The Lighting Cookbook: Foolproof Recipes for Perfect Glamour, Portrait, Still Life and Corporate Photographs

I'm an advanced amateur, and shoot mostly friends and family. The practical tips, in the book, really do make a big differnce in the quality of the photographs. Such as fill light, shooting angles for people, and film types. Now my friends are bugging me to shoot all their portraits, i feel like a pro. Thanks

I was happy to see a book that covered many styles of lighting and styles of photography. As a semi-professinal, i am asked to shoot many types of photographs, and this book has given me excellent tips to "upgrade" my photos. The portrait and fashion section was especially helpful. AA+++

I bought this book while searching for a book that would help me get started in portraiture. Although this book covers portraiture, it is probably not quite what I was looking for, but is good in its own right.The book begins with the first section, "The Well-Stocked Studio," and describes cameras, lighting, and accessories. This is valuable information for a serious photographer wanting to get more advanced, but is overwhelmed at all of the equipment and what it does. Other sections are "Basic Portraiture," "Corporate and Industrial Shots," "Product Shots and Still Lifes," and "Specialized Techniques." Each section presents about a dozen different examples of techniques in that area, detailing the equipment used. Each technique example is covered in a few pages with excellent photographs, a pretty good diagram of the lighting arragement, and an "ingredients" list. The book is also sprinkled with valuable side notes.To duplicate every example in the book, the reader will need an extraordinarily extensive studio. However, the book starts with simple techniques involving one or two lights and reflectors, and builds upon that. Even the more extensive lighting techniques are helpful in developing your skill at visualizing how a scene should look and how you would choose lighting to achieve that look. Moreover, the less advanced photographer could duplicate the techniques with a couple of battery-powered flashes, a couple of slaves, and using an umbrella, walls, or poster board as reflectors.I tend to judge the value of a book by how quickly I read it versus its cost. Unlike "The Photographer's Guide to Using Light," which I read in a couple of hours and cost about as much, I found this book to have excellent value as far as the amount of information for the money. You could probably not sit down in a day and go through this whole book. In fact, I read a little at a time over a few months.As for portraiture, I'm still looking for a book that specializes in portraiture technique. Even though this book does have a section on it, it lacks information on actually posing the subjects.

I am an intermediate amateur photographer and have a different perspective than the "beginner" from Alaska who wrote a review below. About the book "cover[ing] too much material in too little detail," I disagree. All of the photographs have either a detailed verbal description of how the lighting was set up, or a verbal description and a diagram. About the book requiring a "lot of gear and equipment," the back cover says that the author "begin[s] with an inventory of ingredients found in a well-stocked commercial studio," which is fair warning for the buyer. With some imagination, as another reviewer wrote below, an amateur photographer can make do with not-too-expensive equipment (e.g., for the first "recipe" on pages 24-26 the reflector can be a shiny collapsible auto windshield sun reflector that costs $5 at Wal-Mart). I liked Bidner's describing the different styles and lighting techniques used by six professional photographers (Bean, Branman, Farkas, Lane, Thien, Wegner). I don't think I'll ever spend as much money or time (e.g., 10-11 hours photographing a small crystal sailboat, pages 117-119) on photos as the six photographers, but nevertheless this book gave me some great ideas.

You can quickly broaden your scope on photography with this book. Yes, it is a book based on HAVING the equipment, but with a little bit of creativity, you can arrange yourself improvised equipment for doing most of the things on the book. It is not a "technocracy" book. I is *mostly* a book for showing you how do the PROS achieve a PRO look on their pictures. Buy this book if you have plenty of notion in photography, since it is not meant for beginners. Great "secrets" on the book!!!