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Photography Books
Books on photography are excellent resources to improve your skills in photography. Knowing which book to buy, though, can be difficult—especially when you can’t peruse them from an on-line bookseller. One problem is that good photographs sell books on photography. However, once you finish looking at the pictures, you’re going to need good text, real content to help you to learn. We think we can save you the cost of buying slick books that provide you very little in return: they’re expensive and they waste your time. We hope that this section of our site will help you to find the books you need.
General Photography
These are books that about about photography in general. Since this is the age of digitial photography, some of these books do focus on digitial photography in particular and don’t include film photography. There just aren’t many books in print and popular still that aren’t about digital photography.
Composition
Separate from understanding the mechanics of photographic equipment and the physics of photography is the art of composing good photographs. These books focus on this aspect of photography.
Studio Lighting & Portraits
If you're interested in leaning about studio photography, these books will help you with understanding the various types of studio lights and methods for positioning your studio lights. For now this also includes books related to posing models for portraits.
Equipment Specific
For every popular camera—especially those made by one of the large camera manufactureres—there seems to be at least one book published about the camera, sometimes two or three. This section provides a listing of those books and gives brief reviews of them.
Computer Software
These books are related to using computer software with photography. They include programs like Adobe Photoshop and Apple Aperture.
Photograph Appreciation
A significant part of this site, an aspect that we hope will distinguish it from other web sites on photography is information on understanding photographs: what goes on in the mind that makes some photographs more appealing than others. The books that are reviewed under this section focus primarily on this aspect of photography.
Photographer Photo Collection
For every popular camera—especially those made by one of the large camera manufactureres—there seems to be at least one book published about the camera, sometimes two or three. This section provides a listing of those books and gives brief reviews of them.
Miscellaneous
These are books involving subjects related to photography that we weren’t able to categorize under any other topic.
Adding Books
This site is very new, as you may have noticed. We’re still writing articles, adding photographs, and we’re still adding books. As a result, there are many books that we should include that aren’t yet on our list. There are also many books listed in this section about which we haven’t yet written comments or reviewed. So, please be patient with us as we pull this site together.
Book Ratings
We’ve introduce ratings to the books shown on our site. They are an indication of how well we liked a book. The rating scale is from one to five stars—five stars being the best. For some books we haven’t rated them yet, so they don't have a rating. This does not mean that we think badly of them or don’t recomment them. If we thought badly of a book, it wouldn’t be on our site.
Technical and Skill Levels
We’ve introduced two more rating systems: One is related to the technical level of books. This is an indication of how technical is the content of the book. Books that focus on theory (e.g., details on the physics of light) and get into technical details (e.g., detailed explanations of the functioning of image sensors at the pixel level) get more stars in the technical area. The other rating scale added recently is related to skill level. Basically, a one-star rating indicates the book is for beginners. A five-star rating is given for a book suited for advanced photographers.
