PixelatedImage Blog

I suspect the democratic nature of photography – the fact that anyone can pick up a camera and begin making photographs without the kind of talent or training needed to be, say, a painter – is what is responsible for some of the best and worst of this art. The best because it puts it into the hands of children and absolute amateurs and allows nearly immediate intuitive expression. The worst because that same quality also encourages the notion that no training is needed. With the accessibility of excellent digital cameras suddenly everyone is a photographer.

And there’s the rub. Photography, for all its accessibility remains a visual means of expression – a language – and without the knowledge of the alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, we’re wildly babbling away. Oh, we’re talking alright, we just aren’t saying anything.

I’ve preached on this before, the need for visual literacy, but this time I want to point you to two books that are exceptional guides to even the professional. Some of us would rather lick the dust off our sensor with a wet tongue than read a book, I get that. But until there’s a way to absorb this by osmosis, we may just have to suck it up.

The first book is one I’ve pointed to before. Freeman Patterson’s Photography and the Art of Seeing.

The second is Michael Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye. When I first mentionned Freeman’s book I got a number of comments/emails confirming my suspicions – this is a truly excellent book. The premise of The Photographer’s Eye is that the way you compose a photograph influences how someone sees it, and from that premise Freeman digs into the hows and whys of composition in a substantial way. This is a meaty book and you’ll probably have to read it with pen and highlighter in hand. Some pages I’ve had to read twice just to get the gist. But at the end of the day, if we’re looking to hone our craft, this will take us closer to powerful images than all the gear reviews and pithy little blog articles we spend so much time amusing ourselves with.

You owe it to your craft to read – and study – this book. Highly recommended. I’ll be re-reading this again over the coming weeks, once just wasn’t enough.