Mike's Reviews > The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression

It's a bit up and down this book. I'd give it 6 stars (if I could) for the first 100 and last 50 pages, and two for everything inbetween. Excellent insightful writing on the "why" of photography in the good bits, especially the parts on capturing your emotional response to a scene rather than a realistic picture of the scene. Now I know why I just can't take decent photos of some things, I'm just not interested in them enough to have any emotional response.

The middle chapters are concerened entirely with the Zone System, film delveloping and printing, and framing techniques. Other than as an historical aside, I found them of little use as a solely digital photographer. I skimmed over 150 pages before getting back to the creative stuff. I'd already read through Ansel Adams' "The Negative" and "The Print", so I felt no need to go through another lesson in picking developing fluids.

I also found a lot of his photos were not to my tastes at all, especailly the abstracts, but that's not really the point of the book.

I'm still going to give it 5 stars because it's one of the best photography books I've ever read on the artistic side of photography. If you actually shoot and develop film, it would be perfect!