Stoppees' Guide to Photography and Light: What Digital Photographers, Illustrators, and Creative Professionals Must Know [Paperback]

"As a site that explores photography through the lens of lighting, Strobist is necessarily overweighted in technique. But technique as an end to itself is almost certainly doomed to yield boring, meaningless photos." That was David Hobby in a moment of self-criticism on his 'Strobist' blog. Saved me a lot of writing. It's not something I'd accuse David Hobby of, but it's a fair description of the photos in this book.

I can read many American-language books without noticing. This wasn't one of them. The authors in attempting to be chummy relapse into the vernacular. I learned that in American 'the mutts' is not a compliment, that 'sports car' refers to a pantechnicon (judging by what they claim to get in the boot) and best of all that 'talent' is an acceptable term for referring to a young lady. But a lot of it just whizzed past me - it seemed pretty inconsequential. And finally, for the European reader the imperial system of measurement is used exclusively and suppliers seem to be mostly US ones.

All this I could forgive if the book had much to offer. It doesn't. It comprises two parts
- photography for 15 year olds
- lighting for millionaires

You'll like this book if:
- you're eight years old and don't mind being patronised
- you're a native speaker of US English and understand all the homely / homey expressions that leave me all at sea
- your rich uncle has left you half a million pounds / euros / dollars and you have a very large truck to carry the kit between the aircraft hangars you'll be shooting in

There's a lot of blatant product plugging and indeed the kind reviews on the back cover are from the people whose gear they are plugging. Every time an example is given rather than saying "a 105-mm macro lens" they insist on giving the full Nikon product reference.

There's not much book here. Write off the first third if you know one end of a camera from the other. Of the remainder the right-hand pages are deeply dull commercial images. Of the left-hand pages one third is given up to crediting themselves for every photo in the book, to Mr Adobe for his wonderful Photoshop and for every piece of equipment they used down to the Blu-tak and drawing pins. OK, slight exaggeration.

At the end of it - I ground through every wretched page - I knew no more about lighting than I did at the start. It is a guide mainly to gear that I (and I suspect you) can't afford, not so much about actual light and its role in photography. Unless you are a millionaire and want to go into very boring commercial photography just go into Calumet and get some good advice and watch some Dom Bower videos on You Tube.