan”. This one is made in China.
The weight is around 350 grams which is super light, especially considering the lens volume. Although Nikon does not market this lens as weather sealed, I did notice that there is a rubber gasket on the f-mount, so at least dust will have a hard time finding way in between lens and body.
Speaking of the 1.4G lens, your question is probably why I did not buy the 1.4G? I would have loved that lens, but the price tag is around 3 times as much as the 1,8G! And although I love fast lenses, I simply could not cough up the cash to go for the 1.4G.
The lens comes with a lens hood of good quality albeit plastic, it takes Ø67mm filters and there is no issue with moving parts out front, your filter will be sitting in the same position as when you mounted it!
Here the lens hood is mounted on the 85mm 1.8G
The lens has no aperture ring – all adjustments to aperture are done via the camera body. There is only one button on the lens itself, and that is the auto focus to manual focus switch. The former can always be overruled by manual focus as soon as you start turning the focus ring.
I am happy to say that the focus ring works really well. There is no play as I reported for the 50mm 1.8G lens. The feel of the manual focus ring is not super smooth, but it works ok. The AF-S is as you would expect both silent and fast, but not the fastest Nikkor I have tested. But as this is mainly a portrait lens, maybe some street as well, I doubt that you would need blazing fast AF as you do for wildlife and sports. The built in AF motor allows you to use the lens also with AF on Nikon entry level bodies like the D3x00 and D5x00.
Minimum focus distance measured to 75cm; official numbers say 80cm.
The distance scale is there working from the minimal focus distance of 0.8 meters to infinity, although my own non-scientific testing showed that I could get 5 cm closer than that. They have even found space for DoF markings on the distance scale, although only for f/16. There are 7 rounded aperture blades, which is a bit on the low side, especially for a portrait lens where the bokeh per tradition is vital.
The lens comes with what Nikon calls SIC – super integrated coating, and the dampening of flare when pointing the lens to a street light at night is some of the best I have ever seen. The SIC is really sick, pun intended! There is no ED glass at all, so it is really a “back to basics” construction with no modern fancy stuff, but just good glass in a relatively simple construction.
Performance
This lens is sharp! You may have guessed that if you took a look at the MTF chart from Nikon or read other reviews, but it really is! Take a look at these two images from Lightroom measuring the center sharpness at 300%:
Center sharpness.
Wide open left (f/1.8) and stopped down a bit to the right (f/3.5). If you have seen other of my reviews, you know that I like to shoot a whiteboard with a few dollar and EUR bills to test sharpness and contrast, and when I can read the state names, then I know I am dealing with a very sharp lens. In this case I can read that NY is to the rightmost! The sharpness gets slightly better stopped down, but this is impressive performance!
Looking at the corner sharpness, it gets even better (still 300%):
Corner sharpness.
This is from the bottom left, and the performance wide open (left) is impressive! I may be able to see that it stopped down has slightly better contrast (look at the white in the EUR sign top left), but still this is some of the best corner performance wide open that I have ever seen! Well done Nikon!
And when you shoot at f/1.8 you really get a shallow depth of field! I know that f/1.4 or even f/1.2 will give you more, but still:
Out of focus elements – notice the cat to the left.
Same motive, but 2 different focus points: left the flower in the foreground and right the cat in the couch. Even when there is only 1.5 meter between the subject and your background elements, the latter gets rendered beautifully out of focus!
The bokeh I have found to be beautiful. When shooting wide open, the aperture blades are not engaged, and hence you of course get nice round bokeh balls, although the bokeh towards the corners tend to be more oval and shaped like an American football:
Out of focus elements at f/1.8.
I had high hopes for aberrations, but apparently I can get any lens to generate at least purple fringing:
Noticeable chromatic aberrations to the left.
Wide open to the left you can see purple fringing in the high contrast zones of the tinfoil. Not so much stopped down to the right (f/7.1). So there is a bit of aberrations and shooting streetlights at night (yes, a hobby yours truly practices) it gets noticeable – but I have always been able to remove it in Lightroom by pulling a few sliders. And speaking of streetlights at night, my test of flare showed that this lens has some of the best control of flare that I have ever seen.
