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Tim Parkin
Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.
Photographer’s Institute Press should be well known to landscape photographers, they are the company behind outdoor photographer but they also publish photography books. Examples are the classic “Nature Photography Field Guide” by John Shaw and the series of books by Peter Watson, Capturing the Light, Light in the Landscape, Reading the Landscape and Seasons of Landscape (of which I can highly recommend Capturing the Light).
Their latest offering for landscape photographers is a book written by Dawn 2 Dusk workshop leaders Ross Hoddinot and Mark Bauer called ‘The Landscape Photography Workshop’. The premise behind the book is that Mark and Ross have taught budding photographers for few years and the information that they try to pass on would be useful put into book form. PIP obviously agreed and here we are.
So what’s in the book? Well it is very much a beginners guide to landscape photography, starting off by talking about equipment and going on to discuss shutter speed, aperture, depth of field, etc. and once you’ve got past the basics of composition (the usual set: rules of thirds, odd numbers, balance, leading lines, near/far followed by examples of how to break them) you are a third of the way through the book. We get chapters of lighting, filtration (with the obligatory big stopper) and types of landscape. This is followed by an ‘advanced’ chapter which has hyperfocal, diffraction, expose to the right and exposure blending.
This sounds like a very predictable set but that is because it is predictable and probably should be so. In all this makes for a very comprehensive beginners guide to most of the essentials of landscape photography. Combined with the final chapters on post processing and printing (and a set of assigments at the end which would have been better associated with their corresponding chapters) we have a book that would help kick start a budding landscape photographer to a point where they have enough knowledge to know what to look at next.
So, in summary - an excellent book to accompany a first camera for the landscape lover.
However, like every book written by photographers, Ross and Mark have decorated this guide with some of their personal work and very good it is too (although it would have been nice to know which photographs were by Mark or Ross). Ross and Mark have similar styles of photography and the book includes some of my favourites from both of their portfolios.
In terms of representing the photographic output of two of the UK’s talented photographers, this book works very well and if I were them I would be very happy with the final output. On top of which they’ll have some of the best workshop notes you’ll ever get :-)
You can see more of Ross and Mark's work at http://www.rosshoddinott.co.uk/ and http://www.markbauerphotography.com/ and find out about their workshops at http://www.dawn2duskphotography.co.uk/
