Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers

By Harold Davis
April 2008
Pages: 176
ISBN 10: 0-596-52988-0 | ISBN 13: 9780596529888
Press Release
(4) (Average of 2 Customer Reviews)

Description

This beautifully illustrated book teaches you how to apply the techniques and principles of classic photography so you can make great images with today's digital equipment. With a focus on light and exposure, two crucial concepts you need to understand and master if you are to truly capture the images you see, author and renowned fine art photographer Harold Davis presents his own images as examples and inspiration.

Full Description

You may be passionate about photography, and own a digital SLR with perhaps more advanced equipment as well. But do the photographs you take with this powerful equipment come out as well as you'd like?

With this fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, you learn how to apply the techniques and principles of classic photography so you can make great images with today's digital equipment. Harold Davis, author and renowned fine art photographer, puts the focus in Practical Artistry on light and exposure, two crucial concepts you need to understand and master if you are to truly capture the images you see.

Davis presents a generous number of his own images in each chapter, complete with technical information and an explanation of what he was trying to achieve. These striking photographs not only illustrate the lesson at hand, but also serve as inspiration for your own efforts. Browsing the photographs alone will tell you a lot.

Topics covered in this book include:

Camera, lenses, and equipment
Understanding exposure and measuring light
Relationship of aperture to shutter speed and ISO
Working with depth of field
Natural lighting, studio lighting, and the use of flash
Light and color temperature
Working with white balance
Photographing at dawn or dusk
Photography at night
Capturing motion
Telling a story with your image
Capturing people, places, and things
Setting up a digital workflow
RAW processing and double RAW processing
Adjusting exposure and reducing noise
Black & white photography
And much more

Concise and to the point, Practical Artistry clearly demonstrates that photography, essentially, is writing with light, and that the type of images you produce depend on the many choices you have for using that skill. Harold Davis gives you an array of choices in full living color.

Featured customer reviews

Good on the art of exposure in nature pictures, but not comprehensive, July 17 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Roger [Respond | View]

This book is well illustrated with the author's own pictures, each being clearly relevant to the topic in the main text. It's easy to find a heading such as "Intentional Over and Underexposure", find a picture you like, and read about how the author took that picture, and why he made those choices. It covers the ground of shutter speed, aperture and ISO sensitivity comprehensively, highlighting the artistic benefits of each choice. It's less comprehensive on lighting, and uses quite a narrow range of images as examples.

Photography has been around for a long time, and readers might ask whether "digital" photography has changed enough to need new books. This volume covers familiar ground about apertures and shutter speeds, which is largely comparable to traditional film photography, but there are some changes, and this book does bring them out clearly. You can choose the ISO sensitivity for each image (balancing performance with noise interference), that you can see the image on the camera's LCD and learn from that to take another straight away, and that you can edit or even combine the images later in software, gaining flexibility from RAW format data.

The book studiously avoids hardware-specific issues, but does address questions like the position of your flash (front lighting is not subtle), the available range of apertures (many compact cameras have a narrow range, around f/8) and the physical size of the image sensor (smaller sensors are more vulnerable to noise, but have a greater depth of field). Where he does mention hardware, it's usually digital SLRs camera from Nikon or Canon.

This is very much about exposure. The aperture lets you control depth of field, to tell a story, direct attention, or just to have good bokeh. The shutter speed lets you avoid camera shake, freeze the subject's movement or accentuate it. The ISO sensitivity lets you improve colour quality, create artistic effects with noise, or just balance the exposure. The light meter built in to your camera will often not expose the image you really want, so spot metering and intentional exposure adjustments are well covered. Reasons for making each of the choices are discussed, particularly in terms of the artistic or story-telling effect.

Lighting is covered more briefly, with pages about flash, direction of lighting, sunlight at different times of day, white balance, and using a minimal studio. However, each of those topics is breezed over, by comparison to the exposure. At least one factor of the shutter speed goes completely un-mentioned; that at high speeds, the shutter is really a slit in a curtain moving gradually across the sensor, which could result in the same part of a fast moving subject smearing across the whole frame.

