New Flower & Garden Photography Book

My first photography book is out there in the world and available for download on Kindle. It was published yesterday and has already sold a copy. Even stranger is that, as I write, my book is now ranking at a lofty #3 in the Kindle category Photography > Nature & Wildlife, #13 in Beginners > How to, and #38 in Digital Photography. All of which is a complete surprise to me. Such a rapid elevation in the rankings was not anticipated.

As usual with my books, it took three times as long to write as I expected, and ended up twice as long as I planned. I had a bit of a glitch part way through where I was worried that my enthusiasm for the subject was failing to show through. A chat with a friend about the problem, a few edits and I was happy. The problem was not as big as I feared.

My desire was to write an introduction to digital photography but with a specific focus. I selected Flowers & Gardens since that is possibly my favourite out of all the things that I like to photograph.

I really wanted to just get straight into the fun part and write about flowers and light and stuff, but then I remembered beginners don’t necessarily know all about those exposure things like f-stops and shutter speeds and ISOs. The really unfortunate part is that unless you know about f-stops and shutter speeds and ISOs your photography will struggle to improve since knowledge of these things is essential to exert control over the appearance of the image. Yes I know you can put it on Program mode and machine gun away and you’ll probably end up with a useable shot or two – but there’s no skill in that.

So I just had to write about exposure.

And it isn’t very exciting.

And it has to come first.

My concern was how do I communicate this information in the early part of the book without putting people off who just want to know how to take better pictures of flowers & gardens. So I started with a story. Readers like stories, so I wrote a bit about me and my photographic journey from a 10 year old with a Box Brownie waiting outside Buckingham Palace to standing in W.H.Smith (newsagent) and looking at the latest issue of a magazine with my image gracing the cover. Even threw in a few nostalgic links to the equipment I’d used.

After the exposure stuff was over, it was down to the serious business of the flowers. And that was much harder to write than I expected. It’s not that flower & garden photography is some mystical intuitive process – it just feels like it. I had to think very hard about the processes that seem so natural to me when I have my camera in hand and a beautiful garden to explore. But they aren’t natural, they are simply the result of many hundreds of hours looking, clicking, observing results, and then going back and doing it all again – only better.

I hope I have managed to distil the essence of what that process is and communicate, in simple terms, how to emulate it. If I have, then my readers will be enjoying a dramatic improvement in their photographic skills.

Check it out now.

Flower & Garden Photography – Amazon.co.uk

Flower & Garden Photography – Amazon.com

 

Michael

1 Comment

  1. Michael, big subject photography and lots to learn with the triangle probably the hardest thing to learn, ISO-SS-AP. Anybody reading this should also be reading about the basics in photography and taking small steps to reach their goal. I would say practise, practise and even more practise.
    Dave.

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