For a lot of us, photography is synonymous with travel. If you’re anything like me, you actually go so far as to plan your travel itinerary around the best places and times to get out the camera. I was pretty excited then, when I heard that two friends of Light Stalking were collaborating on a guide to travel photography.

Who Are These Guys?

Many of you will be familiar with the work of Mitchell Kanashakavich and his great guides that we have reviewed before on lighting and post production in photography. Many of you will also know of or read Darren Rowse’s great site over at Digital Photography School. Well these guys got together (Mitchell as author and Darren as publisher) to produce “Transcending Travel: A Guide to Captivating Travel Photography“.

Mitchell is a travel photographer by trade – he shoots for Getty Images and his photography has appeared in a heap of magazines as well as on book covers and billboards. He also wrote several guides (mentioned earlier) that went on to sell thousands. In short, the guy knows what he’s doing! DPS knows how to pick talent when they see it.

What’s So Good About The Guide?

As for the book itself, visually it’s exactly what you would expect from these guys – gorgeous, with lots of great photographs and examples. One reason we really love Mitchell’s stuff is that he virtually gives away the whole playbook when he uses examples. All of the images have the data such as ISO, aperture etc and most have extra information demonstrating the point he is trying to make about travel photography.

What’s Inside?

There are four main sections to the guide – Preparation, Composition, Light and Making Photos.

As anybody who has travelled with a camera knows, preparation is invaluable – it can be the difference between average shots and a print that can proudly go on your wall. Mitchell covers this subject by going through his own process of researching shooting conditions before he even buys a ticket. This encompasses gear selection too and is centrally important to good travel photography.

The composition section is a great little rundown of most of the various rules of photographic composition aswell as when to break them. It’s a good introduction for beginners and reminder for more experienced togs.

The lighting chapters of the book are also a great introduction. Judging from both this section of the book as well as Mitchell’s other guides, lighting seems to be where he really has a passion. His explanations of directing light and how to get the right type of light for shots are great.

The final section on the photographic process takes us through how a travel photographer goes about getting a great shot – from conceptualising the image through to planning, waiting and shooting. There are also chapters on the most common types of images for travel – landscapes, buildings, interiors and people.

It’s the sections on people that makes this book stand out. It is clear from the photos that Mitchell gets access to people that the rest of us struggle to emulate. But again, he tells exactly how he goes about it – whether it involves learning a few words of the local language, hiring a guide or simply getting lost in the hills on a motorcycle. To somebody who loves both travel and photography, this is the real gold of the book. Getting access to interesting people in their own environment is tough, but this is the guide that will show you how it’s done. To be honest, I would have loved some more examples of the ethics and psychology of photographing people – it really is an area of photography with not enough written (though I will admit I am a total travel junkie).

All up, this is a fine guide to travel photography and a great complement to Mitchell’s other more technical guides.

Part photography technique, part travel guide, part psychology – this book deserves a place in the collection of anybody who wants to improve their travel photos or get a handle on how to approach a tough area of photography.

What Next?

Now, Digital Photography School is a lot bigger than Light Stalking, but we still managed to convince Darren that it would be a good idea if DPS would offer Light Stalking readers a discount for this guide. He agreed, but only for a week.

So if you use the discount code “25lightstalker” you will get 25% off the advertised price of the guide if you get in this week.

Photography Tutorials, Case Studies and Discounts - LightStalking Photography Newsletter.

A lot of the most stark and emotive photographic images you will ever see are done in black and white. The black and white collections we have put together here at Light Stalking remain some of the most popular on this site of all time. Little wonder then that many folks continually seek out how to improve their own skills at black and white photography and emulate some of its better practitioners.

We were excited to find out then that one of our favorite photography websites has just launched a new guide to black and white photography – The Magic of Black and White (Part II – Craft) by Andrew S Gibson – a follow up to the successful first part (Vision).

Who Made the Guide?

This guide (and the previous one in the series) are published by David DuChemin who many of you might already be familiar with – he runs the fine website at www.CraftAndVision.com and publishes many great guides to photography as well as a very cool blog.