There is a section on the "digital darkroom", which wisely steers clear of being a tutorial on Adobe Photoshop. The author recommends capturing RAW files, but doesn't fully explain their strengths (they are higher resolution than JPEGs, typically being 12 bits per colour channel instead of 8, and contain exactly what was captured by the sensor and so can be reprocessed later without making things any worse than the processing done in the camera). The mathematical side seems to daunt him, in the apparent backwardness of white balance adjustments, and earlier, the relationship between aperture F-stops and the total amount of light, which is explained somewhat shakily.

The example images are clear and closely involved with the text. However, they do focus on the author's preferred topics; landscapes of mountains or bridges, flowers, and macro shots of water droplets. Almost every point in the text is illustrated, and the descriptions are really good at bringing out how the choices were made. However, there are many other styles of picture, and particularly many other issues with lighting, that are not covered.

The narrative flows well, partly because of the personal and friendly style. The print quality of the book is good, which is important, although the white space is all around the pictures and not around the body text, and unfortunately several key features of large pictures are hidden by the book spine. While the early topics of the book are covered in great detail, the later ones, (mainly about lighting) are skimmed more briefly.

In summary, the book is good on the artistic consequences of exposure in pictures of nature. It's fun to read, and really helps in making those choices an intermediate photographer might not have understood. But it's not truly comprehensive, either in its examples or in addressing its own title.

This stunning book deals precisely with Light and Exposure., June 18 2008

Rating:

Submitted by Sally Brown [Respond | View]

Light and exposure are the most important elements in successful photography, and this stunning book deals precisely with them; in explanation, in text, and most of all in the photos. Exposure is made up of three elements: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, and the author explains each one in detail and more importantly, how they interact in a photograph, starting at the beginning level so that everyone can move ahead in the book. He also wants to demonstrate the extremes of what can be accomplished using the same elements of exposure in more unusual ways.

Later on in this book he turns his attention to light, more specifically how the direction from which light is coming affects the photo, and then what to do with flash, low light situations, and noise. Again the explanations are clear and helpful.

However, Harold Davis primarily teaches from his photos, each of which demonstrates a different situation and correspondingly different settings. They are carefully chosen. Apparently his goal is to expand your thinking, and he certainly succeeds. It is not that he expects you to imitate his macro photos, for example, but he wants you to know that you can. You don’t have to stay on first base.

The greatest value of this book comes from studying the photos and the lengthy detailed explanations he gives about his intent in a given photograph and how he went about deciding what settings to use. He describes the settings he tried and the variations he used before he came up with the photos that he chose for this book. We the readers are able to get into his mindset and see his thought processes at work, and these are the features that make this book so outstanding. This is a book to be studied, not just read.

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Media reviews
"If you buy only one photography technique book this year, make it Harold Davis's Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers. This book is an instant classic, and is the first to provide the information you need to really understand exposure from the perspective of the digital (as opposed to film) photographer. And Davis doesn't just talk about technique, he walks the walk - Davis's example photos are creative and awe-inspiringly beautiful. Best of all: he explains the tools and techniques used to create each photo in Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers. "
-- Rick Smolan, Photojournalist and creator of the "Day in the Life" book series

"if you shoot digital and want a good introduction to the all-important basics then I strongly recommend reading Light and Exposure for Digital Photographers."
-- John Watson, PhotoDoto

"This most excellent book aims to present the best practices of the craft of photography in the context of the digital era. But, more importantly, the author designed this book for you on a number of different levels."
-- John Vacca, Amazon.com

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Webcast with Harold Davis:
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"If you buy only one photography technique book this year, make it Harold Davis's Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers."
--Rick Smolan, Photojournalist and creator of the "Day in the Life" book series