Here’s a quick look at books by three photographers who have strongly influenced how I look at creating images and how I’ve learned to create images that match the image I want people to see.
First up, Michael Frye has just published Landscapes in Lightroom 5 which is a great way to get a handle on the new release of Lightroom. His earlier books, such as Light and Land, made a major impact on how I process my images in Lightroom.
Landscapes in Lightroom 5 carries this forward into Lightroom 5 and covers the the basics of processing images and also how to take advantage the new features in the latest release. His teaching style is different than a lot of manuals, instead of trying to teach Lightroom feature by feature, he puts the focus on the image, and through a series of examples with his own images, and talks about the thinking behind the changes he makes on the image to take it from a RAW file to a final product. He also makes available his original RAW files, so you can practice on them and follow along with his suggestions on your own computer, which is a great touch.
If you’re trying to get past the “push the buttons and slide the knobs until it looks good” phase of using Lightroom and teach yourself how to think your way through an image and make modifications to it with a purpose to a final look, this is a good book to help you understand what you need to do to make that shift.
If there’s a photographer that’s had the greatest influence in my work in the last two years, it has to be David duChemin. His work spans a wide range of material. He’s written a number of traditionally published books, the latest being The Print and the Process : Taking Compelling Photographs from Vision to Expression
At some point as you mature as a photographer, you will wake up one morning and think to yourself “I never want to read another blog post about how to put my camera in aperture mode, or why real photographers don’t use autofocus (hint: they’re lying), or how if you use these magical (patented) SEO techniques that image sales will come flying into your email inbox (hint: they’re really lying).
When you hit that point, you’re ready to start reading David duChemin, and happily, Craft and Vision has bundled a set of his books at a discounted price to get you started. The David duChemin Creative Bundle, which includes seven of his titles. Unlike many photography book authors, duChemin talks a lot less about the mechanics of the tools and instead tries to focus on making the image rather than taking, which is to say thinking through the composition and the mechanics of how you process it and not leave those decisions up to chance or to the camera. This package of seven short books goes a great job of encapsulating that philosophy and can start you down the path to making images and being in control of the creative process. At $28US, it’s an incredible bargain, but if you want to start with just one, grab a copy of The Vision-Driven Photographer.
Finally, Zack Arias. I first heard about Arias when he published a guest blog on Kelby’s blog called Transform. It blew me away because here was something almost nobody talks about — what it’s like being a photographer. There is, frankly, way too much push the shutter button and watch the magic happen — once you buy my book going on out in the photography blogging world, and not nearly enough talk about what it’s really like being a day to day working guy who’s making a living and keeping the bills paid by hauling out the camera and getting the job done.
It was Zack, indirectly, who helped me understand that it was okay to not try to turn pro, or more correctly, that it was okay to enjoy taking photos and not feel the pressure to turn them into dollars, because that was the right thing for me at this stage in my life. He is a great sanity check for the mythology of photography that comes out of so many other voices in the industry and I find his take on all of this fascinating and educational.
Zack has finally done a book, and that it exists was enough for me to buy it, just to toss some dollars in his direction. But I’m happy to say that Photography Q&A by Zack Arias
Read the tumblr blog, and then buy the book. You won’t regret it.
What do these three photographers have in common? All three of them are more interested in the image than the pixels, with the results instead of the process. Far too often photographic discussions online run down the rathole of bits and bytes and megapixels and feature checklists and all that mechanical crap, and seemingly forgotten is whether or not the image is good or not, and whether a viewer of that image actually is going to give a damn about that image. It’s (relatively) easy to write about how to twist knobs and pull levers in Lightroom to make an image twitch and giggle, but it’s hard to write about about the craft of creating interesting images and the reality of being a photographer, which is much more than just owning a camera and pushing the shutter.
These three all talk about those parts of the photograph. If you’re not reading their blogs and following their writing, you should start. These books are a good way to introduce yourself to them.
You won’t regret it.