Customer Review: Excellent Introduction to Lighting

This book was a great introduction to photography lighting in general. The photos and illustrations really help.

Customer Review: pretty much all you'll need...and make that 4.5 stars

I wanted to give it 5 stars, but the overall similarity of style and the focus on black and white and film as opposed to colour and digital (or at least a 50/50 mix) were just barely enough to cost it a perfect rating.

That said, the images are (for the most part) beautiful and occasionally quite sexy. Even though the heavy use of black and white (when you'd like to get tips on tungsten, white balance, red vs blue, etc.) gets old, the overall quality and the layout make up for it.

It starts with a somewhat dry but very to-the-point explanation of how light acts, the different types of light and so on, then cuts right to the chase with the photo on one page and a diagram of all the elements used on the opposite/facing page. It gives the location, type of film, all the good stuff...the only thing it lacks is the time the picture was taken where daylight/natural light was used. Some of that does come out in the photographers' descriptions, though.

That's another (very) strong point for this book: multiple artists. Instead of buying a photo book, hating the style and being stuck with 100 pages of it, you can just skip the ones you don't care for...like the handful of pointless macro shots showing 2 square inches of skin scattered throughout.

I haven't tried ''garage glamour'' yet, but it's pretty much the only one I think I'll ''need'' after this. The pictures that are good are VERY good and they far outnumber the crap ones. I'd especially suggest it to someone on a budget who has to be clever with composition to make up for the lack of a $10 trillion camera (the stuff done on old Nikon film cameras in here puts away half of the pics I see from $5,000 Leicas.)

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