The Portrait Photographer's Guide to Posing by Bill Hurter
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Book Reviews of The Portrait Photographer's Guide to Posing
Book Review: Getting it right
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is a great help to photographers entering into portraiture. It helps you to get the basics right thus giving you confidence during the shoot.Book Review: A nice collection of tips for portraits
Summary: 4 Stars
You can start shooting when you start reading.
An excellent choice. Techniques are described and suggestions quite quickly applicable.
Book Review: Useful Guide; Needs Better Structure
Summary: 3 Stars
This is one of Bill Hurter's better books. Like his other guides, every page contains highly professional, artistics examples by well established portrait photographers. Along these examples are Hunter's copious guidelines and suggestions for setting up and taking portrait shots in various situations. This book will be a useful guide if you underline and make notes in the margins of the book as you read, and then actually take out your camera and practice many of the suggestions he provides in this book.
My reason for giving the book 3 stars, however, is I have a problem with the structure. I think the book would have been a lot more useful if it had been set up with less of a long expository format. It would be nice to just have two or three photos on each page with a different topic heading for each particular guideline or suggestion. Each page could consist of just a few paragraphs explaining a technique that is reflected in the picture(s) on the page. The end of each section of the book could also contain a summary list of all of all the guidelines. This is mainly the structure of the book, but you have to read through the long expository narrative to discover the guidelines. And sometimes the photos don't always match the guidelines that he explains on a particular page.
Book Review: Don't look at picture samples
Summary: 3 Stars
If you have a (digital) camera, you're not a pro or advanced amateur and you're shooting your family or friends, read this or a similar book. However, the picture samples don't support the text. That's the big problem of this book to me. Mr. Hurter has put together a decent text that explains the rules of posing but there are no pictures with these rules clearly applied. Even worse, some of the pictures are the exceptions that **break the rules**. It doesn't seem to be the efficient way to teach somebody the basics.
So, I decided to read the book by not paying attention to the pictures and then to go back and try to get any value from the samples I paid for too.
Book Review: not enjoyable
Summary: 2 Stars
I used to think should never judge a book for the cover. But this time I was wrong.
The book is plenty of average wedding photos. It's a sort of frustrating to try to be inspired by a book where the pictures are so standard, conservative and uncreative.
But the worst of all is that there is almost no direct relation between most of the pictures and the text. They are no real examples of what the text describes and there are only a few schemas for covering the topics explained.
I wanted a posing book but only a few chapters cover this area. For me 70% was un-useful information. Sometimes the author tries to teach you about depth of field or how to use a ladder and the possible complications you can having using it.
If I wanted to read about lighting, well then I would buy a lighting book written by a master of lighting. For example, this guy don't know the existence of the big and expensive studio/fashion ring flashes and he adjudge the circular catch lights in fashion portraits to powerless macro ring flashes.
This book should be named: "The Wedding Portrait Photographer, a basic guide to photography".
I don't give this book one star because, yes!, there is still very useful posing information on it.