Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Flawed, but still a gem, 27 Feb 2008
This is a must have book even though there are some shortcomings.
The great
The photos are amazing, the text is snappy and interesting, and is written in a way that lets you dive in selectively.
A must have if you like photo journalism photography, and want to break into this arena.
The book doesn't hold your hand technically, rather concentrates on some of the concepts on dealt with in other books.
The not so great
My main bugbear about this book is the print quality of the photos. These are amazing photos, but the quality they are printed here is disappointing. The prints are good enough for a technical book which this ultimately is, but not up to art book quality (or that of National Geographic from where some of the images are from). Seeing as some of the hype around this book is that it is a coffee-table book, as well as a technical manual I though it was worth pointing out. I would have happily paid an extra £15 for high quality prints.
Some lighting diagrams would have been helpful in places.
That hand-writing font used in places (personal peeve) looks atrocious
Conclusion
It's amazing for what it is: A book of tips and great inspiration from one of the world's best photo journalist.
The tips are not that in depth and a lot of the time you are going to have to fill in the gaps in the technical information yourself. I liked this as it made me think and the book wasn't holding my hand all the way through.
As there is really anything else like it out there is it a must have, beginners will find it useful but will need to find technical information to support the book else where; more advanced photographers will love it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
From my blog From my blog:, 8 Mar 2008
There are plenty of books that follow a similar format to this. A picture, an anecdote and some information about how the image was taken. Micheal Grecco's Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait is a good example of this style of book. Those of you expecting detailed recipe's with lighting diagrams will be disapointed, the technical information is light but gets to the heart photo. This is by no means a criticism, The Moment it Clicks is absolutely jam packed with great photos, entertaining anecdotes and pithy quotes.
Joe's writes as though he's sitting next to you in a bar, talking in a what I assume is a New York accent, there's even a chapter dedicated to bar talk. Unfortunately, I'm unable to do accents when I'm reading to myself, so it comes across to me like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, but no matter, every page jumps out at you, and a lot of the insight he dishes out, will stick with you for life. The pictures, as Joe would say, are all shot with available light, any &*%%@^ light thats available, so there's plenty to excite strobists and strobophobes alike.
Did I mention that this book was packed? I have never seen a book of this style so packed with material. I was about half way through the 240 pages and thinking that this was incredibly generous, I would have been satisfied with half the amount of content.
The geardos among you will drool over the photos and lists of Joe's kit, which get a full four pages towards the end of the book and there is a colourful glossary of terms full of explanations of photographic terms and slang, as well as footnotes on the pages where the terms are used.
Highly recommended
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Get inside the photographer's mind..., 10 Mar 2008
... and what a photographer! Joe McNally has a well-deserved reputation as a photographer and is only slightly less well known as a teacher. But for those of us on this side of the pond, attending one of his workshops is, let's face it, financially daunting. No matter. You can buy this book instead!
Here is much photographic wisdom in book form - and (unusually, given the subject matter) a book that can make you laugh out loud and yet teach you at the same time. OK, so some of the shots are ones you'd never get to take yourself as an amateur (hanging out of a helicopter over the Hollywood sign with Michelle Yeoh takes some beating, and as for getting to meet Kermit in the flesh...). But then for others you *can* try and emulate, even if you don't have all of the kit that Joe has available to him. And even if you can't, well, then, as the publisher's own blurb says, this book would look equally good on your coffee table.
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