Rating: 
Summary: More Inspirational than Instructive
Review: This is an interesting book with some of the most beautiful photography imaginable. Zuckerman is clearly a master photographer and the books meets its goal of teaching photographers how to achieve "perfect exposure."For each chapter, there is an introductory text that is brief and concise and most of the teaching is actually done through the caption text of numerous gorgeous photographs. Zuckerman guides one through the obligatory discourse on the weaknesses of automatic metering and then into various situations that a photographer may find him or herself. Throughout the book, Zuckerman discusses his approach to obtaining exposure. And, there in lies the major weakness of the book - the approach is his. Although and very sound and effective approach, Zuckerman's "secret" is the reliance of a handheld meter. In the end, the book can become little more than a repetition of the idea that if you use a handheld meter, you can obtain good exposure. This is in sharp contrast to Bryan Peterson's "Understand Exposure" which actually teaches the reader the principles of exposure and how to use those principles to obtain good exposure REGARDLESS of the equipment being used. This book, however, has two saving graces: 1) the photography is amazing and does give great examples on how to deal with various exposure situations, and 2) the chapter on finding medium grey in various situations. The first provides the inspiration and the second provides information that is rare to find in books on exposure. Overall a decent book that one would not regret purchasing; however, I would recommend purchasing it along with Peterson's "Understanding Exposure" rather than as a stand alone text on exposure.
Rating: 
Summary: The search for Photographic Exposure Holy Grail of Midtone!
Review: Zuckerman, a master photographer, takes an unassuming, non-technical case-study approach to show readers how to achieve the perfect photographic exposure. The brilliant and superb colour photographs used as illustration or case study are captured with his favorite medium-format SLR camera, a Mamiya RZ 67-II (you can check this out in his interview at http://www.mamiya.com/assets/zuckerman/RZ67). Having explained how and when a built-in TTL (through-the-Lens) reflected light meter (by definition) in an SLR camera may fail, Zuckerman jumps straight to the important concept of a "middle tone" (mid-tone or medium gray or 18% gray) upon which such TTL light meters, and for that matter, all light meters, is based in obtaining a "normal" exposure, as opposed to a "correct" or "perfect" exposure. This is immediately followed by a judicious survey of the classic situations in which one finds difficulty in obtaining a correct exposure. If at all, there is a single rule-of-thumb, Zuckerman makes it clear that if you choose to meter exposure based on a "mid-tone" of a colour, everything else will fall into place. That is the Holy Grail one should seek as far as exposure is concerned! Getting to this even when there is little or no mid-tone is the topic of chapter 3. In a nutshell, when you get an exposure reading from your camera's built-in light meter, often, depending on the lighting situation, you are only getting a "normal" exposure (based on the idea that the camera is exposing your subject at this middle-gray) instead of getting a correct exposure, which is what you want as a photographer!. Hence, when you try to obtain an automatic exposure for tricky situations like black subject on a dark background (examples are a plenty in Zuckerman's book), the built-in exposure meter will fail as it tries to interpret a normal exposure of this by assuming a middle-gray. Consequently, you get an over-exposure in such situation and get a gray instead of black subject. Those situations that present metering problem are covered as individual topics in their respective chapters in this book (high contrast, backlight, indoor architecture, low light of extreme situations when correct exposure is more an art than a science etc). While it is intuitive to illustrate the concept of "middle gray" as being a series of gray ranging from black to white, doing this within the context of colour photography presents even a challenge to the author. The author did, however, made a good attempt by illustrating the location of a "mid-tone colour" in many of his colour illustrations (in chapter 3 and others). One is still left with the question of what exactly constitute a mid-tone of a series of colour of a photographic subject. It would have been great if only Zuckerman could show his chosen "mid-tone colour" for each and everyone of his great colour photographs in this book!
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As a Pro, the author relies heavily on off-camera light meters (notably the Sekonic L-508) that incorporate both an incident as well as a reflected light meter (presumably, no TTL-meter is built into the Mamiya RZ67 II) in capturing almost all of the photos used in the book. Beside stating the importance and the use of incident light meter and a high-end reflected light meter (one-degree spot reading), Zuckerman does provide way in which one can perform the same precision light reading using a standard 35mm SLR on a spot-reading mode. As the spot reading angle is a function of the focal length of the lens being used, Zuckerman shows that with a telephoto lens focused on a chosen mid-tone of a subject, one can achieve the reading that rivals a precision reflected meter! The author does not advocate the practice of bracketing an exposure or over- or under-exposure by a stop or two! Hence, there is no discussion of "zone system" exposure in this book. Interested readers are well advised to check out other titles on this topic, including Les Meehan's "Creative Exposure Control" (Collin and Brown, 2001) and Bahman Farzad's "The Confused Photographer's Guide to Correct Photographic Exposure and the Simplified Zone System" (3rd edition, 2001) While correct or perfect exposure is important, photographic composition is an equally important skill to acquire on your path to great photography. Readers are advised to check out titles on this topic, one of which, "Photos with IMPACT" (David & Charles, 2003) by Tom Mavik is well worth your effort! Overall, this book is both informative and accessible to photographers in general and novice in particular. It is filled with pages and pages of the author's enthusiasm for his subject of nature photography. This simple approach of recognize a photo-exposure situation and search for its mid-tone may not be shared by all photography enthusiasts. But the bottom line is: If you can capture great photos with such an approach, why not? You can always learn the technical details of this later!
