REVIEW: Creative Landscape Photography

The photography world is flooded with books. In fact, many are useless books that are little more than a tribute to the author and their pride in their work. While it may be interesting looking at someone else's work, I’m not the type to enjoy spending my hard earned dollars on picture books. If I buy a book I want to be taught and I want to have something that makes me a better photographer, rather than pour through pages of stories about how great someone thinks they are with little said to help me grow as a photographer.

With the advent of eBooks the problem has become worse because the barrier to entry with publishing books has dropped, so subsequently the volume of crappy books has increased.

When Gordon Laing of CameraLabs.com asked me to take a look at this book I was skeptical because I’ve got about 100 printed books in my “to blog about” list. Many of the books I have aren’t that great which is why I haven’t bothered to review them, so I really wasn’t looking for another to add to the lame collection.

I’m very pleased to report that when I opened this gorgeous book up on my iPad my jaw dropped. The images were fantastic, but the layout and content was even better. While this book does tend to have a Canon bias, the quality of the content is outstanding. It’s really like a great recipie book that many new photographers would do well to have on their iPhone or iPad when they are out shooting.

To see what I mean, take a look at this nice hyperlinked list of topics you can jump to in the book to see exactly how to get the shot:

For each topic there’s the sample photo, followed by in-depth details on how the shot was made using in-camera settings:

Discussions on details about composition and what to look for are great. In addition, these topics aren’t as short as they may appear here (these are just sample pages) so generally you leave each topic thinking “good idea”.

Here’s one for filters:

And here’s another about using reflections:

Conclusion

This is good stuff folks! I’ll be recommending it to my Photography 101 students this season, so if you like what you see in the sample pages I’d highly recommend you toss out a few bucks to get this very well done eBook.

My hats off to Mike Langford and Jackie Ranken for proving that an eBook can be a fantastic product with tons of useful info. In addition, since there’s no dead trees and greedy publishers, the price is dirt cheap.

This book is in PDF format which means it’ll look great on your iPad, iPhone, Kindle File, etc…  You’ll definitely want a color device, and the new iPad 3 just makes you drool with books like this.

Order Now

Click here to view more details on how to order this book. If you don’t already have one, save sales taxes (outside of New York) and pick up your iPad 3 here.