Photography: Revised Edition

by Horenstein, Henry; Hart, Russell

• ISBN13: 9780131839885
• ISBN10: 0131839888
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Moments in Time: Snapshots of Photographic History

Getting Started

Inside Your Camera

The Lens: An Introduction

The Lens: Focal Length

The Lens: Aperture and Depth of Field

The Shutter

Film Basics

Film Exposure

Camera Filters

Lighting Tools and Techniques

Film Processing

Black-and-White Printing

Color Printing

Finishing Prints

Special Techniques

Digital Imaging

Credits

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

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,Photographyintegrates 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 v