Rating:
Summary: The search for Photographic Exposure Midtone Holy Grail!
Review: Zuckerman, an educated master photographer, takes an unassuming, non-technical case-study approach to show readers how to achieve the perfect photographic exposure on film in capturing an image. As such, this book is aimed primarily at film-camera audience although the same principle applies equally to digital camera. There is no discussion on the topic of print development exposure and all brilliant and superb colour photographs used as illustrations were captured with his favorite medium-format SLR camera, a Mamiya RZ 67-II (you can check this out at http://www.mamiya.com/assets/zuckerman/RZ67).
Having explained how and when a built-in TTL (through-the-Lens) reflected light meter (by definition) in an SLR camera may fail, Zuckerman jumps straight to the important concept of a "middle tone" (mid-tone or medium gray or 18% gray) upon which such TTL light meters, and for that matter, all light meters, is based in obtaining a "normal" exposure, as opposed to a "correct" or what the author terms as "perfect" exposure. This is followed by a judicious survey of the classic situations in which one finds difficulty in obtaining such as a correct exposure. If at all, there is a single rule-of-thumb, Zuckerman makes it clear that if you choose to meter exposure based on a "mid-tone" of a colour, everything else will fall into place (and that's Zuckerman's secret!). That is the Holy Grail one should seek as far as exposure is concerned! Getting to this even when there is little or no mid-tone is the topic of chapter 3.
In a nutshell, when you get an exposure reading from your camera's built-in light meter, often, depending on the lighting situation, you are only getting a "normal" exposure (based on the idea that the camera is exposing your subject at this middle-gray) instead of getting a correct exposure, which is what you want as a photographer! Hence, when you try to obtain an automatic exposure for tricky situations like black subject on a dark background (examples are a plenty in Zuckerman's book), the built-in exposure meter will fail as it tries to interpret a normal exposure of this by assuming a middle-gray. Consequently, you get an over-exposure in such situation and get a gray instead of black subject. Those situations that present metering problem are covered as individual topics in their respective chapters in this book (high contrast, backlight, indoor architecture, low light of extreme situations when correct exposure is more an art than a science, etc).
While it is intuitive to illustrate the concept of "middle gray" as being a series of gray ranging from black to white, doing this within the context of colour photography presents even a challenge to the author. The author did, however, make a good attempt by illustrating the location of a "mid-tone colour" in many of his colour illustrations. However, one is still left with the question of what exactly constitute a mid-tone of a series of colour of a photographic subject. It would have been great if only Zuckerman could show his chosen "mid-tone colour" for each and everyone of his colour illustrations in this book.
As a Pro, the author relies heavily on off-camera light meters (notably the Sekonic L-508) that incorporate both an incident as well as a reflected light meter (presumably, no TTL-meter is built into the Mamiya RZ67 II) in capturing almost all of the photos used in the book. Beside stating the importance and the use of incident light meter and a high-end reflected light meter (one-degree spot reading), Zuckerman does provide way in which one can perform the same precision light reading using a standard 35mm SLR on a spot-metering mode. As the spot reading angle is a function of the focal length of the lens being used, Zuckerman shows that with a telephoto lens focused on a chosen mid-tone of a subject, one can achieve the reading that rivals a precision reflected meter!
The author does not advocate the practice of bracketing an exposure or over- or under-exposure by a stop or two! Hence, there is no discussion of "zone system" exposure in this book. Interested readers are well advised to check out other titles on this topic, including Les Meehan's "Creative Exposure Control" (Collin and Brown, 2001) and Bahman Farzad's "The Confused Photographer's Guide to Correct Photographic Exposure and the Simplfied Zone System" (3rd edition, 2001)
While correct or perfect exposure is important, photographic composition is an equally important skill to acquire on your path to great photography. Readers are advised to check out titles on this topic, one of which, "Photos with IMPACT" (David & Charles, 2003) by Tom Mackie is well worth your effort and money.
Overall, this book is both informative and accessible to photographers in general and novice in particular. It is filled with pages and pages of the author's enthusiasm for his subject of nature photography. This simple approach of identifying a photo-exposure situation and search for its mid-tone may not be shared by all photography enthusiasts, but the bottom line is: If you can capture great photos with such an approach, why not? You can always learn those technical details later. About the only caveat one has of this book is that this approach may take some degree of creativity out of your photography.
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