Portrait Photographer's Handbook | Bill Hurter

Portrait Photographer's Handbook | Bill Hurter | Get Monte Zucker's Handbook or the 2nd Edition - the 3rd Is a Mess

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Portrait Photograp...

	Portrait Photographer's Handbook Bill Hurter Amherst Media, Inc., 2007 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Combining time-tested practices with contemporary methods, this guidebook details the fine art of capturing formal and casual posed images. With advice and guidance from the finest and most decorated portrait and wedding photographers in the country, this instructional discusses subjects such as lighting in the studio and on location, improving improvisational shooting techniques, and how to retouch images in the post-production process to create truly flawless looks. A chapter addressing the common problems in taking portraitures?from working with subjects with glasses to subjects that vary in size, facial features, and skin tone?is also included.

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A valuable resource

"Portrait Photographer's Handbook" by Bill Hurter is a valuable resource for anyone interested in portraiture. It starts off with a pretty useless discussion of camera format/size. It then launches into lenses, film and so on. All of this is fairly elementary but useful as a review. However, when Hurter gets into metering, lights and light modifiers, things get more interesting. Chapter 3 is devoted to posing (there could be more on this). Chapter 5 discusses portrait lighting. While this might be a review for some, I found tips and tricks that I really appreciated. The lighting diagrams were well drawn and the illustrative photos were very good. (It sure does help to have beautiful people to photograph!). Chapter 7 on outdoor lighting was useful to me (I don't do that much outdoors). Chapter 9 on corrective lighting and posing techniques was well done. Chapter 10 was on PhotoShop retouching techniques - very good basic stuff. See also "Skin" by Varis. In short an excellent book, clearly written, and beautifully illustrated by some of the top portraitists (is there such a word?) of our day. I would have liked a few Karsh portraits included, but that's just me. Recommended.

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Get Monte Zucker's Handbook or the 2nd Edition - the 3rd Is a Mess

I waited a few months for the 3rd edition to come out, and now wish I hadn't, due to how it tries to put three books - an introduction to digital photography, a portrait handbook, and a book on Photoshop techniques - into 120 pages. Each of those subjects is far too in-depth to cover well in one book and, even as it is, it's poorly done.

Chap. 1 - Equipment and Basic Techniques
A good intro to lenses, depth of field, meters, umbrellas, etc.

Chap 2 - Good Digital Working Techniques
Here's where it starts to go off track, basically giving you a beginner's manual on digital photography, including info on formatting your cards and backing up your images.

On top of that, the Shadows/Highlight tip on page 25 is flat-out wrong. First it has you create two copies of the layer, apply Shadows/Highlight, and then apply a layer mask, when in fact the Shadow/Highlight tool is designed so you don't have to use a copy or layer mask. And when it says to paint white on the faces "to conceal the underlying data," painting with white actually reveals it.

The Camera Raw examples are also useless, as when it shows the resolution bumped from 2000x3000 to 4000x6000. Any beginner reading this is going to think that's the way to go and end up with a huge file that will only bog down their computer with useless resolution. It even says, "by converting the file from Adobe RGB 1998 to a wider-gamut color space (ProPhoto RGB), the file can be easily enlarged to 4000x6000 pixels." Color space and resolution have nothing to do with each other, and 99% of the people reading this book wouldn't want to do either of these adjustments.

Chap 3 - Posing
At last we get to portraits, and here there's good general guidelines covering the shoulder, eyes, mouth, and hands. But the stock photos illustrating the chapter don't help at all. For instance, it says to have a man fold his arms across his chest with the edge of his hand turned to the camera, but you're not given a clue how it looks. Instead, we get a half page photo of a pregnant woman lying upside down, wrapped in gauze. We're even told the title of the portrait: "Anticipating." But we don't learn a single thing from it.

Chap 4 - Composition
Briefly covers the rule of thirds and the golden mean, and tells you how "the S-shape composition is perhaps the most pleasing of all compositions," and the inverted L-shape is "ideal for seated subjects." Sounds great, but heck if I know what they look like `cause there's not a single example of either of them.

Chapter 5 - Basic Portrait Lighting
The text is fine, covering all the basics, including metering. Hurter also tells us how split lighting can be used to narrow a wide face, but there's not a single example in the whole book. In the same way, another section says "a round face may appear more flattering from a different angle." But again, it offers nothing in terms of what the angle might be or what it looks like.

To top it off, only three photos in the whole book show the lighting equipment and set-up for how a photo was made, so you have to guess what is where and what it might look like. Monte Zucker's own "Portrait Handbook" has dozens of such examples.

Chaps 6 - Lighting Variations, and Chap 7 - Outdoors Lighting
These chapters are about window light and portable flash and are quite good on both subjects, covering scrims, fill-flash, etc. In fact, these two chapters are actually better than Douglas Allen Box's entire book on the subject, "Professional Secrets of Natural Light Portrait Photography."

Chap 8 - Spontaneous Portraits
This section is short, but good on interacting with your subjects.

Chap 9 - Corrective Techniques
This section covers how to correct twenty-one problems, from overweight subjects to large ears, but it crams it all in on just four pages, with no examples.

Chap 10 - Retouching Techniques
This waste of eight pages starts off with a full page of text about retouching in the old days. As for the rest of it, it's nuts to talk about linking layers and layer sets, which most people will never use and there isn't room here to cover well.

Chap 11 - Fine Prints
When buying a book on portraiture, you don't want to be reading what the unsharp mask tool does for the twentieth time. And you sure don't want to be reading about monitor calibration, color management, printer profiles, and color correction. Katrin Eismann's "Restoration and Retouching" and her new "Creative Digital Darkroom" cover all these much more clearly and comprehensively, so just get one of those and skip everything Photoshop in this book, just like the author should've.

Review Summary
If you're new to portrait photography, you'd be better off with Erin Manning's "Portrait and Candid Photography" in that it's much better illustrated in making each point, shows the actual equipment you'll be using, and covers the usual situations you'll encounter. If you're a bit further on and want to learn great technique, Monte Zucker's own "Portrait Handbook" is excellent in focusing on each area, with photos to match the text, and has dozens of photos showing the positioning of the lights, scrims, reflectors, and windows. And when he brings up digital issues, it's all useful in portrait work, as in how to actually read the histogram to ensure an accurate exposure.

In the end, this book tries to cover too much and so ends up giving too little. If it'd focused on what it's supposed to be - an introduction to portraiture - instead of using up a full quarter of the book on digital issues, you'd actually have something.

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Dissapointment for me

Well, I bought this book based on glowing reviews. I should have checked it in the local bookstore first.

Cons: The book is loaded with so many soft focused images and pretentious poses as if there are no other technique. There is no life in those images. Some of images clearly overprocessed in Photoshop with oversharpened eyes and blurred faces. So, if you are into soap opera looks and poses this is certainly a book for you.

Pros: On the other side the author (and his contributors) does know his trade . Lighting, composition,color etc look very professional. It is just so boring

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Good book, but a tad over-priced for what you get.

This book had a few good tips in it for portrait work. I feel though it is over-priced for what you get. It is not really a book that I would read more than once, so to me, this should just be borrowed or checked-out at the library instead.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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