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Very good and detailed explamation of setups and lighting ratios. Best book on portrait lighting.
After the basic lightings, it gives a brief outlook to some more advanced techniques.The step-by step instructions and the wide variety of example photos also make this book a must for a professional wannabe. If you wish to go into portrait photography a bit more seriously, this is a tremendously good book to start. It's starts from the very basic, and goes thouroghly through the first steps necessarry for understanding studio lighting.
And finally, watch out for errors in the diagrams -- I spotted a couple like where a shoot-thru is shown and it was really just an umbrella. I agree with another poster who noted that the images selected for the book are rather dull. This is the way they should be written and diagrammed out, but it falls short of its very real potential. It seems minor but when careless stuff like that comes up it makes me question the accuracy of the rest of the diagrams and content.To be fair, this is one of the better lighting books out there still today. If you don't like the photos, why would you want to copy the technique. Another complaint is that the images used to show progression of lighting set-ups are often so different from one another, especially in poses and attire it becomes difficult to discern the subtle changes in lighting -- when the subject of the photo changes from image to image, it is difficult to see exactly how the lighting has changed and to evaluate effect.
It's a pretty good guide. This book covers all of the most popular lighting styles for portraits. I've yet to practice all of them but the diagrams are nice to see and I believe this book will help me to improve my photography by being able to offer more variety in my photography.
Also, all of the people in this book are basically "models" but real world dictates you won't be shooting your ideally "proportional" subject. They are mentioned in the book but really more of an afterthought and sprinkled around. Maybe even a small section of full length as an added value would be good. Let me first say that if you want a thorough and exhaustive explanation on portrait lighting this is it. The only reason for not giving it 5 stars is that it would have been good to create a separate chapter on "Challenging Portraits" such as wrinkled faces, big noses, double chins, etc.
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