Does anyone have any recommended reading for beginners? Anything you read or someone else read that really helped them out or brought a new perspective to there thought process?
Gryphonslair99's suggestion is a great place to start. As well, Peterson has another book entitled
Learning to See Creatively - also recommended reading IMHO. For stuff on composition, anything by Freeman Patterson is worth reading - he is a well established Canadian photographer. Also, I found Rob Sheppard's books -
the Magic of Digital Landscape Photography and
the Magic of Digital Nature Photography worth reading. I also enjoyed reading
Nature Photography by Chris Weston. Wiley Publishing have also created a series of books they call their Photo Workshop series and there are a number of easily readable books there. They cover the more technical aspects of photography such as Black and White Photography, Exposure, Composition, Macro Photography, HDR Photography, etc. and can be easily found on your book store shelves in the Photography section as they have a rather unique orange and black cover and the front cover contains a fairly large photograph related to the subject of the book. If you are looking for something of a more elementary nature that covers mostly the technical side then the
Digital Photography for Dummies is quite good and readable - don't knock the "dummies" series, there are a lot of good books by good authors in that series.
It really depends what you are looking for - I tend more to books that are subject oriented - landscapes, nature, flowers, etc. rather than general technical books, although I do have some covering very specific technical areas such as HDR and macro photography. Although I don't buy them, if you go to your local library, I would recommend that you look at what I call "picture" books - collections of images by various photographers in areas that interest you - Adams, Porter and Weston, for example, for landscapes - Karsh, Cartier-Bresson, Liebowitz for people...there are really so many that it is hard to say unless you can tell us a little more about what type of photography you are interested in.
There is also a wealth of material on the web and it is simply a matter of searching, for example, a quick search on
landscape photography got me over 13 million hits - how relevant any of them are to what I might be looking for...well that is up to me to narrow it down. Hope this helps.
Cheers,
WesternGuy
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