My fascination with photography began in 1999 when I arrived in Japan. I bought my first SLR camera, put in some film and started taking pictures. I didn’t have any photographer friends, know of any photography clubs or really have any clear idea of what I was doing. For the first few months my new camera remained in the auto everything mode, but slowly I started experimenting seeing what all the other buttons did and working my way through the camera’s manual.
Taking more and more photographs is a great way to improve, but I still didn’t have anyone that could offer me advice on subjects like which lenses to use or the best way to shoot a portrait. It turned out however that there were hundreds of fantastic mentors out there who had distilled their wisdom into books. It didn’t matter that I was living in a snowdrift in northern Japan as those magical brown cardboard boxes from Amazon always managed to get through. And so in a country where I can’t even read the children’s books I gradually began to build up my own modest library that offered both guidance and inspiration.
So what are the books on my shelf?
I thought I would start with one closest to my own passion – Bob Krist’s Spirit of Place : The Art of the Traveling Photographer. Its a book written by a man with a dream job: assignments by magazines like National Geographic to exotic locations across the world. It’s easy to read with lots of useful information, but not overly technical. The photographs do however have the useful data such as shutter speeds, aperture and camera/film that give you a better idea of how he took the picture.
One interesting feature of the book is that there are several mini photo essays in the book. If you want to work as a professional travel photographer you usually need to think about getting a series of shots rather than just a single photograph. If you are telling the story of a city you need to have a selection of images that show all its different faces.
Overall a good book from a man with a fantastic job.
Check it out out your local library or bookshop or if you want you can get it from Amazon.com here:
TRAVEL 67 : Chris Willson Photography 