Review: Horse Photography: The Dynamic Guide for Horse Lovers

I recently purchased Carol J. Walker's Book Horse Photography: The Dynamic Guide for Horse Lovers (Horses Ponies) in hopes of finding an excellent reference on how to improve my equine photography.  My wife, Michelle, is a horse owner and lover and I have found that photographing horses has been a great way for us to share something we're both passionate about.  

I'm definitely a suburban kind of guy and my experience with horses prior to meeting Michelle was limited to taking one horseback tour through the Garden of the Gods about 15 years ago.  As I've learned to take better pictures and delved into the horse world with Michelle, I've found myself seeking to know more about horses and how their owners want to see their images taken.  I saw this book as the first big step toward obtaining that knowledge.  I couldn't be more disappointed.  

First, let me say that the book is very short - 98 pages in total, with only about a third of it being text.  Despite it's length (or lack thereof), Ms. Walker decided she'd cover nearly every topic in photography.  Unfortunately, while attempting to cover so many topics, in my opinion, she failed to cover any sufficiently.  

This book seems to be written for people that love horses and maybe like photography.  Her broad strokes of attempting to define basic photographic skills are mediocre at best.  Additionally, her example images are weak, at best.  Yes, there are many beautiful photographs in this book but they don't often highlight her points.  The captions are also garbage.  She probably mentions about 15 times how important it is to shoot a dark horse on a light background and visa versa.  She also beats a dead horse, pun intended, by constantly pointing out that her images always have the horse on level ground.  She also inaccurately discusses shutter speeds by stating that you can use a slower shutter when the horse is coming directly at you versus moving laterally across you.  

Another very poor lesson in this book was Ms. Walker's discussion on light.  She basically says to avoid backlighting like the plague, unless you're purposely trying to silhouette your horse.  The page is filled with images of silhouetted horses!  But she completely ignored the fact that you can expose directly on your horse or you could use fill flash to properly expose.  The lack of explanation on light, and in my opinion laziness in terms of properly explaining a concept, is repeated throughout this book.  

The only pages that I found helpful were specific shots on what moments to capture during a walk, trot or canter.  These were the kinds of moments I was hoping for in this book.  I wanted specific details with photographic examples on what a horse owner wants.  I wanted to find examples of images I could sell.  Unfortunately, those moments were few and far between.  

Ratings (out of 10):

Content - 4

Images - 7

Writing Style - 4

Overall - 5

Summary:

In conclusion, I don't recommend buying this book if you're interested in selling equine images.  If, however, you want a book filled with decent horse images and you're a horse lover who occasionally takes pictures, this book might be the one for you.  I find that good books on equine photography for professionals seem to be lacking.  Maybe I'll pursue writing a book of my own on the  topic in a decade or so!  

Review: VisionMongers: Making a LIfe and Living in Photography

In my humble opinion, VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography by David duChemin, is an incredible book that both scares and inspires the reader.  I purchased the book in hopes of finding some answers and while I did find many of the things I was looking for, I was left with many questions I would have never known to ask.  

David makes many things clear in his book.  First, he states there is no secret to being a professional photographer.  The bottom line is that all professionals share a few things in common: hard work, knowledge on how to please their clients and over deliver and the drive to constantly improve their craft.  

The second fact David makes clear is that becoming a vocational photographer is not for the faint of heart.  Photography by profession is not a get rich quick kind of business.  He discusses many skills one must have from marketing to interpersonal skills to being financially sound.  He discusses rejection, debt, etc.  The bottom line is he's real about what one can expect in this field.  

One of the things I appreciated most about VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography was David's use of many examples.  First, he talks extensively about his own experiences which include some drastic career changes, poor financial management which resulted in debt and dealing with clients which often have small budgets for photography.  He also included 4-5 page sections on six different professional photographers who offered their advice on different aspects of approaching photography as a vocation.  

Things I Learned:

First, I learned that I have a lot to learn.  The marketing section was especially eye opening.  David talked about the importance of creating a brand around your photography.  He discusses congruency between your blog, website, business cards, mailers, etc.  The book really pushed and inspired me to learn as much as I can about marketing, especially with the progression of importance of social media (like this blog) in today's world.  

I also learned that I don't have all the necessary tools and it may not be worth learning them.  The bottom line is I'm not great in design.  So, maybe it'll be best for me to one day higher a company to create my logo and help refine my website.  I'm no expert in tax either so hiring an accountant is a must.  While it seems like a good idea to learn to do these things on your own when you're just starting out, it may be more helpful to spend the time honing your photography skills then learning how to write off all your business expenses.  

Finances, insurance and other liabilities are also discussed in depth.  David really stressed living debt free (woohoo!) and I couldn't agree more.  I consider myself a Dave Ramseyian (if that term hasn't been coined, I'm claiming it) and living debt free is priority number one for my financial plan.  While I consider myself relatively financially savvy, I did learn a lot about insurance needs, including insuring your studio for liability should someone have an accident during a shoot. 

