Suggested Reading for the Self Taught
February 15, 2009
Photography is a wonderfully democratic form of art.
You point, you point, you shoot, you get a print. The digital revolution has made it even easier, you point, you shoot, you email your shots to your friend or post it to your blog. If you want to kick it old school, fire off 36 frames of color negative film, and drop it off at the drug store you can still do that in many places. For those older than 30 an increasingly affordable line of film scanners has allowed us to drag those wax paper envelopes out of our closets and show the world what kind of poor fashion choices we made during the 80′s.
In any group of soccer moms happy snapping away Forest and Ashley on the fields every Saturday there will be one or two who desire better composition, more dramatic skies (and why not, a soccer field is FLAT, get some cloud action in there), and cleaner colors. And why not? An art degree isn’t required to get bitten by a creative impulse. Nor do you have to be batshit insane in order to produce art.
One of the key elements in any creative enterprise is craft. This is the actual nuts and bolts of getting what you want. For photography this is a matter of learning exposure, some rules of composition, editing, and finally printing. As a self-taught photographer (who initially tried learning from FAQ’s) I’ll include the books I found most helpful in untangling the knobs and levers on your average camera.
Black and White Photography: A Basic Manual
Since this blog is at least in theory about silver based photography we’ll start off with a book that you can find new or used very easily. The later editions have replaced some of the older hand drawn diagrams with more professional (and easier to understand) illustrations so you might want to get the 4th edition if you don’t mind paying for a new book. Horenstein covers the basics needed to shoot, develop, and print in black and white. If you’re throwing a digital process in there (scanning your film over printing for example) you can just skip that part of the book. Even if you prefer to drop off your film at the lab (if you do DON’T LET THEM CUT YOUR NEGATIVES… painful personal experience…) you can benefit from knowing what goes into that process and the first part concerns exposure which everyone needs to know.
If you just picked up a dusty Pentax K1000 out of your dad’s attic or are gazing at the settings dial on your new Canon D50 going from a fully automatic camera to setting your exposure manually can be a frightening prospect. What’s ISO, what’s meant by “correct exposure”, what’s this reflective meter thing, so my aperture went from f/4 to f/5.6 now what, 18% grey card, why are you waving that strange device around, WTF? This book gently takes you through the essential concepts of exposure and helps you understand why things work the way they do. Horenstein’s book covers exposure but after assisting a few B&W classes I’ve found that this is where most people need additional help. I did. This is useful for any camera and later editions of the book cover digital photography.
Black and White Photography Magazine
A British publication that is a bit pricy in the US (I pay around $12 an issue at the newstand) but I find very useful. The magazine features portfolios and a number of monthly columns including one which takes you through the process that two photographers take with the same negative. This is almost worth picking up the magazine for alone as it covers darkroom technique, scanning, photoshop, and how you can use each tool to solve problematic negatives. The portfolios are always good and most of the articles are interesting and range from biographies to overviews of equipment or techniques you may or may not have heard of.
This is a biggie. St. Ansel as he’s sometimes known wrote three books which “should” be on every “serious” photographer’s shelf. I would agree with this for the same reason that I went out to see the William Eggleston retrospective at the Whitney despite really loathing his work. Like it or not Adams (and Eggleston) had a major impact on the way we think about photography. The Negative is his second book and its not for beginners but once you get comfortable with the basics its a great book to dive into. If you’ve heard about the zone system, this would be drinking from the source. The zone system is meant for large format photographers but once you grasp the fundamentals you can apply it to roll film as well, especially medium format as you’re more likely to be shooting an entire roll of 8-16 shots in a single lighting situation than all 36 frames of a roll of 35mm.
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