The lens does suffer from focus breathing, so if you are considering it as an option for videography you may find that this is a showstopper. Especially when you ALSO consider how well flare and ghosting is controlled by this lens (videographers for some reason love this stuff and do not want to well dampened lenses in this regard).
In my reviews I don’t test distortion or vignetting. The simple reason being that you can fix this in Lightroom with a push of a button. Only for demanding architecture or real estate photographers can I imagine that distortion and vignetting would be a problem, and I am pretty sure they are not in the market for a 85mm.
Conclusion
Pro:
Super sharpness, both center and corners
Super contrast, both center and corners
Light – 350 grams
Ok build quality, albeit no gold ring from Nikon
Well working manual focus ring
Takes filters with no issues
Good handling of flare and ghosts
Price performance
Works on Nikon entry level cameras
Con:
Not the widest of wide – there is the 1.4G to mention an alternative
Some aberrations in high contrast areas wide open
Not for videographers (flare too well controls + some focus breathing)
AF not the fastest in the AF-S family
Not sure how long-term durable the build quality is
You probably have picked this up reading the review above, but I absolutely love this lens. It is clear to me that all attention has been given to the internals of this lens, and hence you get a “budget-feel” lens on the outside and a top performer on the inside. If you are to prioritize, then if you ask me, this is as it should be.
Right now, I cannot think of a lens where the price / performance ratio is better than this one when we are talking modern lenses (vintage lenses you buy on a flea market may have a better ration, but that stems from the price primarily). So if you need a 85mm prime from Nikon, this one should definitely be on your short list.
My only concern is if the lens will stand the test of time – will it survive the constant use in a demanding pro environment? I am not sure; maybe better to go with a gold ring lens if you are a demanding pro.
This is probably as academic as it gets! If you want to learn the basics about photography like exposure, composition, etc, then this book is not for you at all! The title is to be taken very literally.
It is an interesting read. You really understand how much goes into interpreting a photograph. Maybe not your ordinary picture of your pet or your new car, but a picture used to document the death of Che Guevara, or the first day in the camp for the Rwandan Tutsi and Hutu refugees.
The chapters do not make up a nice red thread. Instead, it seems like a collection of articles that take their own angle irrespective of the other chapters. Analysis of an an image. Tribute to a photographer. Meet and dialogue with a photographer. Sometimes it is an analysis of a specific picture, other times a photographers work.
It is not an easy read. It is super academic. I will not claim that I understood all that John Berger writes, nor that I read it all. It is simply too demanding for little me. Consider yourself warned.
It shows what human beings can do to each other in a warzone. It is not pleasant reading, but Danish photographer Jan Grarup has never been a crowd pleaser.
The table of content gives the scope of the locations that Jan has photographed over the years: Kashmir, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Rwanda, Kosovo, Roma, Ramallah, Hebron, Iraq, Iran, Darfur, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Gaza, Haiti, Somalia and Mosul. More than 400 pages in coffee table book size, filled with black and white images from the horrors of war. People killed, people on the run, people in despair, people crammed together in refugee camps. Weapons, corpses, soldiers, dust, blood, poverty.
Jan has been a warzone photographer his hole life. And he has paid and continues to pay a high price for his work. PTSD to mention one. You can’t dispute Jan’s capabilities as a photographer – every image is carefully selected, the composition is impeccable, the technical quality of the images is from the top shelf.
In the foreword Jan quotes Dr. Martin Luther King jr. saying “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.” – I think this sums up the mission Jan is on: to wake up the good people.
PS: I don’t think this book is available anymore from new. With a bit of good luck you may find a used copy. You won’t get mine. Good luck hunting.
PS: It is a BIG book. Even for a coffee table book sized book, it is bigger than most: 39cm tall and 28 cm wide, and with a weight around 3,2 kilo!
I must admit that I did not know of the company XTAR until they reached out to me and asked me to review the XTAR Camera Battery Charger. Apparently XTAR was Founded in 2006 as an electronic technology company in Shenzhen that specializes in development and manufacture of Li-ion batteries, smart chargers, and LED flashlights. Always good to have a product from a true specialist, so I happily accepted to review the product.
