Veteran photographer and instructor Bryan Peterson is best known for his arresting imagery using bold, graphic color and composition. Here he explores his signature use of color in photography for the first time, showing readers his process for creating striking images that pop off the page. He addresses how to shoot in any type of light, and looks at color families and how they can work together to make compelling images in commercial and art photography. He also helps readers understand exposure, flash, and other stumbling blocks that beginning and experienced photographers encounter when capturing images, showing how to get the most out of any composition. With its down-to-earth voice and casual teaching style, Understanding Color in Photography is a workshop in a book, helping any photographer take their images to the next level.
Understanding Exposure has taught generations of photographers how to shoot the images they want by demystifying the complex concepts of exposure in photography. In this newly updated edition, veteran photographer Bryan Peterson explains the fundamentals of light, aperture, and shutter speed and how they interact with and influence one another. With an emphasis on finding the right exposure even in tricky situations, Understanding Exposure shows you how to get (or lose) sharpness and contrast in images, freeze action, and take the best meter readings, while also exploring filters, flash, and light.
With all new images, as well as an expanded section on flash, tips for using colored gels, and advice on shooting star trails, this revised edition will clarify exposure for photographers of all levels.
Discover a whole new way of seeing the world while honing your photography skills across composition, exposure, lighting, lenses, and observation.
Use This if You Want to Take Great Photographs is packed with fun photography prompts and inspiring images by master photographers so you can get creative with your camera. Create your own highly personal photobook by sticking in your pictures with the adhesive corners provided or simply dip in and out when you're stuck for ideas. Whatever your specific interests – street, studio, still life, landscape, or portrait photography – you're free to interpret the prompts in any way you want.
52 Assignments: Underwater Photography is a year’s worth of inspiring weekly assignments to kick-start your creativity.
This collection of photographic workshop assignments is designed to build core skills, expand horizons and kickstart creativity. The book takes readers on an underwater adventure with assignments designed to teach valuable lessons and produce stunning images. It has a year's worth of weekly challenges and concepts for conceiving and composing powerful, dynamic underwater photographs and videos. Complete the assignments weekly over a year, or dip in every time you need to bring a new concept or creative approach to underwater photography.
Full of technical advice and professional tips, the book includes space for readers to add their own notes, lists and tech specs, allowing them to create a unique journal to record the journey they have made with their imagination.
Assignments include: silhouettes, macro backlight and reflections.
With more than 350,000 copies sold, Understanding Exposure has demystified the complex concepts of exposure for countless photographers. Now updated with current technologies, more than one hundred new images, and an all-new chapter, this new edition will inspire you more than ever to free yourself from “auto” and create the pictures you truly want.
In his trademark easy-to-understand style, author Bryan Peterson explains the relationship between aperture and shutter speed, including how to achieve successful exposures in seemingly difficult situations. You’ll learn:
• Which aperture gives you the greatest contrast and sharpness, and when to use it
• Which apertures guarantee the background remains an out-of-focus tone
• Which one aperture—when combined with the right lens—creates an area of sharpness from three feet to infinity
• How to creatively use shutter speed to either freeze an action or imply motion
• Where to take a meter reading when shooting a sunset, snow, or a city at dusk
With new information on white balance, flash, HDR, and more, this updated classic will inspire you to stop guessing and take control of your settings for better photos anytime, anywhere, and with any camera.
The first book in the Understanding Photography series, Understanding Exposure, was a runaway best-seller, with more than 250,000 copies sold. Now author Bryan Peterson brings his signature style to another important photography topic: shutter speed. With clear, jargon-free explanations of terms and techniques, plus compelling “before-and-after” photos that pair a mediocre image (created using the wrong shutter speed) with a great image (created using the right shutter speed), this is the definitive practical guide to mastering an often-confusing subject. Topics include freezing and implying motion, panning, zooming, exposure, Bogen Super Clamps, and rendering motion effects with Photoshop, all with helpful guidance for both digital and film formats. