Extraordinary Everyday Photography: Awaken Your Vision to Create Stunning Images Wherever You Are
Get inspired to discover the beautiful images around you Photographers are born travelers. They’ll go any distance to capture the right light, beautiful landscapes, wildlife, and people. But exotic locales aren’t necessary for interesting photographs. Wonderful images are hiding almost everywhere; you just need to know how to find them. Extraordinary Everyday Photography will help
Get inspired to discover the beautiful images around you
Photographers are born travelers. They’ll go any distance to capture the right light, beautiful landscapes, wildlife, and people. But exotic locales aren’t necessary for interesting photographs. Wonderful images are hiding almost everywhere; you just need to know how to find them.
Extraordinary Everyday Photography will help you search beyond the surface to find the unexpected wherever you are, be it a downtown street, a local park, or your own front lawn. Authors Brenda Tharp and Jed Manwaring encourage amateur photographers to slow down, open their eyes, and respond to what they see to create compelling images that aren’t overworked. Through accessible discussions and exercises, readers learn to use composition, available light, color, and point of view to create stunning photographs in any environment. Inspiring photo examples from the authors, taken with DSLRs, compact digital cameras, and even iPhones, show that it is the photographer’s eye and creative vision–not the gear–that make a great image.
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Extremely Well Done Inspiration This is a book from the class of books which aim to improve the photographer rather than one dealing with the technology of photography. Perhaps the best known author along this line is Freeman Patterson who the authors here cite both as an expert in this area and an inspiration for them. These books, such as those I’ve cited and one other excellent one, ‘The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World With Fresh Eyes’ teach you to see and once you see the striking image, recording it photographically is just a matter of steps.Who is/are the photographer(s) you admire? Very likely these people did not need to travel to exotic locales like so many photographers desire so they can find ‘the shot’. These masters saw the great images they later captured all around them. For example, Henri Cartier-Bresson just wandered the streets taking quiet images using his little Leica. Ansel Adams’ images sell for seven figures yet he mostly shot places millions of others have…
Learning to See There are photography instruction books that suggest that a person can be a better photographer if they practice Zen in photography. Somehow my mind rebels at this approach, as if what I consider a form of religion (I know others will disagree) can be picked up and put down like a camera lens. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when Tharp and Manwaring suggested a Zen-like approach without ever mentioning Zen. I was also pleased when they suggested that their recommended approach could be used not only to make photographs of the inherently spectacular, like the Grand Canyon, but also to make better photographs of the everyday world around us.The authors suggest a number of techniques for using the photographer’s most important instrument – the mind. The opening chapters deal with learning to see the world and the later chapters with composing the key elements, especially light, to reveal what we see in that world. The book is lavishly illustrated with the authors’…
The Head and the Heart Hundreds of books exist that explain how to take well exposed, well composed photos. What’s so special about this one? The authors, Brenda Tharp and Jed Manwaring, say that while knowledge (the head) of basic photographic techniques is important, it is the heart that is fundamental to the creative process as it is a tool of infinite exploration, perception, and expression in the field of play that is photography today.Brenda and Jed make a case for “seeing deeply and feeling deeply” in order to create images that may or may not be technically perfect, but that have personal meaning — the ones that makes your heart go pitty-pat and cause you to exclaim a silent or very loud Yes! to yourself. And to carry out that expression effectively, the authors suggest that we begin with a “creative vision that comes from seeing with an open heart and mind.”They illustrate the “how” of this process through a series of intelligently presented chapters that each focus on an…