Black and White. From Snapshots To Great Shots by John Batdorff

In the introduction to Black and White: From Snapshots to Great Shots, photographer and author John Batdorff talks about getting given a Kodak Instamatic as a child in 1977 and becoming hooked on photography. My own journey into the world of photography is similar dating back to about the same time and age (maybe a couple of years later – I was only 4 in 1977). When you can easily relate to a book from the very first page, you know it’s going to be a good read and Black and White: From Snapshots to Great Shots doesn’t fail in that regard.

The book proper kicks off with a look at equipment and settings. A lot of that may be familiar to some but it always bears repeating for people looking to move into the world of photography. One part I was happy to see included early on is a short section on monitor calibration. This is often left to later in a photography book or left out completely but in mu opinion it is so important that it should be included with the basics up front. Other basics such as gear, exposure, shooting modes and so forth are all covered in good detail.

Moving on there are chapters dealing with other essentials – composition, lighting, contrast, framing and texture. The third chapter expands on the process of exposure, offering examples and suggestions for landscapes, portraits, visualization and story telling as well as the more technical areas like understanding histograms and the exposure triangle. Experienced photographers may be tempted to skip over these parts but it’s worth a quick read, particularly the parts toward the end of the chapter.

Chapter 4 covers Lightroom. Tool of choice for many photographers, the main areas of Lightroom are covered in great detail. I’ve been a Lightroom user since the very first public beta in 2006 and thought I knew the application very well but I actually found something about Lightroom in Black and White: From Snapshots to Great Shotsthat was new to me.

Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 is discussed in the next chapter and for me this is the most useful chapter. I upgraded a few months ago to Silver Efex Pro 2 for my black and white and while I know my way around it enough to get a decent image out of it, what I learned in this chapter opens up even more of the program to me. Features that I just hadn’t gotten around to fully learning about are explained in easy to follow detail and save me a lot of time.

Black and White: From Snapshots to Great Shots concludes with a chapter on Printing and other sharing. Discussed here are papers, print profiles and settings, using print labs, sharing to social media sites and ore.

If you’re a beginning or intermediate black and white photographer, then you’ll find this book to be an essential buy. For the advanced photographer, it will be worth if it there’s a certain area you need to brush up on (like me with Silver Efex Pro).

Disclaimer – I’ve known (online via social media) the author John Batdorff for a while now and he arranged to send me a reviewers copy of his book. The opinions reflected above are my honest thoughts and are in no way influenced by having received a free book.