Each chapter builds the student’s photographic toolkit.
Chapter 1: Devices
A broad overview of how images are captured with the help of tools, including a wide array of cameras. Discusses the major camera types and provides pointers for beginning students looking to acquire their first serious camera.
Chapter 2: Optics
Explores the science behind how lenses use light to form an image and the technologies that continue to improve this process. Understanding these concepts gives the student a level of control over their photographs that many artists never achieve.
Chapter 3: Exposure
Making exposures is the most important task a photographer will perform with a camera. This chapter illustrates how a photographer controls the amount of light hitting the camera’s image sensor or film in order to make correct - or, incorrect, if so desired - exposures.
Chapter 4: Composition
The artist’s job is to arrange visual elements into a successful composition that contributes to their artistic goals. By studying how other photographic artists have constructed their compositions, the seemingly magical visual power of some images is revealed to be an operational science - made of field-tested theories, proven through millennia of human art-making.
Chapter 7: Post-Production II
This chapter expands the student’s digital post-production knowledge by illuminating some of the artistic possibilities created by Adobe Photoshop’s robust functionality, including retouching and compositing.
Chapter 9.5: Craft, Composition, Content and Concept – The DNA of Photographic Art
At this point, the book’s foundational framework - described as the 4Cs: craft, composition, content, and concept - has been fully introduced. For an aspiring artist, the 4Cs are useful not only for understanding the work of other artists but also for thinking about one’s own work. In this short chapter, students gain practice analyzing images using the 4Cs.
Chapter 11: Tradition
Photographers have at their disposal not only the most advanced equipment, but also the practices of the past, what this book refers to as tradition. This chapter examines how tradition manifests in contemporary artistic practices.
Chapter 14: Words
All artists use words to further their work: whether writing an artist’s statement, applying for a contest, giving a talk at an exhibition, or just speaking with someone who is interested to know more about the work, words are absolutely required for artists wishing to share their work with others.
Chapter 5: Light
Light is the essential building block of photography and a photographer must be able to recognize its characteristics, manipulate its properties, and capture it with optimal control. Various light sources and light modifiers are explored, equipping students with the skills needed to previsualize the look of their final images.
Chapter 8: Prints
Sharing images, or outputting, is the final stage in the digital workflow. While digital displays are on the rise, prints are still an important end product for many photographic artists. This chapter introduces the techniques required to produce prints that meet the photographer’s standards.
Chapter 10: Development and Presentation
For an image to emerge into the world, an artist must execute the idea and see if it “works.” This chapter will provide a field guide for this undertaking, which will be referred to as development. Relatedly, a work of art is created so it can be shown, raising the question, how should these images be presented to the public? This chapter will also survey innovative methods of presentation that may be used as inspiration.
Chapter 12: Video
Advancing technology increasingly helps photographic artists integrate video into their workflow.This chapter will introduce readers to the craft of capturing and editing video, as well as some approaches of artists working in the medium.
Chapter 6: Post-Production I
Digital post-production is a complex process requiring a large and varied skill set. Chapters 6 and 7 are primers to this expansive field, orienting students to key software programs and skills. Chapter 6 focuses on organization and adjustment/enhancement, primarily in Adobe Lightroom.
Chapter 9: Content and Concept
Simply put, a photograph’s content is what it is about, while its concept is why it was made. A wide range of photographic artworks, contemporary and historic, are examined through these lenses, providing students with a foundational understanding of content and concept that can be applied to their own image-making.
Chapter 10.5: Money
A topic not often discussed in photography classrooms is the question of how an artist can sustain their practice. This chapter will focus on the various ways a photographer can make an income from their photography, offering a glimpse into how others have made it work.
Chapter 13: Computational Photography
A digital image’s data is computed throughout the digital workflow and as students will discover in this chapter, computation has also become the conceptual backbone for a new frontier of art-making in which the computer’s incredible ability to crunch numbers facilitates creativity. Photogrammetry, virtual reality, and augmented reality are a few examples of these new media introduced.