Creative Nature & Outdoor Photography, Revised Edition Paperback – February 23, 2010

This is a well produced book that would do any library proud. However, my brand new book stuck in several places near the spine & though the pages did come apart without tearing, there is an unsightly grey fuzz running vertically down several pages near the spine.But that has nothing to do with Ms. Tharpe. Picked it up on Ken Rockwell's suggestion & am glad I did.Concepts are clearly explained & the accompanying photographs are very appropriate & helpful.The questions she suggests a photographer ask of himself & composition is very helpful, coming back to photography after a long hiatus.The style of writing is interesting & not at all pedantic, though there is a lot of information in these 10 chapters.The chapter on Light is comprehensive as it not only talks about its colour, direction & how the camera sees it with very helpful boxes like: How to read a historgram?; HDR, and White Balance.All chapters have this great mix of general comprehensive presentation along with tips.Chapter 8, Artistic Interpretations have different Techniques & there is a small segment on Lensbabies.I would have loved to have read this when I was sixteen & starting out learining the craft. But better late than never.All in all, an excellent & beautiful book that I would reccomend & readily gift to friends & family interested in the Art.

I had been away from serious photography for many years. About 1 year ago I had taken up painting, and needed some reference photos to use with the painting. I was so pleased with the photo results, that I've rediscovered photography. I've read several books, but the 2 that I'm most pleased with are Creative Nature & Outdoor Photography and Bryan Peterson's Understanding Photography Field Guide. Both are excellent and I'd recommend them to anyone who wants to understand what their camera is capable of doing. But most important, how to see a quality photo even before it is shot.When I read it is with a highlighter in hand. There is hardly a page in either book that I haven't marked or written a note to myself inspired by what I had just read.The bonus of these books is the photographic examples the authors use. If you bought Creative Nature & Outdoor Photography, just for the remarkable photos it would be worth the price.Maybe you know someone with an budding interest in photgraphy, consider these books as a gift to them. They'll become much better and faster photographers than learning on their own.

This is a great book to get you motivated to take more interesting landscapes/nature photos. It's strong on composition ideas, and organized very nicely. It's not at all heavy on the technical aspects, and it specifically is not meant to be (go to your local library and you can find dozens of books on the technical aspects of photography).There were a few things that bugged me along the way. First of all, this new edition is 100% digital, whereas the first version was 100% film. This doesn't change that much in regards to photo creativity or composition, but the first version had helpful sections about how to compensate for certain lighting conditions depending on what kind of film you were using. Plus that means 100% of the photos in the first book were film, 100% digital in the second book, and no two are the same. I think it would be worth it to read both and compare photos from both. She constantly mentions in the second edition how easy digital manipulation is, so I'll bet that changed her approach when she was actually in the field.For all of her example photos, she lists the size of her lens, the focal length at which she used it, shutter speed, and aperture. No ISO. Again, this is not meant to be a technical book, but I could see a newbie trying to match her settings to the best of their knowledge, getting bad results, and becoming discouraged. I also mention this because she wrote down her film speed for every shot in the first edition. And I hate to say it, but she claims to use a six thousand dollar Canon DSLR throughout this book, and there's a very real advantage as far as way higher, way cleaner ISOs being at your disposal when you're in the field shooting at very small apertures.Sometimes she'll tell a really great, detailed story about how she figured out something in the field or how something fell into place for a truly memorable photo, and the photos on that page are of completely unrelated situations, so you can't see what she's even talking about. Though most of the time, she does include quality photographs related to the subject about which she's writing.The last thing that bothered me was the typos. I can't say there's a lot of them but there's a half dozen very obvious ones that take away from the book. The "wondeorful" plug-ins she uses in Photoshop (pg. 127) and getting feedback "fr/om" your viewer (pg. 19) distract from the purty, purty picture on the opposite page. But that's just me.Overall this is a very great book, full of very great photos. This is THE book to get once you've read up on shutter speed, aperture, and all the other boring technical bits. I've never read something about depth of field in a technical book and wanted to go out shooting, but I'll read one page in this book about diagonal lines, complementary colors, or the different qualities of light and I'll instantly be tempted to grab my camera and go out shooting.

This is a superb book on creative photography along with an introduction to digital techniques. The book covers a wealth of topics on photographic vision that are accompanied with magnificent photographs illustrating each topic. Thus, the reader's understanding of light, color, composition, and many other topics is enhanced by both clearly written text as well as the accompanying images. This is not meant to be a book focused on digital photography techniques (for that purpose I recommend Digital Landscape Photography by John and Barbara Gerlach), but it does include an introductory discussion of topics such as histograms, HDR photography, and some uses of Photoshop at appropriate points. This book is a joy to read and should be on every photographer's bookshelf.