Skippity's Book 7: Plants and dirt and sunshine, hooray!

Yet another in what will inevitably be a long string of photography book reviews...

Ian Adams' "The Art of Garden Photography" is one of the better photo-instruction books I've read. Which, I mean, there haven't been that many yet, but it seems a lot of them are filled up by fluff and pictures the author has taken. By fluff I mean, content that reads well but that doesn't actually teach you anything, or pretends to teach you something new but just says the same thing over and over in different ways.

In addition to being written in a user-friendly tone, this book addresses a good range of subjects that crop up in outdoor photography, such as lighting, structure, angle, and even finding good gardens. Much of what he has to say can be applied to "untamed" nature vistas as well. And being a fairly recent book, it even addresses digital SLR photography. Even though it was published last year, though, it's out-of-date about that part, which is both good and bad--good in that technology is moving so fast, bad in that it's damned hard to find stuff in print about it that's not outdated from the time it's written to the time it goes to press. But that's ok in this book, because most of it is about technique rather than equipment, which is exactly what I was after. I even applied some of what I learned already.