But today, I would like to talk about John Waaser's recently published book, PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPOSITION: Because a Technically Perfect Picture Without Good Composition is of No Interest to Anyone. This is Book One of John's photo course. John spend two decades photographing motorcycle races for a living, and wound up as the Eastern US Contributing Editor for "CYCLE WORLD MAGAZINE," which at one point was purchased by a division of CBS, Inc. You don't rise to that point without knowing what you are talking about! In this book, without any technical rigmarole that might be hard to understand, John teaches you how to take a picture that will simply LOOK good. He does not talk much about the controls on your camera, or any later manipulating with Photoshop, or any of that stuff. He talks about backgrounds, foregrounds, how to separate the background from the subject, and the foreground from the subject. He talks about color, and about relative size of the subject, and cropping, and lighting. All the stuff you can and should control before you actually take the picture. And except for some discussions about zoom lenses, the book will work for you even if you are just using the camera in your cellular phone. And he talks about several photos he took that he sold in spite of the fact that they were technically very imperfect, because they just looked good, because he snapped the shutter at exactly the right moment. The so-called rule of thirds is the photographer's version of the ten commandments all rolled into one, and he not only does an excellent job of talking about it, but he drew a diagram that puts it all into perspective. If you take pictures, even if they are only of your kittens, or your new child, and even if they are only for distribution to your own family, this book will have you taking pictures that will put your audience in awe of your photographic skills. And it does it all in language that anyone can understand. The above link will take you to the book's own page on the publisher's website, from which you can find links to purchase the book from the iBookstore, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Kobo, and Google Books, among other retailers. The cover photo alone is an absolutely lovely sunset photo, and he tells you exactly how he chose and cropped it to make it fill the bill as a cover shot. And no, it's not something he found on some free photo page on the internet! He was standing on the dock at a local lake where the county shoots off fireworks over the lake every July 4th, and while waiting for the fireworks to begin, he noticed how beautiful the sunset was over the treeline at the far side of the lake, and he took about fifty photos of it as the sun got lower and lower. He was able to crop this one to show the sun in the center, with the clouds coming down an equal amount on both sides, giving him the space for the contrasting text he wanted at the top and the bottom.
Price at the time of this writing is $3.99 for the eBook, but better hurry, there are rumors of a rise to $4.99 very soon. The Paperback is $19.99, because interior color pages are vastly more expensive than black and white, and this book has a few interior photos in full color.
PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPOSITION
No comments:
Post a Comment