Professional Secrets of Nature Photography: Essential Skills for Photographing the Outdoors

Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful, Insightful Photography Book for All Levels!
Review: Judy is a magnificent and insightful photographer and teacher. One of the world's foremost outdoor photographers and certainly the best woman in her field. Her images are beautiful and her dignified teaching methodology is understandable, down-to-earth, and inspiring to amateurs and experts alike. There is something here for everyone. Her powerfully beautiful animal portraits and landscape images by themselves are worth the the price of the book--the descriptions of how each image was made is the frosting on the cake. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Quite disappointing
Review: This slim volume includes brief and elementary advice on equipment and film, composition, and exposure. Despite its title, it includes very little advice about dealing with nature as a subject.

The 114-page book includes 38 full-page or near-full-page photographs along with the photographs on most other pages. This reader would have been happy with more smaller photographs and much more useful text. Also, while there are some fine images in the book, there are many surprisingly weak ones which seem more than artistically or subjectively out of range - they look like amateur snapshots.

In its favour, this book offers a simple and accessible introduction to the elementary basics of composition. It also offers more examples than many better books do of a few of the topics being discussed. For example, a discussion of eliminating clutter from a frame has three large photographs of the same subject illustrating the topic.

However in the end I can't recommend this to anyone other than rank beginners in photography. Many of the elementary ideas in the book are found other beginner's guides and magazine or web articles. The purported subject of this book - nature photography - is far better introduced and illuminated in books by John Shaw and Tim Fitzharris, and in stunningly-beautiful books by Niall Benvie. Many of these books, too, offer much of the basic advice found in this book, and are a smarter buy.