The author, Andrew S Gibson is no slouch himself (check out the images below to see what we mean). He also writers for EOS Magazine and has been in a bunch of other photography publications you probably know (Practical Photography and Photoshop Creative to name a couple).

So What’s It All About?

David was kind enough to give us a sneak preview of this follow up guide. To be honest, he set such a high standard with his other books, that we were expecting a lot.

The first thing that is striking about The Magic of Black and White is its visual appeal. Like all Craft And Vision publications, it is absolutely gorgeous to look at – this time due to the fantastic photographic skills of Gibson. Check it out:

The guide itself has three main messages (with great examples) on how to achieve various aspects of producing a stunning image in black and white. The focus of this one is the actual technical craft (making it the logical follow up to the first guide which was about vision).

Conversion - Several Techniques for taking a basic digital image and converting it to black and white properly. Remember though, as the guide states, you still need a decent color photo to get a decent black and white conversion!

Toning – Various methods of toning including a detailed look at split toning which involves adding two colors rather than one as in sepia toning.

Textures – Gibson shares a very cool technique (albeit relatively popular) for adding textures to photos by combining a texture layer into the black and white image. The resulting examples are quire stunning.

The guide goes into enough detail on each point (with specific software settings for Photoshop and Elements which are relatively easy to emulate in most photography software) that it can practically be used to emulate the results of the photo examples. That makes it solid basis for folks looking to learn the craft.

As with most Craft and Vision published guides, perhaps the main criticism is that it leaves you wanting more and asking when the next one is coming out. The guide itself is great – we just want more of it! The eye candy is spectacular and the lessons are solid.

But that is the kicker. These short guides solve a specific problem for many photographers and they do it succinctly and well. With them being priced at an incredibly cheap $5 it’s difficult to not want to snap up all of them.

The Magic of Black and White – Part II – Craft is well worth a look and at these prices, very difficult to ignore.

And, as David has kindly informed us:

For the first few days only, if buyers use the promotional code MAGIC4 when they checkout, they can have the latest ebook for only $4 OR they can use the code MAGIC20 to get 20% off when they buy 5 or more books from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST June 1, 2010.

Check it out by Clicking here.

David has kindly agreed to share the proceeds of any sales via this site with Light Stalking so we can continue to bring you great photography content.

Photography Tutorials, Case Studies and Discounts - LightStalking Photography Newsletter.

As somebody who finds it very challenging to manipulate light in photographic scenes to suit my tastes – especially as I tend to travel light without much lighting equipment, I was quite happy to stumble accross a guide by Mitchell Kaneshkavich called ‘Seeing the Light‘ and devoted to ‘making the most of available light and minimal equipment.’ Like me, Mitchell is somebody who loves travelling and knows the value of taking as little gear as possible. Lugging around a huge pack even in your own home town isn’t fun, but it can be torture overseas. I was therefore hoping that his guide would help me out.

A quick google of Mitchell’s name revealed that he has been the winner of the 2009 Sony Exposed competition as well as being an excellence award winner from “Color” magazine in the USA. He also shoots for Getty and has been on the cover of or featured in half the photography magazines I read! In short, he knows what he’s talking about.

The book itself is intelligently divided into three sections corresponding to the three main lighting situations you are likely to find yourself in – The Flash, The Reflector and Natural Light.

The Flash

Michell covers both the equipment he uses as well as the theory and techniques behind their use. I found his explanations of choosing appropriate flash settings and adjusting the light quality with flash gels to be quite informative and the results he gets (and shows you how to get) with such a small amount of lighting equipment are quite spectacular.

Where it really shines though is how he uses diagrams to explain his incredible results. From showing you a very impressive image, Mitchell’s diagrams show exactly where and how the flash was set up and where any natural light was coming from (seperate diagramns show both side and top view). Of course all of the other camera settings are there too. This is extremely useful as it allows you to immitate his entire setup!

The Reflector

Another compact piece of equipment that Mitchell carries on his travels is a basic 42 inch 5-in-1 reflector for reflecting the natural light. Again, his results from using this extremely basic piece of equipment are impressive and again, they are accompanied by those incredibly useful diagrams laying out where exactly the reflector was when he took each shot and where the natural light was coming from.

