Charlie Waite is my favorite landscape photographer. Galen Rowell, John Shaw, and Art Wolfe to name a few usually does little to nothing for me. But when I look at Charlie Waite, I'm spellbound. I picked this book up again recently and again it is sooo inspirational. Excellent. I like the tone Charlie Waite writes in as well.
The book consists of 150 color photographs, all of which are 6x6 pictures (Hasselblad). Most pictures have not been cropped, so if you have strong distaste against the square format you're going to miss out ;) This is by no means a medium format photography book, though. Other than the fact that the pictures are taken with a medium format camera, everything in this book is about the picture itself.
The contents are:
- Introduction: A Frame of Mind
- The Arrangement of Parts
- Simplicity
- Right Time, Right Place
- Lenses
- Movement and Exposure
- Manipulating the Image
- The Play of Light
- Colour in its Place
- Sky and the Landscape
- Water and the Landscape
- Buildings and the Landscape
- The Big View
- The Intimacies of the Landscape
- The Final Shape
The format of the book is one picture per page, some text about the picture and composition and a "Points to Watch" box. There is also a box for each picture giving the technical data, but don't let that fool you into thinking that this is a technical book. It's a book that shows pictures and what the photographer thinks about each one. It's not a book that will take you step-by-step through anything.
Charlie Waite is based in UK, so most of the photographs are from Europe.
Also see my review of Charlie Waite's "Seeing Landscapes" which is not too different from this book, but different enough to be worth having too.