Here’s another good reference book, Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait by Michael Grecco.  It is an inspirational book that blends the best of the Rotovision series of books (lighting diagrams / camera info) along with interesting behind the scene anecdotes of a celebrity photographer (“We were shooting at Shaq’s home…”) The first sections are based more on types of gear and how to use them: cameras, lighting etc. Later chapters are based on concepts and case studies. Well written, great images, a quality book. On Michael Grecco’s website you can also get a good idea about his lighting setups by looking at his behind the scenes video clips. I particularly liked this clip showing a portrait of Scorsese, it shows a clever use of natural and strobe light along with a bit of smoke.

Last Christmas both my parents and my brother gave me books on photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson. It turns out that by blogging about what is on my bookshelf, they were able to deduce what wasn’t there. Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer is a comprehensive collection of Cartier-Bresson’s work spanning the years 1926 to 1979 and includes images from France, Mexico, China, Russia, and even Japan. In Henri Cartier-Bresson: À Propos de Paris he delves deeper into his relationship with Paris. One aspect of his images I find fascinating is his ability to get fly-on-the-wall shots where the presence of the photographer is unnoticed or ignored. I have never used Leica cameras, but their compact size would not only make the photographer more maneuverable, I presume, it also reduces the impact the photographer has on the scene. Subjects would have behaved differently for example if he’d used a giant camera like my Pentax 67 that tends to get stared at rather than ignored (Not to mention the rifle-like crack of the Pentax’s shutter). My favorite Cartier-Bresson image can be …

A Shadow Falls is a impressive book. Impressive in its physical size (nearly 16 x 13 inches). Impressive in its vision (vast African savanas). Impressive in its goals (to memorialize the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa). The images are stunning. The tritone plates have a mesmerizing quality to them. Although the shots of elephants are perhaps the most famous examples of his work I found the images of the wildebeest migration the most powerful. Enjoy.

I was given one more photography book for my birthday. I hadn’t mentioned it already as A) it came by sea so only arrived recently, and B) it has a few more words than most photography books so I had to sit down and read it. The book is  A Camera, Two Kids, and a Camel: My Journey in Photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt, a National Geographic photographer who has managed to juggle her career with two kids and a camel. (Something you don’t even see at Cirque Du Soleil.) It would perhaps be best described as an illustrated autobiography. The author talks about her life as a National Geographic photographer and there were several interesting facts or pearls of wisdom along the way. These included: “Assignments in those days (early in her career) averaged three to six months. No assistants. No shot lists. No excuses.”  Photographers were sent to a place after a five minute phone call and then it was their job to find the story behind that city or region and to photograph …