Book Review – Macrophotography
I cannot remember being more excited to read a photography book. As most of you know, macro photography is my passion. It is also a rather difficult field to get good tips about. Most of the top macro photographers are quite silent about their techniques.
Therefore, I was extremely excited to find a book by such a talented artist. Gilles Martin has photographed for the places I could only dream of and he has also dabbled in pretty much every type of macro and micro technique.
Unfortunately, this book was a huge let down. I could not have been more disappointed. Granted, the photographs are gorgeous and Gilles certainly has tremendous skills, but the text of the book (and in some ways the photos too) suffer from some huge flaws.
For beginners, Gilles did not write the book himself. Another person wrote the book and at times it reads more like a fan book than a technical guide. I really felt often that it should just read “look at this awesome thing Gilles did” and “if you were as awesome as Gilles you could do this to”. Still, I have read books like this before and still found them useful once you perform a brain block on the ego.
However, the book also suffers from the flaw that it can’t seem to decide whether it targets absolute beginners or seasoned macro photographers. The first third of the book contains no information that you won’t find in any other absolute beginners macro book. Even worse, it is much more difficult to understand. In one section, the author discusses how important apochromatic lenses are and why the photographer must have them. What do you imagine will happen when the beginner strolls into his local camera store and asks to see an apochromatic lens?
In discussions on effective magnication and depth of field, the descriptions are far too convoluted and I suspect a beginner would have difficulties understanding. On the other hand, an intermediate or advanced photographer would already know these terms and question – like I did – why the author is making them so complex.
While the pictures are gorgeous, they don’t really back up the text. For instance, in multiple places the author talks about using a bellows and a short lens to get very high magnifications up to 20x. However, nowhere in the book are these higher magnifications used. This makes me wonder how useful this truly is if no pictures in the book use this technique. This happens multiple times in the book. If a technique is truly useful, show me some pictures that take advantage of it!
On the advanced end, I felt the book lacks a lot of details. The book discusses keeping live specimens, terraniums, portable tanks, insects in flight, and other advanced topics. In some cases there are diagrams of the setups but not very much practical information on what purpose each piece plays and why it is essential. There’s one photograph of Gilles’ main study with numerous tanks, diffusers, and lights. I would have loved to hear more in depth information on how these are used. In short, from the advanced perspective there are hints but no details.
One of the sections I was most excited about was the discussion of microscopy at the end. It is extremely difficult to find any photographer oriented resources on microscopy and I hoped that I had finally found one. I am still looking. The discussion is very basic and extremely important terms such as brightfield, darkfield, and phase contrast are just glossed over. Any good introduction to microscopy would go into these in depth.
At other times I really felt that the book provided a way for Gilles to show off all of the equipment he owns (which is a lot). Why else include a few pages on endoscopes that do very little to help a photographer that actually hopes to use an endoscope. All they do establish are the facts that endoscopes are cool and Gilles has one.
In the end, I cannot recommend this book to anyone except those who like to look at pretty pictures. There are much better beginner books out there – such as those by John Shaw – and more advanced macro photographers will not learn much from it.
No related posts.
Tags: book, macro, macrophotography, micro, photography, review