I did not know the city Shenzhen either, but apparently the city is located in the Guangdong Province, China, and according to google is a modern metropolis that links Hong Kong to China’s mainland. The 600m tall skyscraper Ping An certainly gives the city skyline a distinctive look.
Chargers, chargers and chargers
Some of the chargers that came with my cameras… All different in size, shape and how they work…
If you like me have a few cameras, then you also know that each of them comes with a separate charger, and even if you stay with the same camera brand, they tend to change the battery type and format over time, as the batteries get more and more powerful (and the cameras more and more power demanding). So it is a mess. And you have to remember the right charger(s) for your camera(s) when you travel and it all takes up space in your backpack.
I believe EU is working on legislation to make USB-C the common standard for chargers, and I really welcome this initiative, but when you like to buy cameras that are a bit dated (like the Nikon D750), then short term this is not much help. This is where the charger from XTAR can help you out.
XTAR solution
The XTAR charger is named SN4 and is in the bottom center of the image below. This is the backbone in the solution. A bit like Lego, you can click different types of so called charger plates onto the SN4. Each charger plate takes 2 batteries of the same kind, and the SN4 can take either 1 or 2 charger plates.
In the example below I have disassembled the SN4 from the charger plates, so you have a charger plate that fits Sony batteries (NP-FW50) bottom left, and a charger plate for Nikon batteries (EN-EL15) bottom right.
The XTAR SN4 is in the center bottom. The 35mm film top right (Ilford) is just to give you a feel for the size of the charger.
The SN4 takes a USB-C cable as input (yay!) and can be charged via the power supply from XTAR, named C45IC. It will give you a whopping 45 watts (!). In the image above it is show in the middle, just below the USB cable in the top.
Charging using a power bank as power source.
You don’t necessarily need the charger – you can use any USB-C capable power supply to feed the charger, but be aware that it may not give it all the juice it needs to charge the batteries as fast as it would with the XTAR power supply. In the image above I use a power bank to feed the charger.
If you look carefully, you can see the words NP-FW50 in the empty battery dock, so this one takes batteries for Sony cameras (I have the A7Rii). Also notice that I have only used half of the SN4 potential, as the right hand side has the plastic blind mounted.
When charger plates are mounted on both sides, it looks like the image below. Here I have Sony batteries left and Nikon right.
3 batteries almost fully charged. The fourth one is filled up (lights out).
Most of my chargers simply has a single LED that tells me if the charging is ongoing or complete. The XTAR is more advanced to say the least. For each of the 4 batteries there are 4 bars showing how the charging progresses. A solid light means the level is done, a flashing light means work in progress. When the battery is almost charged all 4 bars light up as in the image above, and once the charge is complete, all bars are turned of as shown leftmost.
In addition there is indicators below the bars showing how much current the battery gets (2A and 3A), albeit turned off when current is low.
XTAR claims that their charger is both faster and more gentle to the batteries relative to the chargers that comes with the batteries. This should give you less wait time and prolong the battery life time. I have not tested this as I normally put my batteries to charge over the night and hence the speed is of less importance to me. What is much more important to me is the ability to charge several batteries in parallel, and here I can charge 4 Sony batteries at the same time, provided I have the right charger plates.
Charger plates
XTAR currently deliver charger plates for Sony, Nikon and Canon. You can find the full list of available options here if you scroll down to the bottom of the page to see if your specific battery is supported.
There are plans to develop charger plates for Fuji, GoPro, Olympus, Panasonic and more. I will be waiting for the Fuji charger plates, as my beloved X-T20 is very happy to consume batteries at a fast pace!
Prices
You can find the current prices available directly from XTAR here. Here in October 2021 you can get the SN4 plus 1 charger plates (2 battery slots) and a USB cable for 39 USD. If you add a charger plate, it is an addition 10 USD, but then you have 2 charger plates (4 battery slots for 2 different batteries). If you want the power supply on top, it is an additional 20 USD.
If you want to go all in and have both a carry bag, SN4, power supply, 3 charger plates and a Sony charger plate F970, then the total will set you back 89 USD.
You can buy directly from XTAR as per the link above, but there are also many retailers that sell the XTAR products if that is to your liking.