Natural Light

Accompanied again by some impressive images taken on Mitchell’s travels, this section is still very useful, but I didn’t find it quite as helpful as the other chapters. Mainly this was due to the fact that this chapter only had two of the diagrams that by the previous chapter, I had come to really enjoy (I think I spent as much time looking at the diagrams as I did reading the rest of the book). This chapter on natural light only has two of those diagrams though in reality they are more useful when explaining flash and reflector setups. Still, it has some solid explanations of choosing shooting times and anticipating lighting conditions.

Final Thoughts

The visual appeal of the images is what grabbed me at first about Mitchell’s book. I wanted to know exactly how he got the image on the cover (and then how he got the great images inside the book). I wasn’t disappointed because he gives the entire playbook away. Perhaps my main criticism is that there are a few images in the book that I would have love to have seen a corresponding diagram for. Even so, it’s a great book and one that will certainly help my low light shooting.

Click Here and Check out Mitchell’s website to get yourself a copy.

Mitchell has kindly agreed to share the proceeds of any purchases you make on his site with Light Stalking so we can keep bringing you more photos and articles.

Photography Tutorials, Case Studies and Discounts - LightStalking Photography Newsletter.

A lot of email we’re getting suggests that most photography fans feel that they don’t know their camera as well as they would like to. Of course that impacts whether you can use a camera to the full potential that it has.

To be honest, getting to know your camera is about the most important thing a beginner (or anyone) can do.

Just recently the folks over at Digital Photography School released a cool little guide called, “Photo Nuts and Bolts” which is all about getting to know your camera and getting the most out of it.

Now let’s be clear – getting to know your camera is not rocket science, but it is very very useful to know this stuff by heart and it will help you utilise your equipment to its full potential.

Photo Nuts and Bolts not only goes into how image making works, but why. In many cases (such as their great explanation of pinhole cameras) this gives you a much better understanding of a subject. Extremely useful for taking better photos.

More importantly, for someone like me, there are a LOT of explanatory diagrams and summary text boxes – this makes it so much easier to understand difficult concepts.

I particularly enjoyed the way the sections on exposure concisely and simply explained what can be a tricky topic. Some of the keys covered are:

Apperture – Knowing which apperture setting to use in which conditions can be a little difficult, though it is the primary way in which you can control depth of field. Getting this right is often the difference between a good shot and a great one. The chapter on aperture gives a great run down with practical examples of controlling depth of field.

Shutter Speed - Getting the right shutter speed is imperative for certain shots. If you’re attempting to convey movement in a photo for example, then the tips in the guide will certainly piont you in the right direction. Again the practical examples convey the concept very clearly.

ISO – Some lighting conditions dictate the choice of ISO. While higher ISO means more noise and slightly less saturation, the guide explains (with visual examples) how to choose correctly.

Together these three elements are explained in the book using the concept of the “exposure triangle.” Again, the diagrams easily convey possibly the single most important concept in photography theory.

The guide also covers other elements of image creation such as lenses, metering modes, white balance with the same clarity. I must say that the emphasis on visually communicating these ideas is a solid way of explaining the concepts and one that saves the reader a lot of time in wrapping their head around them.

Each of the chapters has projects (“Homework”) that the reader can use to practice each concept.

While one small criticism I might have had is simply that I would like to have seen even more explanation and visual examples of each concept, the book makes up for this in that each chapter has a generous list of further online reading resources for anyone who wants more information.

All things considered, this concise guide is an excellent introduction to the functions of any DSLR camera and a fine guide to controlling how your images turn out.

Now, you can check out the guide online here.

If you’re quick, DPS is also giving away a bonus – a shooting “cheat sheet” which you can print out and carry with you. It has various likely shooting conditions and what type of camera settings are best for them. It can be VERY handy when you’re not quite sure which settings you should be using. I think that bonus is only available for a limited time so you should check out out ASAP.

Title: Photo Nuts and Bolts
Author: Neil Creek
Publisher: Digital Photography School
Rating: 4/5

PS – If you use any of the links in this article and happen to purchase a copy, Light Stalking receives a commission so that we can keep bringing you all these photography articles.

Photography Tutorials, Case Studies and Discounts - LightStalking Photography Newsletter.