Digital Photography Expert: Close-Up Photography : The Definitive Guide For Serious Digital Photographers

Rating:
Summary: Close Up Work is a Different World
Review: Cameras and lenses are normally designed for and indeed used for standard photography at standard distances. When taking pictures at normal distances standard equipment, standard techniques work well. When you move into pictures where the image is the same size or larger than the object being photographed the whole picture changes. The equipment, the lighting, and the techniques are different.

Michael Freeman is a consummate master of close work. In this book he goes into the equipment and more important the concepts that become important in photographing things may be too small to be seen through the naked eye. He is a professional photographer and has had numerous difficult assignments to photograph. In this book he discusses several of his projects and the extraordinary efforts he had to go through to get the final result.

The book is less a tutorial than a series of examples of pictures and the detailed setup required to produce them.


Rating:
Summary: A Great Reference & Learning Tool
Review: This book has examples of any type of close-up photography you can imagine, plus tips on how to take pictures of each type of object. It also reviews some of the basics of the techniques behind it. It is very light however on talking about the tools, especially the lighting tools.

Rating:
Summary: Far Off
Review: This is a book that attempts to cover the entire range of close-up photography from close-ups of gems to close-ups of insects. As I read this book I kept wondering what audience the author was trying to reach and what he was trying to teach that audience.

The book is laid out in individual sections of two facing pages. Each page contains text and photographs or diagrams. The layout resulted in beautiful typography but almost seemed to interfere with a coherent development of any subject because of the desire to shoehorn the material into the two-page format, when clearly some subjects required extensive development that couldn't be so limited.

Moreover the level of detail was not enough to help a beginning close-up photographer in the basic tasks or an experienced photographer in complex tasks. Instead the book was most useful as an idea book about what is possible in close-up photography.

Often the author offered opinions without any substantiation. For example, he regularly indicated that single lens reflex cameras were best for close up work, but never explained that that was due to the difficulty of framing a close subject due to parallax errors with a camera whose viewfinder is not on the lens axis.

There is also a lot of bad information here. For example at one point he suggests manually calculating exposure for a flash picture. I found this incredible given that fact that most digital cameras provide for some sort of automatic, through-the-lens, metering of electronic flash.

But then I should not have been surprised. Undoubtedly every publisher now wants photography manuals pitched at digital photographers. Indeed the title of this book is "Digital Photography Expert Close-up Photography", and the cover states that it is the "definitive guide for serious digital photographers". And yet there is not a single mention of what I consider to be the most useful tool offered by digital cameras, a histogram of light values to aid you in calculating exposure.

Finally, much of this book is devoted to something other than close-up photography. For example, the discussion of rocks and stone features pictures of a slot canyons and petroglyphs all of which appear to be at least 10 feet distant from the camera.

I don't want to suggest that this book is totally without merit. Scattered throughout the book are tips that a close-up photographer might find useful. For example the author suggests it may be possible to achieve depth of field by compositing several pictures of a small object in editing software, each with a different focus point, to create the appearance of sharpness where a single image would not succeed. But for someone looking for a well-conceived, total approach to the art of close-up photography, using a digital camera, this book is not a help.