My job continues to decay, let’s look at something else again, shall we? How about books about photography?
When I was younger, I took a fair number of photography classes but I stopped when I realized that they were all teaching the exact same thing: This is how you turn your camera on and this is how you turn on the flash. True, most of them did dip in a little bit on composition and the like, but given the limitations of the technology we had access to (I think I was shooting a 110 format camera at the time), it’s not like there was room for experimentation. If you can’t focus your camera, let alone zoom or muck around with apertures, there’s not much to teach beyond that power switch.
When I got back into photography a couple years ago with the capability to experiment and fiddle, I hit the books trying to figure out what the heck I was doing now. It was wonderful to figure out what f stops were about and how aperture affected the focal length and the importance of shutter speed and all that stuff that informs my work today. Then I hit a realm of deja vu as I realized again that most of the books at a Barnes & Noble (or Amazon’s listings) teach the same thing over and over again: here’s how you turn on the camera and this is aperture priority mode. I’m not knocking them, but I’m looking for something different now. I want to explore composition and framing and whatever it is that makes me perk up and think that this moment is a great shot, get the camera.
So I’ve been doing a lot of reading and I’m going to keep at it. And the first book I read is Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision by David DuChemin.
I’ll say up front that I did not finish this book. It’s not that I didn’t want to, I simply had to return it to the library first.
For the most part, I liked it. It did a good job of straddling the line between the techgeekery and the artistry of photography and there was a fine example for every text explanation. No sooner has DuChemin mentioned panning or night photography but there’s a picture to make it clear and attainable. I think I’ll be checking it out again in the future to finish it up but I’m not feeling much of a rush to do so because there were two things that I found frustrating about the book.
First is that there wasn’t enough (at least in what I read) about working with your eye. A lot of information about lenses and depth of field, but not much about how to look. It was all very useful, but not what what I’m looking for.
And second is that I found the examples to be too exotic in some ways. While I’ll be the first to agree that the shot of a temple in Kathmandu was phenomenal and the Indian holy man in New Delhi is a great subject, I’m left wishing for commonplace examples to explain some of his techniques. How about a shot in his backyard or driving through Iowa?
Which is ultimately what I’m interested in. Some of my favorite photographers are the likes of Cartier-Bresson and Brassai and while their work seems kind of exotic with the distance of time, they were shooting things they saw on the streets as they went about their days. What we admire for being atmospheric was probably just another Thursday in the neighborhood as they went about their days.
Within the Frame is a very useful book for someone looking to explore and expand the technical horizons of their work, but I felt it lacked in the artistic arena. Fortunately the next book filled the gap nicely.
