Book Review: The Photographer’s Eye – Michael Freeman – Nature Photography. Landscape Photography. Scenic Photography - Stock and Fine Art Photographs

Book Review: The Photographer’s Eye – Michael Freeman

This book features as number 4 in my list of my Top Ten Favorite Instructional Photography Books.

This is one of the first books I purchased after my interest in photography was rekindled. The subtitle of the book is “Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos” and this describes well what it is really about. The subject of composition is well covered, from the shape of the image frame, to the photographer’s intent in making the image (What David Duchemin calls “Vision”).

This book, like other books I have read from Michael Freeman, is really a collection of short Essays. Each Essay touches on a separate topic of the subject being discussed. This approach has both good points and bad points.

I found that, as I was relatively new to most of the material in the book when I first read it, the coverage was very wide, but not deep enough on each individual topic for a full understanding. On the plus side, this approach does provide an excellent guide through the various topics of composition. This is how I have made use of the book, first I read it through from cover-to-cover, I then used it as a guide for further reading and discovery in each of the topics presented. That is, I used it to guide what areas I needed to understand better and study further.

There is now a companion volume available entitled “The Photographer’s Mind” which I own, but have yet to read.

The book is published by Focal Press. It is a very well made soft cover edition. The photographs included in the book are exceptional and well chosen to supplement the discussions in the text.

Overall, if you use this book as a guide to the various areas of composition as I have, then I would recommend it highly.

The Featured image for this post is “Farm Shed at Dawn #01″ an HDR image, shot in Hawkes Bay New Zealand.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 4:20 pm. It is filed under Book Review, Books, Instructional, Publications and tagged with Book Review, Books, Composition, Photography, Publications, Technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.