A friend gave me this book and I was immediately captivated!  Although I have not been too active in landscape photography, I must confess it was more for lack of knowledge than opportunity, so I was intrigued by the subject as well as to see how the subject was presented.  I have referred to it again and again because it has encouraged me to experiment with this aspect of the craft and I am sure I will continue to need its advice.

John Clements has given us this excellent book about landscape photography, organised in an easily understood and informative way.  As he says in his introduction “As a species we have always been linked to and drawn to the landscape” and which of us has never been overawed by the beauties of our natural surroundings?

What sets his book apart from many others on the same subject is the explanation of the creation of each subject image, usually with the flow chart, photographer’s thoughts, tips, image stages, settings, conception, enhancements and printing and publishing.  This enables the reader to get a good handle on the production procedure for the final image and, at the same time, consider some of the thinking behind the original photograph and the adjustments.  This is valuable information for those of us who aspire to better landscapes.

In addition to dealing with what might be called the “traditional landscape”, the author then delves into panoramas, sepias, solarizing, creating dramatics, monochrome and infrared.  There is a glossary of photographic terms and personal information about the photographers who have provided their images for discussion.

This is a well presented book, full of excellent images and equally excellent advice for all of us and would make a perfect addition to your bookshelf – as it did to mine.

It is available at Amazon for just over $17.00 and is well worth the money in my opinion. You can click on the image of the book to get your copy.

A Comprehensive Guide to Digital Landscape Photography, John Clements, AVA Publishing SA, 128 pages.

From the first chapter “Getting Started” to the last one “Saving and Sharing Your Work”, every function of Adobe Elements 6 is explained in detail and the reader is led through each process with numbered actions to be taken and accompanying similarly numbered screenshots.  So you can see exactly what needs to be done and how to do it.  Descriptions clarify the whole procedure as well, and the result is that it is almost impossible to fail to make any adjustment, improvement or feature successfully.  Useful and clearly presented tips appear throughout the book, too, and they add enormously to the knowledge available.

The book has a detailed Table of Contents with page references as well as a comprehensive Subject Index, both of which make it very easy to locate the function you want to use.

Of the authors, Mike and Linda Wooldridge, Mike is a user-interface designer who has written nineteen books in the Visual series and Linda is a former senior editor at Macworld whose fifth book this is.  Teach Yourself Visually Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 is a full colour book which I can enthusiastically recommend as indispensable to everybody using Elements 6. And to have such an indispensible source to refer to for less than $30.00 is nothing short of a bargain in my mind!

You can get this book by just clicking on the image of it.

Teach Yourself Visually Adobe Photoshop Elements 6, Mike Wooldridge and Linda Wooldridge, Wiley Publishing, Inc. 340 pages.

There are so many titles in the “Visually” series that it is not possible to list them all here. The best thing to do is to go to the publisher’s website and search for what you want.

Do I need to introduce Freeman Patterson? He is well-known in the photographic world, is a prolific publisher of photographic works, has won numerous awards, was appointed to the Order of Canada and has established and given workshops throughout the world. His book reviewed here, Photography and the Art of Seeing, has been updated and expanded to include technical guidelines for both film and digital and is presented in four basic sections – Barriers to Seeing, Learning to Observe, Learning to Imagine and Learning to Express, with a final section on Photography and the Art of Seeing.

This is a book that challenges every photographer to learn to observe things differently and then to consider some unique ways of looking at the subject to be photographed.  Exercises, instructions and techniques are then presented clearly enough for the photographer to achieve that satisfying  photograph.  Freeman has included many excellent images demonstrating his thinking about looking at things differently, with comments on the thought process involved in making the image.

As he says in his introduction “…these exercises have helped me to see familiar things in a whole variety of new ways, and to photograph subject matter and situations using ideas and techniques I might not have tried twenty years ago.”

This is a welcome book, full of new ideas, and of interest to photographers from the amateur to the professional.  Good, inspirational reading and at less than $15.00 it is one that is difficult to be without!  And you can get it from Amazon by just clicking on the image of the book.

