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Summary: Creative Nature & Outdoor Photography
Review: Just finished the book and it was most helpful...easy to understand and put into practice. The photo's are outstanding and it is truly a creative book.
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Summary: Can Creativity be Taught?
Review: Somewhere along the line between beginner and expert most photographers decide that they want to be more creative. It is to this audience that Brenda Tharp had addressed her work. But one question this book raises is whether you can teach someone to be creative. The author believes the answer is yes, although she acknowledges that it takes a lot of work on the part of the photographer.Tharp begins and ends the book by telling you that the secret to creativity is learning to see. But as you go through the book some of the chapters on subjects like light and composition and perspective sound remarkably similar to a lot of other photography books that are concerned with technique rather than creativity. Tharp's method is to give you a rule like "simplify" and then to tell you how to simplify. She does this well and the pictures that she uses certainly show her creativity, but it's hard to make the connection between these rules and developing our creativity. I wish she had spent more time on telling us how to see because I think she is on the right trail here. But if you speed down the highway too quickly you might miss it, which would be a shame. Assuming you can teach creativity, Tharp makes a decent try of it, providing the reader is willing to work at making the connections to seeing. There are many approaches to teaching how to be photographically creative. In "Fine Art Nature Photography: Advanced Techniques and the Creative Process" Tony Sweet presents us with a series of pictures and a narrative for each that explains what he was trying to achieve with the photograph and what techniques he used to achieve it. In "Creative Landscape Photography", Niall Benvie talks about the different subject matter one may encounter, like wilderness, and then talks about what that subject means to him and what techniques he uses to translate what he sees and feels into a photograph. And my favorite photography book, "Photography and the Art of Seeing" by Freeman Paterson, in a very touchy-feely work, provides a number of unusual exercises that are designed to teach a photographer how to see. None of these books actually teaches creativity (although for me, Paterson comes closest.) Instead they show creative work and the considerations that the authors had in creating that work. Whether any method works in developing creativity is an open question. If it can be developed, which authors' approach will work best will depend on the individual reader. A serious photographer will want to try them all until he or she finds one that works for him or her. Tharp's book is certainly one that ought to be examined in this difficult search.
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Summary: Great Overview of Outdoor Photographic Techniques
Review: The heading says it all. Nicely illustrated, covering the basics of outdoor photography. Touches on digital.
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Summary: Good for beginners, but lacking some important information
Review: This book is sort of a "how to see creatively" kind of book. It has decent photos and gives a nice theory behind seeing pictures. My main two problems with the book are the following:
1) Despite basically trying to teach composition, no compositional art terms are ever mentioned (ie, rule of thirds, etc).
2) None of the photograph captions (besides a handful in one of the chapters about shutter speed) show any sort of shot information like shuter/aperture, and only some show focal length.
This book is not designed to be a technical book, so if you need to learn how to use the camera or learn about lenses, depth of field, or what aperture/shutter settings to use for a given composition, you won't find it here. On the other hand if you'd just like a book with decent nature photographs, and what is essentially a pep-talk throughout the text, this one will fit that bill. It is essentially a beginner's introduction to nature photography composition, I believe.
There is another book on amazon that I also owned called "Learning to See Creatively", and though it did not deal strictly with nature photography, it seemed to be a bit more experimental and pushed you to actually be more creative in your compositions. It also has all the lens/aperture/shutter setting information in the caption for every photograph.
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Summary: Take More Creative Photos!
Review: This book is well written and easy to understand. It includes a ton of great photos, which illustrate the points Brenda is making. My photographs have definitely become more creative and unique because of Brenda's tips. Her book challenges me to look for photos that aren't my "normal" compositions, which has resulted in getting more creative and satisfying photos.
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Summary: Take More Creative Photos!
Review: This book is well written and easy to understand. It includes a ton of great photos, which illustrate the points Brenda is making. My photographs have definitely become more creative and unique because of Brenda's tips. Her book challenges me to look for photos that aren't my "normal" compositions, which has resulted in getting more creative and satisfying photos.
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Summary: Delightful
Review: This is a delightful book in which concepts for creative photographs are cogently explained and illustrated with consistently strong images. This book could well have carried a subtitle something like -- "A Composition Toolkit". Very useful -- perhaps even inspirational -- for all skill levels.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful
Review: This is a delightful book in which concepts for creative photographs are cogently explained and illustrated with consistently strong images. This book could well have carried a subtitle something like -- "A Composition Toolkit". Very useful -- perhaps even inspirational -- for all skill levels.
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