- ISBN13: 9780817438159
- Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
- Notes:
Product Description
Illustrated with Barry Thornton's own stunning landscape pictures, each chapter is interlaced with technical detail and personal feelings.Amazon.com Review
British photographer Barry Thornton has spent a lifetime devoted to black and white photography. He shares his warehouse of technical savvy in Edge of Darkness: The Art, Craft, and Power of the High-Definition Monochrome Photograph. If you have at least a working knowledge of basic photography, t... More >>
Edge of Darkness: The Art, Craft, and Power of the High-Definition Monochrome Photograph
This book reads like an autobiography and a reference book. Biased towards medium format work and the Rollei SL66, He brings up some very well executed experiments about many factors than can enhance the final print that one would not normally think about. From camera and enlarger lens performance and alignment to enlarger modifications and focus shift problems with various papers and more!
ОтветитьУдалитьNot so much a darkroom chemical reference but a more mechanical approach to enlightening oneself about overcoming little gremlins to achieve more tonally accurate and sharper prints. His "stories" tie in to his teachings in such a unique and profound way. A truly original piece of advanced photo-technical reference material.
Rating: 4 / 5
Excellent book for the beginner or advance photographer looking to refresh their skills. Well written, great photographs. Plan on using it as a reference book in teaching my beginning photography classes.
ОтветитьУдалитьRating: 5 / 5
As an amateur photographer striving for technical excellence, I found Barry's book and approach extremely useful. I like the way he breaks down the necessary elements of image sharpness and quality into chapters. I can digest them one at a time and try to correct my own shortcomings. The photographs are marvelous and I would have been proud to have created any of them. I only wish Barry were still alive to continue his easy style and dedication to helping photographers. May your memory be eternal!
ОтветитьУдалитьRating: 5 / 5
Barry Thornton's masterful book is all about what you have to do to take those razor-sharp, etching-clear B&W photos. And it's all about film types and film-speeds and focal lengths and tripods and skylight and development chemistry and enlargement lenses and so on. The book is full of excellent guidance, test set-ups you should be doing to confirm the focus of your camera or the film-speed settings or the alignment of your enlarger or the various developer mixes that are available for B&W chemistry and how each produces sharper or less-sharp images.
ОтветитьУдалитьOver and over again, he demonstrates that the sharpest photos don't necessarily come from the finest-grained films or the biggest lenses or the most commonly used developer chemistry. In fact, there's a point at which the actual graininess of a film/print -- something you'd think would detract from the sharpness of the image -- actually contributes to the eye's perception of sharpness, of acuity!
This is one of the best written photography books I've ever read -- right up there with Ansel Adams' classic trilogy and the National Geographic Field Guides to Photography.
He starts each chapter with a personal event or story about his life, a place he found and photographed, a person who influenced his work. Then, he takes this narrative subject and makes it the illustration of whatever the topic of the chapter is. Beautifully written. A joy to read! And that's really saying something about a book on photographic techniques!
Of course, the book is printed on high-quality clay paper and is full of exquisite reproductions of Thornton's works. And, like a true technical book, every photo is accompanied by a blurb on the camera, lens, film, development chemistry and times, printing chemistry and times, coatings ..., really, much more information than most readers would care about. But all is meticulously documented and, as you go through the chapters, you come to understand the significance of these technical bits of data -- and the differences in the images they produce.
This is truly an outstanding book on photography, one of the very best I've read -- and I've read dozens! Yes, it's about B&W scenics, mostly. But the lessons it teaches are applicable to ALL photography and will help any photographer to improve. I highly recommend this well-written and very readable book.
Rating: 5 / 5