ABSTRACT
This book takes as it’s starting point my earlier The Photographer’s Eye, which deliberately concentrated on how the image works rather than how the camera works. One of the things I realized with that book and its sequels was that often it would have been simpler in explaining a point about composition or color to have bypassed words and instead relied more on a purely visual explanation. That’s the premise here. Words to a necessary minimum, with visuals carrying the story. The decision also allowed me to indulge my love of making illustrations, although you might wonder why a photographer would be illustrating when he has a camera. I can’t really answer that question, but somehow, for me, the two go together. In any case, I’ve always thought that text and imagery gets processed by the brain in such different ways that any illustrated book demands a kind of jump in the reader’s mind as the eye moves from one to the other. Here at least, we’re asking for less mental jumping by keeping most of the information on the purely visual, graphic plane. Photography itself is an entirely visual experience, so any description of what went on at the time of shooting has to be reconstructed later if it’s to be put into words.
