Product Description

This art book shows contemporary and cutting-edge work as well as historical. It deals with real-life issues of taking pictures and making prints in the practical way working photographers do. Using strong contemporary portfolio photographs, profiles of top photographers with a look at career matters, it includes practical strategies for taking and printing photographs, and a seamless mix of color, black-and-white, and digital technologies. For photographers and photojournalists.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212215 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 435 pages

From the Back Cover
This art book shows contemporary and cutting-edge work as well as historical. It deals with real-life issues of taking pictures and making prints in the practical way working photographers do. Using strong contemporary portfolio photographs, profiles of top photographers with a look at career matters, it includes practical strategies for taking and printing photographs, and a seamless mix of color, black-and-white, and digital technologies. For photographers and photojournalists.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Photography is now a mainstream art course taught at virtually every level from grade school to college—the latter in art schools, professional schools, and liberal-arts settings. It is taught in continuing education programs, at camera clubs, and in an ever-growing number of year-round workshops. Yet the medium's academic success is a fairly recent phenomenon. If you wanted to study photography just 30 years ago, your options were far more limited. Most art schools didn't have separate photography programs and many major universities didn't even offer an accredited course. And only a few institutions gave graduate degrees in photography.

The growth in photographic education reflects a huge change in photography's social and cultural status. In the art world, photography has finally been accepted as a legitimate medium, worthy of the same attention as painting or sculpture. Museums large and small have permanent collections of photography; hundreds if not thousands of galleries and private dealers exhibit and sell fine-art photography. In the advertising and design communities, photography is used more than ever as a means of persuasion. And where art directors, editors, and clients once told photographers how to work, they now look to photographers for ideas and style.

And there have been many technical changes, too. Photography has always been to a large degree driven by technology, but that has been especially true in recent years. Commercially available photographic materials and processes have improved in quality, flexibility, and permanence. Photographic equipment—especially cameras—has become highly electronic, allowing precise automation of exposure, focus, and other aspects of picture making. And perhaps most significant, the computer has become photography's handmaiden, playing an important role in image capture, editing, and output.

If and when digital photography will replace traditional film-based photography is still a matter of speculation. For the time being, many photographers have adopted a hybrid approach. They make photographs with film and process them conventionally, but then scan them to create digital image files that can be manipulated in the computer and output as digital prints that may or may not look like conventional photographic prints. The level of post-exposure control offered by digital technology generally exceeds that of the conventional darkroom, hence the term digital darkroom. But while filmless photography is making serious inroads, it usually can't match the quality of film, except with expensive and large studio-bound systems.

The purpose of this book is to address the vast changes of photography's past few years, and to help bring photographic education into the twenty-first century. It presents traditional photographic technique in great detail, explaining such basic matters as film exposure, camera controls, film processing, and printing for both black-and-white and color. Rather than treating black-and-white and color photography as separate disciplines, Photography integrates the subjects. And it also provides a thorough exploration of the role of modern technology—camera automation and digital imaging—and how traditional and new technologies can be used together for the best results.

The book's art program plays a critical role in its educational goals. Its many portfolio images come from all areas of photography—technical and commercial to fine-art. The intent was to provide an overview of some of the best creative photographers working today, in whatever field they've chosen to work, and also to help explain in captions something about their methods and techniques. To a large degree, these portfolio images pick up visually where Vicki Goldberg's photo history (Chapter 1) leaves off, with that chapter providing a visual reference to the medium's past and the portfolio images providing a visual reference to its present and future.

A how-to text can take the reader only so far. In eight special profiles, the book details the working methods, thoughts, and visual styles of some of the most visible professionals in a variety of areas of photography. Our goal is to give the reader an understanding of how successful photographers work and also to create a sense of the choices available to future generations of photographers.

The next few years will bring new challenges and opportunities at what promises to be a very rapid pace. Succeeding editions of Photography will doubtless lean more and more towards automation and digital image capture and processing. The authors are uniquely qualified to interpret and explain these changes. Both are active photographers, working in both the fine-art and commercial areas. Henry Horenstein has been a photography teacher since 1970, currently at the Rhode Island School of Design, and has written several of the; most enduring photographic textbooks.. Russell Hart has taught photography at the Boston Museum School and Tufts; University, and has been a photography writer and editor since 1980, mainly at Popular Photography and American Photo magazine, where he is currently Executive Editor.

ACCOMPANYING SUPPLEMENTS

• Laboratory Manual / Workbook (0-13-975509-8); (97550-8)
• Instructor's Manual (0-13-975491-1); (97549-0)
• Website – www.prenhall.com/horenstein

Customer Reviews

A word from the authors about the revised edition
The second edition of PHOTOGRAPHY isn't a token revision. It's a major update of a book that we had already designed to bring basic photographic instruction into the modern era without leaving the fundamentals behind. It is, unlike most of its competition, a book you can grow with as your photographic skills improve.
PHOTOGRAPHY is really a cross between a how-to book and a coffee-table book. That's one reason it costs more than a regular photo handbook: In addition to hundreds of technical illustrations there are dozens of beautifully reproduced, full-page photographs by some of the leading photographers of our time. You'll find photographs by Annie Leibovitz, Joel Meyerowitz, Sebastiao Salgado, Mary Ellen Mark, Joyce Tenneson, James Nachtwey, David LaChapelle, Matthew Rolston, Mark Seliger, and many others representing every kind of photographic discipline you can imagine. These images, which have been substantially updated in this revision, are interspersed throughout the text. PHOTOGRAPHY also features a series of individual profiles of well-known working photographers, heavily illustrated with examples of their work, and a compact, illustrated history of photography by New York Times critic Vicki Goldberg.
Why the emphasis on big, high-quality pictures? Because PHOTOGRAPHY is meant to inspire as it teaches.
--HENRY HORENSTEIN AND RUSSELL HART

Photogrephy: Revised Edition
This book by Horenstein and Hart was bought as an introduction to photography. Before I bought it, I looked at numerous other books on photography, but none of them seemed to tell me a lot more than what I already knew. In addition they did not inspire me. I only tell this because my opinion is that this book is what I searched for. It is well written and gives a decent treatment of the different topics. The illustrations are clear, and there are several photos showing the concepts involved, the photos being so good that they also show more subtle effects. And then there are works by various professional photographers all along. These are not just dumped there, but actually fit the topic being treated. The chapter on digital photography is perhaps a little short. However, I would rather by an additional in-depth book on digital photography anyway. This book gives the basis knowledge on how photography evolved and on different techniques. I only wished it had been available in hardback, because the relatively large format makes it somewhat unhandy in paperback.

Great Textbook for Beginner and Professional Photographers
I've been a photo student for nearly two years and this is the textbook I started with. I didn't realize at first how amazing and inspiring it was until I couldn't find it. Horenstein's book is organized and it is easy to read. It covers a great deal and has wonderful images as examples. I enrolled in a photojournalism class last semester and had to purchase Photography (8th ed) by Barbara London & John Upton. I was very dissatisfied with the textbook when remembering how great Horenstein's is. I urge every hopeful photographer to make an investment in this book.