Closeup Shooting: A Guide to Closeup, Tabletop and Macro Photography [Hardcover]

I greatly enjoyed the review copy of Cyrill Harnischmacher's first book, Low Budget Shooting. This one I didn't find as compelling. There is quite a bit of good information here, and certainly you could learn a lot about how to start experimenting with photographing all manner of things close up. But where Low Budget Shooting was really innovative in addressing a need that many photographers don't even think of having, Closeup Shooting looks at a topic well covered and doesn't breath the same refreshing air as Harnischmacher's first book.

In some cases, the technical information is limited without, so far as I noticed, an explanation. To say that extreme closeup photography is only possible with an SLR or DSLR is flat out wrong. Medium format and large format cameras are capable of as much and even more. (Perhaps the book's title should have been Small Format Closeup Shooting.) One mention of infrared photography didn't mention the difficult - or even impossibility - of doing this with DSLRs. There are many examples of images, but relatively few show the set-up and lighting diagrams that help people understand how the techniques worked and to apply them in their own shooting.

Given the number of special considerations one could make, 121 pages simply aren't enough to offer comprehensive coverage - there are entire books written on nothing but close-up photography in nature. It certainly isn't a dud, and it contains a lot of useful information, but I don't think it would be my first stop to learn about tabletop or macro photography.

Product Description

Cyrill Harnischmacher is a photographer and designer who lives and works in southern Germany. His first book "lowbudgetshooting" won him the prestigeous Fotobuch-award of the German Booksellers Association in 2005. Cyrill is a studio photographer by profession and a nature and infrared photographer by passion.

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