I’ve been looking for a good travel photography book for ages now – and in every sense of the word. It’s got to be about travel photography, and also portable enough for me to bring during travel too.
The photography books section though isn’t short of material on this subject; though it’s a lot harder to find books that are small enough yet contain enough objective information and captioned pictures for one to get ideas from.
The Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Photography is in its third edition, and with a publication date of Aug 2009 is a very recently-released book too. Interestingly, the third edition is a larger tome than the earlier edition which was paperback novel sized. This third edition isn’t nearly as big as a coffee-table book, but it’s still larger than the earlier one and about the size of a netbook.
Of first impressions: the paper used is of heavy stock… nice! I’m not quite so sure of the cover though. A landscape shot would had been nicer. Instead, there’s this scary looking painted Pulikkali dance performer eye-balling the reader.
Content wise, it’s all in order. The book has been nicely updated from the earlier edition with technical specifications that are more 2009 than 2006. E.g. the table presenting storage space vs megapixels in an image now specifies up till 32 GB cards and 25 megapixel images. I’Anson in the book’s Introduction also notes a long list of additional places – including Singapore (!) – he’s visited since the second edition, and the book end nicely indexes pictures of each new place.
Unlike also the other Lonely Planet Photography book I picked up a fortnight ago (blogged about here), I’Anson’s writing is more objective, less flippant and containing pained attempts at humor injection. His advice, perceptions and take of a particular subject theme is stated matter-of-fact.
Unlike Tom Ang’s How to Photograph Absolutely Everything though, while I’Anson’s book covers very roughly the same ground and 2-3 page presentations of numerous subject themes, there isn’t those third person pictures to illustrate how pictures were taken that I really liked in Ang’s book. Oh well – you can’t have everything.
Minor quibbles too. The books shipped from Amazon are always cardboard reinforced, and shrink-wrapped for additional protection. Of the two books that arrived from The Book Depository, one was placed in a bubbled envelope – scary – and neither of the two books were shrink wrapped. Scarier. The Child photography book was in pristine condition, but this Lonely Planet Guide was very slightly dog-eared.
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