Summary:

This book really is one of my all time favorite photography books.  It's not the type of book that will teach you what aperture and shutter speed to use, which lenses to buy or even which website to use for your blog or webpage.  VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography goes deeper than that.  It challenges you to decide if photography is really something you want to pursue.  It guides you and informs you of many different methods to achieve success, while always preparing you for potential collapses.  It doesn't claim to have all the answers.  It's meant for the person that thinks of photography constantly - the person who, as David puts it, can't not do it.  That's me and I thought this book was exactly what I needed as I'm just starting out.  If you want to check it out, I couldn't recommend it more.

Ratings (out of 10):

Content - 10

Images - 8

Writing Style - 9

Overall - 9

For those of you who aren't familiar with David duChemin, I recommend you check out his blog, this book and others he has written.  As a whole, I think he's my favorite photographer.  I love his cause (shooting for NGOs), his attitude, his work and his teaching style.  

Review: Light, Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Light--Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting is an incredibly in depth resource that will teach you the principles necessary to predict how light behaves and how to control it in your photos.  Let me say that this book is not intended for the casual reader.  It is a very detailed, textbook-like reference that will dig much deeper than 95% of the photography books you will ever run across.

The intent of the book isn't to teach you how to duplicate the photos it contains, it is to answer the "hows" and "whys" and be able to use that knowledge to produce pictures your own way.  Fil Hunter's, Steven Biver's and Paul Fuqua's claim is absolutely correct, "Light--Science & Magic does not go out of style because it was not, is not, and will never be based on style.  The book is based on the behavior of light and its principles will not change until the fundamental physics does."

So let's take a look at what you'll find in the book:

The main point of the book, in my opinion, is to teach you how light behaves when it reflects from a surface and how the material making the subject determines the appearance of that reflection.  The book doesn't necessarily teach you a lot of new information, afterall, we're used to seeing light and the way it behaves every waking minute of our lives.  This book just helps define what we see, and teaches us how to predict and control the behavior of light.

So to further simplify, the book discusses two things 1) what light does, and 2) how materials affect the behavior of light.

Regarding light, the book covers such topics as direct and diffuse transmission, absorption and reflection.  Here's a brief definition of each, so you know what I'm talking about:
Transmission - when light passes through a subject, like clear glass
Diffuse Transmission - when light hits a source like white glass or thin paper and scatters in many random, unpredictable directions
Absorption - when light is absorbed by a subject and never seen again, like black velvet
Reflection - when light strikes a subject and bounces off

Regarding materials, the book covers how light behaves on most common materials like metal, glass, paper, even human skin.  It discusses shiny and dull materials, different colors of material, etc. to teach you most of the common lighting situations you will face.

The book also has chapters dedicated to individual topics that are most often seen as difficult to shoot, like black-on-black, white-on-white, portraiture and situations with mixed lighting (like using a flash in a room with flourescent lights).

Things I Learned:
I won't even be able to begin to scratch the surface of things I learned in this space but here's a few highlights.

The Inverse Square Law - intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.  Wow, that's a mouthful.  The inverse square law defines how bright a light is based upon how far away it is from what you are lighting.  The inverse square law tells you that if a light is 8 feet away from the subject and you move it to 4 feet away, the light will have 4 times the intensity, not 2 times the intensity (because it is based on the SQUARE of the distance).  Similarly, if a light is 3 feet away from a subject and you move it to 9 feet away (3x as far), the light will only have 1/9th the intensity (square of 3).

Granted, most photographers won't be standing behind their camera crunching numbers to determine how bright their lights will be, but knowing the principle is important.  For example, if you think a light needs to be twice as bright as you current setup, you can move the light closer and have a good idea of where you need to place it.

Family of Angles - determines where photographers should put their lights.  The family of angles is really easy to explain on paper, not so easy to describe in writing, but here's my best shot.  Imagine your eye is your camera lens and you're outside on your front lawn on a bright, sunny day.  Your friend has a small mirror and he uses it to shine light in your eyes from across the yard.  You can say that the sun (your light) filled the family of angles of the mirror.  So the family of angles is always describing the relationship between the camera, the subject (what you're taking a picture of) and your light source (whether it be a lamp, a flash or the sun).  If you were taking a picture of the mirror and wanted it to be fully lit, the sun would have to completely fill the family of angles.  If you were taking a picture of the mirror and you did not want it to be lit at all, the sun could be anywhere, except within the familiy of angles (at any angle where the light wouldn't be reflecting in your face).  If the sun only partially filled the family of angles your mirror would only be partially lit.  It's as simple as that (I swear).

Summary:
This book is fantastic and has certainly earned its unofficial title of being the #1 book in photographic lighting.  If you could master all of the techniques in this book there's no doubt that you'd have a long line of interested customers waiting at your door to pay you for the images you create.  It took me about a month to get through this book once and I imagine I will go through it several more times in the next few years.  I can see this book being by my side as a constant reference more than any book I've ever read.  If you're serious about the pictures you take and the way they are lit drop everything and order Light--Science and Magic now.  You won't regret it.