Photography and the Art of Seeing, Freeman Patterson, Key Porter Books.

Other books written by Freeman Patterson include -
o Photography for the Joy of It
o Photography of Natural Things
o Photography and the Art of Seeing
o Photographing the World Around You
o Namaqualand: Garden of the Gods
o Portraits of Earth
o The Last Wilderness: Images of the Canadian Wild
o ShadowLight: A Photographer’s Life
o Odysseys: Meditations and Thoughts for a Life’s Journey
o The Garden

I like this book!  I saw it in the bookshop and could not resist having it, mostly for its way of presenting each photographic subject or technique in an easily understandable way.  I consult this book frequently.

Scott Kelby, author of The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers and other titles, as well as being editor-in-chief of Photoshop User magazine and of Nikon Software User magazine, has produced these step-by-step secrets for making your photographs look like the pros.

A full range of subjects is covered, including Getting Really Sharp Photos; Shooting Flowers, Weddings, Landscapes, Sports and People; Avoiding Problems; Maximizing Digital; Travel and City Shooting, and Printing.  There is also a very useful section at the end of the book about How to Get “The Shot” – simple things to think about for fourteen photographic situations.

The book is easy to read and very well presented, with basically one page for each technique or situation, making it simple to locate the information you want quickly.  It is full of excellent photographs depicting the subject or equipment being discussed and there is a comprehensive page index as well as a general index.  All in all, a thoroughly recommended and useful addition to any photographer’s library. You can easily purchase it from Amazon – just click on the photograph – and at just under $16.00 I have to consider this to be one of my best book buys.

The Digital Photography Book, Scott Kelby, Peachpit Press.

Other books by Scott Kelby include -
o The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers
o Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks
o Photoshop CS2 Killer Tips
o The Photoshop Channels Book
o Photoshop Classic Effects
o The iPod Book
o The Adobe Lightroom eBook for Digital Photographers
o InDesign CS/CS2 Killer Tips
o Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips
o Getting Started with Your Mac and Mac OS X Tiger

I attended the seminar given by Andre Gallant last year where he presented his Dreamscapes and demonstrated the principles behind them.  And I was most impressed by the results he showed on the large screen.  So it was with much anticipation that I began to read his book “Dreamscapes” and, believe me, I was not disappointed.  I found it really well presented, easy to read, excellently illustrated and, above all, challenging!  It is all too easy to think we have found and conquered our particular photographic interest and it is therefore a big awakening to be shown in such a compelling way that there is another aspect we may have thought of but not persued.  I know many of us have experimented with multiple images, but this book prods us to be more creative and I personally found it stimulating.

Andre Gallant is a professional photographer who has co-authored “Photo Impressionism and the Subjective Image” with Freeman Patterson and has now himself authored “Dreamscapes”. Dreamscapes explores photo montages, which he describes as “…passionate, powerful, evocative images derived from fantasy and created by superimposing two photographs.” He demonstrates four types of dreamscape – composite (two images combined), mirror (flipped images), surreal (combining an in-focus image with a out-of-focus one) and cross (combining a vertical image with a horizontal one). The creation of each of these is clearly explained and demonstrated by numerous excellent photographs, with Andre’s tips and suggestions for successfully producing them.

This is a challenging book that encourages the photographer to think “out of the box” and to try to produce something different in the way of artistic technique which, at the same time, develops a different attitude when taking the original photographs with dreamscapes in mind. However, we all have our own images on file and a perusal of these may well reveal a few of them that will be suitable for combining in one way or another.

I can fully recommend Andre’s book Dreamscapes to any photographer who would like to try something new and develop some rewarding montages.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Amazon have the book in stock and although the price is $30.00 it is well worth it in my opinion, not only as a reference book but as a nice book to have sitting around on the coffee table ready to browse. Just click on the photograph.

Dreamscapes, Andre Gallant, An Andre Gallant Book.

Other books by Andre Gallant include -
o Photographing People: At home and Around the World
o Destinations:A Photographer’s Journey