Books like Art of Photography (Library of Photography) by Time-Life Books

Guide to crafting compelling digital photographs through disciplined design, composition, and post‑processing techniques.

An illustrated autobiography about Ansel Adams’ dedication, adventures, and achievements in landscape photography and environmental conservation in the United States National Parks. This book focuses on Adams' wisdom and concern for human beings and nature.

Photography has long been harnessed as a scientific tool, enabling observation of phenomena beyond human vision by capturing time, size, and light wavelengths invisible to the eye.

Veteran photographer Bryan Peterson simplifies exposure, covering light fundamentals, aperture, shutter speed, and their interactions, plus advanced topics like flash, gels, and star trails.

The 250-odd photographs in this book had to run an arduous gantlet of editorial selection. For each one that was chosen for publication, thousands were examined, some never before seen in this century. Those that survived represent the work of 68 great photographers; hence, the title of this book. What makes a photographer great? Not one great picture; hundreds of people, by design or accident, have achieved or stumbled upon an image that others consider great. Rather, inclusion in this collection signifies that a photographer accumulated a body of great work during his career. In photography, as in any field, greatness is a quality more easily demonstrated than defined. Yet in researching this volume, the editors encountered several factors that, taken in combination, appeared to form a definition. The first is intent. What did the photographer have in mind? When Alexander Gardner shows us an empty Civil War battlefield, he intends us to feel the sense of loss and tragedy he found there; when Lewis W. Hine poses a child beside an open door he intends us to ask, "Where does that door lead?" And when Yousuf Karsh shows us the broad brow of Nikita Khrushchev he intends that we feel the public power, wisdom and aggressiveness that are stored up behind it. The second factor is skill. A great photographer must be able to execute his intention. He has to master all the tools at his command. He must exploit the qualities of light and film; must understand human nature, and know how to be patient at one moment, spontaneous at another. Without these skills even the noblest intent is unfilled. Finally, the great photographer must execute his intention with a consistency lesser photographers cannot approach. The great photograph is no accident in the hands of these men and women. Whenever possible, the editors have looked at the whole life's work of each photographer represented here: with only a few exceptions, the early pictures and the late ones share the successful mark of their maker. Intent, skill, consistency: however different the photographers in this book seem, they all share these qualities.

Many amateurs have the technical skills and the imagination of professionals, and certainly all the equipment they need. But they don't take as good pictures. This stems largely from a difference in attitude. The professional must sell his pictures. Therefore he constantly thinks about them. If he is a photojournalist he develops the ability to regard them not so much as individual pictures but as parts of larger subjects, and he is always considering how and where they may be published. It is this difference in attitude that ultimately distinguishes the professional. It forces him to stand outside himself, to think like an editor, to ask himself if what he has framed in his viewfinder is really as "useful" picture, if it helps tell a story, establish a mood, catch the high point of an event. In short the effort to think like a professional teaches him how to squeeze the maximum out of what is going on around him. That is what photojournalism is -- making photographic stories out of events and their impact on people.

Bruce Barnbaum’s celebrated photography guide, now in its latest edition, balances technical depth with artistic vision, offering clear explanations of composition and creative expression supported by his renowned imagery.

Aesthetic Trends 1839–1960 by Helmut Gernsheim

Despite our stereotypical ideas on photographic images as a snapshots (slices of time), photography is fundamentally a time-based medium. The relationships between photography and time are manifold: time can be directly represented within the image, it can be its theme and philosophical horizon, but it can also represent the global framework in which photographic practices develop and change through time. It is the ambition of this book to bring together the various aspect of time in photography as well as of photography in time, and to illustrate them in a series of case studies that focus on seminal authors (e.g. Fox Talbot, Victor Burgin, Robert Morris) and genres (e.g. spirit photography, montage photobooks and tableau photography), with examples ranging from the very first photographic pictures to the most recent cross-medial uses of photography in and outside art.