Mastering Landscape Photography DVD – Learn By Video Workshop
Review

Mastering Landscape Photography DVD – Learn By Video Workshop
Peachpit Press
US $34.99 CAN $36.99 – Shop online for better prices
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-80833-2

This is a clear and useful video tutorial presented by landscape photographer Phil Hawkins. It is designed for the beginning photographer and, as you might expect, leaves very little to chance. The strongest compliment I can pay this particular tutorial is this: Once you start watching, you want to continue watching. It’s just under three hours long.

Hawkins begins with basics, such as the differences between tripods and the kinds of lenses to take into the field for a day of landscape photography. He then explains the best way to set up your camera, but never does he give advice without offering the reason for the advice.

Here’s one good example. All professional photographers typically advise us to shoot images in camera RAW format, because that format captures the most amount of digital information possible with any given camera. Hawkins explains what this means and also what it means to convert, or compress the image, to different formats. His explanation was not new to me, but I can’t remember anybody else making the technical information as clear as he does.

He does this by sitting down in front of a pizza  with the works (camera raw) and then begins the compression process, taking out bits of the ingredients and rearranging the pizza until it’s a mess (or a badly degraded photo.

The post processing part of this tutorial is its weakest link mainly because neither Hawkins nor anyone else can cover every photo editing program available. His choice for importing images, Capture One from Phase One, may not work exactly like whatever you’re using. The software used in this program is Windows-based. Basic principles may apply to Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, which he illustrates, but my guess is that all this will get muddy for the beginner.

Still, this is by far one of the best photo tutorials I’ve encountered in recent years.

MyMac Review Rating: 8 out of 10 


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