Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94469 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Beautiful images, but not much insight on vision and style
I've just finished reading Developing Vision and Style, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. The book's images are uniformly beautiful and reproduced very well, even in the paperback edition of the book I bought.

After a dozen or two images, though, all that uniformity starts to grate. It seems to me that there is a certain sameness to many of the landscapes, and it shows up right on the front cover: rocks in the foreground, dramatic sky, optional body of water. The images that don't follow this formula stand out by comparison.

This is a little odd in a book that is meant to be about developing vision and style. Although the authors and other contributors talk at length about their unique visions and styles, there isn't always a lot of uniqueness on display. I was also struck by how little insight was to be gained on the photographers' vision and style: very few were able to articulate what characterized their own work, never mind offer readers useful direction on developing theirs.

The book is beautiful and the notes on how individual images were made are often interesting. The text is not nearly as interesting, though, and the title promises more than the authors deliver. I'll open it again, but I think I'll just look at the pictures...

Landscape series
Very good book, refreshing, gave me some ideas. Will have this permanently on my shelf as a reference.

Not really a guide to vision & style
I bought this book wanting to learn how good photographers go about developing a vision and a style. I would use that information to develop a vision I could articulate, rather than just stumble around with my current vision, "I take photographs with bright, vivid, happy colors that make people excited." (Boy, does that sound weak. Now you know why I need help.)

I was very disappointed. Not a single photographer defined their vision or told how they developed their own vision, or, for that matter, gave any advice at all about what a vision is.

I had hoped we would be given many different perspectives on "vision"...something like, "Here are the elements and factors that I feel go into making a vision." Given this kind of starting point, I could then add to the list of elements and refine them into my own, private, creation.

Alas, the first paragraph on the back cover of the book really tells you what you will read about throughout the 156 pages:
"Photographic vision means seeing, as opposed to merely looking."

You hear this same theme repeated in a variety of ways by each of the contributors to the book. It is the closest any of them comes to defining "vision." I really learned very little in this book.

The photos were terrific, but I didn't want to buy a picture book. I really hoped to gain insight into how I could go about deliberately developing a vision that I could explain to others.