3: *whew*
This book has everything, and then some. It will take you from not knowing anything to being a quasi-expert in a fairly short amount of time.That said, it is pretty dry. Very textbookish in form, the book is difficult to read straight through. This is made more palatable by the extreme depth that the book goes into for each topic that it discusses. Starting with the differences in photo gear, the author leads the reader through selecting a first camera to selecting a lens to selecting a film and finally the development of the negative and print. The book is exhausting in its depth and breadth. Much time was spent on Adams' Zone system and its usefulness in taking beautiful photographs. This focus throughout the book really drove home the importance of exposure. The pictures used in the book are fantastic and the personal accounts of some photos by Adams himself are very interesting. The only thing that I felt was skimped on was the process of selecting a shot. Adams was a large-format photographer so he wasn't able to make the hundreds of shots of a scene that a 35mm photographer could make, so it was important for him to select his shots carefully. More text space devoted to Adams' method or instinct for finding shots would have been the final piece of information that would have made this a complete guide to photography. It wasn't easy reading, but I learned a lot and was able to immediately use the information in the book to improve my own photography.
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