Welcome to (The Occasional) Photo Tip of the Day! Please also visit my main site jeffwignall.com. Text and photographs Copyright 2016 Jeff Wignall.



“The best way out is always through.”


Tuesday, August 23, 2011

New Exposure Book on the Amazon Bestseller Lists

Thanks in large part to the publisher (Wiley) doing an email blast about it, my new book Exposure Photo Workshop has made it to bestseller lists on Amazon just a week after it was released. Today it reached the #20 spot among photo books in its print edition and the #4 spot among photo books in its Kindle edition. (Remember, if you have an iPad or some other device, you can read the e-version in full color.) The book is in the top 10,000 books among *all* books on Amazon--and that's something like eight or ten million books. It's really nice to have a book sell this well so soon. Wiley did an amazing job with the design and reproduction and at nearly 350 pages it's quite a nice book. Thanks to my friends Derek Doeffinger, Jennica Reis and Gavin Zau for contributing such great photography to the book. In the coming weeks I'll run some photos from the book here and talk about how they were taken.

And please, if you don't see the book in your local library or bookstore, ask them to order it.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Boyd Norton's New Serengeti Book

Yesterday I had a wonderful long conversation with my photographer friend Boyd Norton and, as always, it was a very fun talk and I came away knowing much more about the natural world in general and Africa in particular. Boyd is one of the world's foremost wildlife and travel photographers and he has been leading safaris to Africa for more than 27 years. He has a brand new book coming out this fall called Serengeti: The Eternal Beginning and I'm sure it will be a landmark book on the subject. You can watch a trailer for the book here.

The Serengeti is a region of more than 12,000 square miles and is home to the largest animal migration on our planet. As many of you probably know, there is a plan being considered to run a highway right through this primal wonderland and it would spell ruin for the Earth's greatest wilderness. It would also no doubt mean the beginning of the end of tourism in Tanzania which would be a devastating financial blow that would far exceed any gains made by the highway. It's a complicated issue, but you can read more about it on the Serengeti Watch page (where you can also make donations to help stop the Serengeti highway). As it says on that page: "If we can't save the Serengeti, what can we save?"

I'll write more about Boyd's book (and hopefully run a few photos from it) as the publication date gets closer. In the meantime, this is probably the greatest ecological/wildlife issue of our lives, so I hope you'll take time to read more about it.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

My New Book on Exposure Released

My latest book Exposure Photo Workshop (2nd edition) has been released (a week early!) and is now available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble and is probably in most major bookstores already. This book is a total revision of the previous edition and features more than 100 new photos and virtually every page of text in the book has been updated. The book also features more than a dozen photos by my good friend and world-renowned photographer Derek Doeffinger, as well as photos by two of my former students, Gavin Zau and Jennica Reis. It's a very handsome book and the publisher, Wiley Publishing, did a superb job with reproduction.

There are also several new topics that weren't covered (or were only lightly touched upon) in the original, including High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI), an expanded RAW section, details of the latest mirrorless (MILC) digital cameras and much more. I spent nearly four months updating this book and I think it covers the subject of exposure better than any other book on the market. Shutterbug magazine said of the original: "...possibly the best book ever written on the subject." The book is also available as a Kindle edition and, on the first day that it was available, reached the top 100 Kindle photo reference books in the world (just click on the image to go to the Kindle page).

While the book covers the entire topic of exposure, there's nothing in it that will scare off or confuse any photographer--and yet I think it's complete enough to satisfy any advanced shooter. I worked very hard to break the entire subject down into easily understood pieces and every concept and technique is well illustrated. The book is also quite a bit longer than the original and is almost 350 pages long--a bargain for the price these days!

And, as always, if you have any questions about exposure or photography in general, I answer every email so feel free to write. And if I could figure out a safe way to put my email address right here I would--but you can find a contact form on my main site.