- Publisher
- Focal Press
- Published
- 2007
- Shelf
- photography: Craft
- ISBN
- 9780240809342
Craft
The Photographer's Eye
Michael Freeman
Composition treated as a set of decisions rather than a set of rules, with the frame as the first and hardest one.
Why read it
Freeman takes apart what happens in the two seconds before a shutter: where the frame edge falls, how the eye travels, why a picture balanced on paper can feel wrong. He is unusually good at showing several valid crops of one scene and explaining what each one costs.
Why own it
It is the rare craft book that survives the technology it was written around, because none of it is about the camera. Photographers come back to it at every level.
Who it is for
Anyone whose photographs are technically fine and somehow flat.
Reading order
Book 2 of 6 in the photography reading order. See all 6
Read nextThe AmericansRobert FrankOnce a single frame makes sense, Frank's book shows how meaning builds across a sequence of eighty-three photographs.Read before thisRead This If You Want to Take Great Photographs
Opens a search on AbeBooks, a network of independent and antiquarian sellers, which is where a good part of this shelf has to be found, because it is out of print.
Read next
Chosen because they argue with this one, not because a machine noticed they share a category.
- Read This If You Want to Take Great PhotographsHenry Carroll
- The AmericansRobert Frank
- Camera LucidaRoland Barthes
Also on the·photography shelf