Bryan Peterson

After just having read "The Photographer's Eye", a book so dense I couldn't consume more than four pages or so per day, I started "Understanding Exposure"—and read it in just a couple of days. Not because I liked it so much, but because it just didn't contain that much information.

The author is implicitly assuming that your main goal is slow-paced, methodical landscape photography. He literally scoffs at you for not carrying your tripod everywhere, for not using a full-frame camera, or for using any kind of automation. If you're not shooting everything in manual, at base ISO, you are not a real photographer, he seems to say.

So take out your light meter, go to manual exposure, and switch off your autofocus, or this book is probably not for you. It was certainly not for me. As an amateur, I don't have infinite time to set up the perfect shot, and wait for the perfect dawn light. I even like to—gasp—use auto-ISO, -focus, and -white balance.

There is a lot of good information, and practical wisdom in this book, if you can read between the lines, ignore scores of irrelevant descriptions of camera settings, and generally translate knowledge from the film days to your modern camera. I just wish it were updated to account for modern technology, and didn't come off quite as condescendingly as it does.… (more)