Conclusion
While we wait for USB-C to become the standard way to charge a battery or charge a camera, the solution from XTAR certainly takes a good step in the right direction. It is a very compact and flexible solution, that will enable you to travel with a much smaller setup when it comes to chargers. And then it gives you better information as the charging progresses, plus you can charge up to 4 batteries in parallel.
In addition you can do without the power supply, as XTAR gave the SN4 a USB-C interface. This is where I find the solution changes from good to great. Provided you have a power bank or any other device that yields power via a USB-C interface, you can leave the power supply at home as well.
Prices seems fair. You are up and running for less than 50 USD with a 4 battery charge solution. I will happily pay that for a solution that makes my photography life more simple. And this one does. My only gripe is that I really hope XTAR come with a solution for Fuji batteries very soon! Other than that, I can recommend this solution if your pile of chargers is a nuisance to you.
I bought my copy of the Nikon AF-S 16-35mm ED 1:4G lens in February 2021 for around 730 UER, but here in October 2021 you can get a used copy over at mpb around 450 EUR subject to wear and tear. I recommend you get a used copy as the lens comes with a gold ring (Nikons pro level lenses) and is hence built to last. If not forever, then for a long time.
Specs and build
The Nikon 16-35mm lens
The lens ranges from 16-35mm and has a constant aperture of F4. That may not be the fastest of lenses, but a bit controversial, Nikon has supplied this lens with vibration reduction (2.5 stops claimed) which allows longer shutter openings without camera shake. Some report that they have shot razor sharp images down to 1/10th of a second.
The lens takes Ø77mm filter threads – no issue with rounded glass in the front or the front turning. At 15cm the lens is somewhat longer that what you would expect from a wide lens, but it balances well on a Nikon D4 with its 680 grams. Lighter cameras like a Nikon D750 makes the combo a bit “nose heavy”.
The lens comes with a very short lens hood, which is what you would expect when the widest angle of view is 107 degrees. There are buttons to turn VR and autofocus on and off.
Lens hood.
There are 9 rounded aperture blades inside the lens, along with ED glass and aspherical lens elements. Nikon has made the lens since 2010, so the design is relatively new (coming from a vintage lens enthusiast!). The focus motor is built into the glass (SWM – silent wave motor) and works silent and fast; albeit it is not far the glass has to be move to go from 16 to 35mm.
The lens is all made in plastic except for the lens mount, but feels solid and in good quality. My only issue with the lens build quality as such is the manual focus as there is a bit of play when you turn the focus ring before it engages and actually gets the glass moving. Plus the throw is rather short at around 90 degrees. Other than that, it seems like they have made a good job in Thailand assembling this lens.
Daily use
At first I was skeptical to the idea of both VR and a zoom lens – why not just give me a fast prime? But I must admit this lens has grown on me. The ability to zoom in and crop a bit where relevant is great when you are shooting with not-too-high-resolution cameras like the D700 or the D4. Here the zoom allows me to get the framing right in camera so I don’t have to crop in post.
The VR in combination with the not-so-fast aperture actually works really well. I think Nikon knows that a lot of issues occur for fast lenses wide open, so by stopping down to f/4 by design and adding VR instead, you get a really useful combo. Not great if you want to shoot fast moving subjects, but I think this lens is made for landscape photographers primarily.
I find the AF less useful. Don’t get me wrong – I am as lazy as anyone else, but I often take my time to focus when I shoot landscapes and AF is really not that important. I would much rather pay a little less for the lens and skip AF. What I instead could use was some depth-of-field markings on the distance scape. That is useful for finding the hyper focal distance. And then I would like to get a better manual focus ring that has a long throw and engages immediately.
I have a few times, especially when shooting at the ocean, missed the ability to go wider than 16 mm. I can see the difference to my 14mm Samyang prime, and believe it or not, the last 2mm makes a HUGE difference. So it would be nice if the next version of the lens could go a tad wider.
Image quality
The performance of a lens is always a co-operation between lens and camera, and there will be sample variations from any production line. For these reasons a MTF chart is more an indication than the absolute truth. Having said that, the image quality from this lens is from the top shelf. The red lines below in the MTF shows impressive performance in terms of contrast also close to the edges, whereas sharpness starts lower and declines more, but both in tele and wide we are at 0.9 or above, which in my opinion is very high. Now wonder Nikon gave this lens a gold ring.
