Remastered Anglais Edition of The Photographer's Eye: Capturing Stunning Images with Your Camera

eric: I like going back to study the basics from time to time. This book is quite highly regarded and is full of great information. But the writing is anything but compelling. It’s like translated text from the 12th century. An editor would be a wonderful improvement for subsequent editions.

United States on Sep 30, 2023

Turnips: I've read many books for serious amateur photographers. If I had to pick one, this would be it.

United Kingdom on Aug 23, 2023

Luis: Além do texto bastante complexo, com muitas imagens como se espera de um livro de fotografia.

Spain on Jun 23, 2023

Alexandre B: Freeman dispensa apresentações. Seus livros detalham conceitos e técnicas de forma prática e interessante, com fotos e ilustrações excelentes. Este livro, que se concentra na COMPOSIÇÃO fotográfica e no DESIGN, me parece essencial para quem quer evoluir na fotografia. Recomendo muito!

Brazil on May 30, 2023

Felix Valencia: As someone only just playing around with digital photography, I picked up this book as a complement to Bryan Peterson's  Understanding Exposure  to get me started and provide some inspiration. Neither book disappointed. Where Peterson's book is an excellent starting manual for people new to the world of photography, Freeman's goes into much greater depth about composition techniques.

The book is divided into 6 chapters, with each chapter further divided into sections dealing with a certain aspect of photographic design. Whilst some sections make reference to others, and in particular to photographs on other pages, in general it is possible to read this book piecemeal, skipping over bits that are of no interest, or returning and dipping into others. Each section abounds with example photographs, many also exploiting instances of photographs that didn't quite work to further highlight a point.

As many have already said, the writing is at times a little academic, and has the feel of being written with a photography or similar course in mind, but there is little that should prevent the average reader from understanding everything covered here. Freeman quotes a...

United Kingdom on Jan 23, 2012

Mr. T. White: The problem I have with this book is that it's written by a good professional photographer. "Good". That is to say, not... one of the best professional photographers who has ever lived. And admittedly, to my eye, many of the photos in this book were a little uninspiring; and frankly the addition of explanatory lines and geometrical reasoning etc. did not enhance the visual results of all the 'compositional foreplay'. Let's face it: many of the photographs were quite unexceptional by professional standards. Some were... dare I say it, quite mundane. If you don't accept that, then look at this book and then pick up a book by Ansel Adams, or Cartier Bresson etc., and then ask yourself - who, given the hypothetical choice, you'd rather learn about composition from?

I really don't feel that this book is worth the 5/5 stars that everyone else has given it, as I believe that they've not really paused to reflect on the fact that while Freeman is a good photographer, he is by no means of the same class as a true master such as Cartier Bresson. And therefore, I felt quite irritated by his trying to explain how his reasonably good photographs were designed and preconceived. As if they...

United Kingdom on Mar 16, 2009

Ana_y_lat: I had been looking for a book on design for ages, since they tend to be expensive, I looked in second-hand book stores first, but it seems that all I found there was way too boring and tedious for me: starting with basic shapes only to build up to how to incorporate them into photography half way through the book at best. That could very well be the way to go for serious design/photography students, but I do not have time or interest in something that detailed and technical. I wanted a nice overview of the techniques that are available to a photographer, and not just a "follow the rule of thirds" kind of advice that you get from most online photography tips, but a more profound discussion on why the rule of thirds is even important, how it tends to affect the viewer, and when is it appropriate to break it.
And this book provides exactly that - a brief but concise overview of the most prominent design theories, based on the research on the way we see/interpret things. I am definitely not a design expert after having read this book, but I know as much about it as I need/can afford to learn at this point, being an amateur with no ambition to go pro in the observable future.
The...

United States on Sep 08, 2008

T. Campbell: This is the best single volume on visual design and composition in years. Painters need a book this good. Freeman's earlier book from the 1980s, "Image," had long held the status, IMHO, of being the best single volume. His new book surpasses the older one by a significant margin.

Freeman is one of very few photographers, or artists of any ilk, who can articulate their art-related thoughts in concrete, accurate, analytical ways, and not in the jargon of so much of what is written about art that lacks any actual content. Not only is he an outstandingly gifted photographer, with dozens of books to his credit, but one who has mastered the grammar of images and is one of the few who can describe how and why visual phenomena work.

This is the most complete volume on this subject out there in terms of numbers of topics introduced and discussed at a reasonable length. It is also the most effective melding of the insights of current Gestalt perception theory with traditional design elements/principles in print. The first 60% of the book deals with the more concrete aspects of designing an image.

The last two chapters marry the other part of composing that is harder to...

United States on Jun 14, 2007