Ratings (out of 10):
Content - 10
Images (diagrams) - 7
Writing Style - 8
Overall - 8.5

Review: Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson

In Understanding Exposure, Bryan Peterson's strategy is to teach the definitions of aperture, shutter speed, ISO and their relationship in the photographic triangle.  Bryan teaches you how to use this foundation of knowledge to make technically correct exposures.  But that isn't the point of this book, his main intent is for you to take the technical knowledge and mold and shape it into "creatively correct exposures."

ISO is not discussed very much in this book and with what I believe is good cause.  If at all possible, Bryan recommends keeping your ISO as low as possible to reduce the effects of noise.  Ignoring ISO, Bryan talks about how most photographic situations have at least six technically correct exposures.  If you were to set your camera to full program mode and meter a shot the camera would give you the "correct" aperture and shutter speed based on your ISO.  You can then go into manual mode or shutter/aperture priority and increase your shutter speed by a set number of stops and decrease your aperture by the same number of stops.  Decreasing your shutter speed and increasing your aperture works the same way.  What determines the "creatively correct" exposure is the combination of shutter speed and aperture that delivers the message you're trying to portray.  Bryan sums up his intent of the book with this quote, "It's always the first priority of every successful photographer to determine what kind of exposure opportunity he or she is facing: one that requires great depth of field or shall depth of field, or one that requires freezing the action, implying motion, or panning.  Once this has been determined, the real question isn't 'What should my exposure be?' but 'From where do I take my meter reading?'"

The second main focus of Understanding Exposure is light, which Bryan describes as icing on the cake.  He discusses all basic lighting conditions - frontlight, overcast frontlight, sidelight and backlight.  He also discussing the different available metering techniques - in camera vs. off camera, spot vs. matrix and center-weighted.

After discussing light and metering, Bryan discusses specialized techniques like panning, implying motion with zoom and making rain.  Some of these topics don't really seem to belong in the book but I'd say you can take them as an added bonus.

Understanding Exposure then ends by discussing more broad topics like filters and their uses and film vs. digital photography.  Again, I can't say that these topics necessarily belong in a book about exposure but the information is all good and very useful.

Things I learned:
18% Reflectance - Basically this means that camera light meters do not see the world in black and white, they see the world as gray.  So, long story short, if you're taking a picture of something black you need to underexpose compared to what your camera tells you is the correct exposure (so you're going from the grey the camera sees to black) and if you're taking a picture of something white you need to overexpose (to get from gray to white).  The easiest way to make sure you get it right is to buy a gray card from any photo shop.

The Sky Brothers - Bryan uses the "Sky Brothers" as a rule of thumb for dealing with outdoor situations where you might have a hard time deciding where to aim for metering.  Situations can include sunny days, backlit sunrise and sunset landscapes, city or country scenes at dusk and coastal scenes or lake reflections at sunrise or sunset.

Mr. Green Jeans - Bryan doesn't really explain why this works but claims that in situations where your scene is predominately green you should manually expose 2/3rds of a stop lower than what your camera's light meter says.

Low-light Shutter Speed Calculations - As part of the photographic triangle, aperture, shutter speed and ISO are all inversely related.  This means that increasing one requires you to decrease another to keep an equal exposure.  So if my camera tells me a correct exposure is an aperture of f/5.6 and a shutter speed of 1/250 sec I can also achieve a correct exposure by increasing my exposure to f/4 and decreasing my shutter speed to 1/500.

Where this can really come in handy is in taking a photo in very low light when you want a great depth of field (a very small aperture, say f/22).  Start by setting your aperture to its largest value, say f/2.8 and you may see that your camera tells you the correct shutter speed is 1/2 sec.  To get from f/2.8 to f/22 you need to decrease your aperture by 7 stops (f/2.8 to f/4 to f/5.6 to f/8 to f/11 to f/16 to f/22) and to keep a correct exposure you need to increase your shutter speed by the same number of stops (1/2 sec to 1 sec to 2 sec to 4 sec to 8 sec to 16 sec to 32 sec to 64 sec).  Now you can just set your camera to f/22 and a shutter speed of bulb and keep an eye on your watch.  Once the shutter hits 64 seconds you know you'll have the perfect exposure.

Summary:
In the end, I'd call this book nothing short of fantastic.  Bryan's writing style is very laid back and full of cheesy analogies but they all work.  He has several exercises throughout the book to help give you real life examples that will solidify what he is teaching.  The book is also jam packed with beautiful pictures that perfectly highlight what he is teaching.  He even has many images that show you what changes were made and how they effected the final image.

If you could only buy one book to get you started in photography, I'd recommend Understanding Exposure over anything else I've read.  And it's not just for beginners, I think every level of photographer could learn a lot from this book.

Ratings (out of 10):
Content - 9
Images - 8
Writing Style - 9
Overall - 9

If you'd like to see more of Bryan Peterson you can check out his online photography school, The Perfect Picture School of Photography here.  PPSOP offers online photography classes in just about any topic you can think of, a blog and numerous free video tutorials.

You can also find his other books on Amazon, like Understanding Shutter Speed,  Understanding Close-up Photography, Learning to See Creatively and Beyond Portraiture by clicking here.  Please note that by using the amazon links to make your purchases you help keep this page up and running :)