I have shot more than 4000 images with this lens in the 8 months I have owned it, and I can confirm that the image quality is stellar. There are of course some that will be able to see the slightly softer corners, but I really doubt anyone will notice.
A beautiful sunset.
Sun stars and bokeh
I doubt anyone buys this lens for it’s rendering of out of focus elements – that is probably more relevant for a 85mm portrait lens. But of course there may be an architecture or real estate photographer that appreciates good bokeh. Being a landscape photographer, I am not a bokeh fanatic.
But what I am very interested in is sun stars. And these do not look great when the blades are rounded – see the example above? I prefer sun stars from straight blades any time.
Vignetting and distortion
Vignetting and distortion is bad, especially distortion. Good news is that it is only a click away in Lightroom. You can literally fix both issues by two clicks in Lightroom. However, if you are a real estate or a architecture photographer, then this could be an issue for you, so know that this lens comes with these issues.
Aberrations
Contrary to what the MTF charts show with the solid and dotted lines moving apart towards the corners of the lens, I have found aberrations very well controlled in this lens. Only if I shot at 16mm and in Lightroom zoomed in at 400% in the corners, was I able to find purple and yellow fringing, but for most users of this lens I think the bottom line is that aberrations are controlled so well that it is no issue at all. The fringing I did see was removed immediately when I hit the “remove CA” checkmark in Lightroom.
Flare and ghosting
This lens has Nikons latest and greatest ED coating, and flare and ghosting is very well controlled, actually to a level where I think this could be a showstopper for a videographer (they love flare!). Not that I think a videographer would be interested in this lens, but just to illustrate how well it is dampened.
Conclusion
On the plus side:
Price (450 EUR used)
Useful zoom range (16-35mm)
Vibration reduction (tripod less needed)
Super center sharpness
Super contrast
Not too heavy (680 gram)
Takes 77mm filters
Weather sealed
Constant aperture
Aberrations and flare well controlled
Can focus close (29 cm)
Color rendition as we know Nikon (which is good if you ask me!)
And the less positive:
Some softness in the corners
Would be nice to go even wider than 16mm
Heavy vignetting and barrel distortion (easy fix in post)
Rounded aperture blades (sun stars not super pretty)
Manual focus ring quality (play)
F/4 not the fastest wide lens (but VR compensates)
No aperture markings on the distance scale
And things where I cannot mobilize a strong opinion:
Built in AF (I could easily do without – if the price came down)
Bokeh is fine (but I don’t really need it for landscapes)
Focus breathing is an issue, but I doubt videographers or macro photographers would choose this lens, and for the rest of us it is not important
Longer than you would maybe expect at 15 cm
So can I recommend this lens? Yes, absolutely, provided of course you need a wide lens. But get a used copy. There are plenty out there, and it comes with Nikons gold ring (pro level lens) so it is built to last.
Alternatives
If you want the very best wide angle in the Nikon lineup for the f-mount, you should take a look a the the 14-24mm f/2.8. It is a super lens! It is in almost al dimensions superior to the lens under review here, but be aware that the lens is 1 kg (!), does not take filters due to the rounded front glass and the price is close to double up! But if you want the best from Nikon – this is it.
If on the other hand you want something smaller, lighter and much cheaper, the little 24mm prime from Nikon that I have reviewed here could also be an alternative. It is going in the opposite direction in terms of price and size and zoom range, but it all comes down to what your requirements are and how much you want to invest.
I believe they produce a book similar to this one every year, or at least regularly. This is the edition 10, with 1-9 preceding obviously. So it is not the latest and greatest I am reviewing here, but the images are timeless and hence the edition number is of less interest.
It is VisitBritain as sponsor amongst others, so there is an agenda here other than just distributing some absolutely lovely award winning British images.
And I am happy to see that one of my favorite ocean photographers Rachel Talibart is one of the winners that made it into this book (the Sunday Times magazine award), but there are simply so many other talented British photographers that you have to see it to understand it. This is only the top of the iceberg – there must be so many hard working photographers out there that are not on display in this book.
One of the things I really enjoy about this book – other than the beautiful images – is that the photographers tell a little story about each image and in the back of the book they document what camera, settings and lens they used, and in addition briefly describe their post processing work. This is valuable insights, and shows that cameras of different make and price range are all able to produce beautiful images. It is the photographer that makes the big difference. A decent quality and camera is merely the means to an end.
Photo work: Forty photographers on process and practice, edited by Sasha Wolf
This book is as academic as they come! That is my review in short! If you are curious to look over the shoulders of 40 acclaimed photographers (like Andrew Moore or Paul Graham) and understand their process and workflow, then this is the book to read!
All 40 have been given the same questionnaire of 12 questions like “Do you create with presentation in mind, be that a gallery show or a book?”. The book is simply the documentation of 40 answers to these 12 questions.
This is not your beginners book about photography, nor the advanced book about photography, rather it is an look into the minds and workflows of some highly creative people. I could as well have been a book about painters – the questions and their answers are that agnostic to photography.
So only if you have a keen interest in this highly specialized area can I recommend this book – otherwise I would stay clear of the 255 pages of process and insights.
The Photography Storytelling Workshop by Finn Beales
This is not your average photography book – far from. Finn Beales apparently has landed some VERY big accounts (Apple, Land Rover, Audi, Cartier, etc) and in this book he shares how to pitch for a photography job, plan, deliver and maintain a good long lasting relationship with the client.
The book opens with a chapter about storytelling and how you make a series of pictures tie together to tell a story, with a clear red thread throughout the images – the last image holding the hand of the first one. It continues into how to pitch for a job, win it, plan it, execute the shoot day, edit and finally deliver. I learned a lot about how to manage such process (including the shoot day(s)) as a project and how much planning that is required.
There is a very good section in the book about what colors work together and why – and illustrated with specific examples to underline the points made. Finn coins this as creating a mood board. This was an eye opener for me. I have not come across a photo book where the use of color is addressed in this way and I can tell that this section of the book is one that I will re-visit over and over again.
Finn also has a section about which focal lengths he uses for what kind of shots and I really felt that this part of the book was like looking over the shoulder of a successful commercial photographer. I really found this part extraordinary, and as a result it re-ignited my love for the 50mm prime as a universal tool in my camera bag!
There also are some chapters about editing your photos, but here I felt that I did not learn that much new. However, Finn also addresses how to do data management of your photo files, and here there are lots of tips and tricks that I think you will find useful.
So all in all I found this book both interesting and useful, but if you are new to photography, this would NOT be the book I’d start with. There are better options from Joel Sartore and Michael Freeman. However, if:
storytelling with pictures
project management of your shoots
use of colors to create moods
creating and maintaining client accounts
processing and storing your images
are subjects of interest to you, then this book is definitely worth it. 176 pages with lots of illustrations and examples and exercises. And there is more to be found on his website.
I must admit that I was a bit disappointed when I opened the parcel the book came in, only to find a relatively small and not all that thick book. I had expected a big and heavy book – the bold name “bible” had created some expectations that the appearance of the book could not match.
However, as they say, don’t judge a book by it’s cover, or as in this case: by the size and weight of it. It really is comprehensive. I can understand why Michael Freeman has named this “The Photography Bible” because he really covers a lot of aspects of photography and manages to do so in a condensed way. The main blocks from the table of content are: Exposure, Light and lightning, Composition and Post Processing – distributed across 330 pages with lots of examples and so called challenges.
Challenges are exercises for you as a reader to take on to complete a chapter or an knowledge area. And the author in the foreword recommends that you follow the structure of the book from front to back and don’t just dip in here and there. I can see that great care has been made to present the subjects in a particular order and wrap it with an exercises (challenges) to enhance your learning, so I support the advice to read the book from front to back in its full and take up the challenges presented.
I can really recommend this book if you are after one of the most complete books about the basics of photography. And more than that – it is one of the few books that I have seen talk about soft and hard light, chiaroscuro lightning and not just aperture, depth of field and the like (which of course is also included). It also covers composition to a great extend – a subject that in itself could fill an entire book. So, in short, a great book if you are after a rather complete book about the basics of photography. But not a book that I would read from front to back, I more use it more as a reference when I want to study a subject in detail.
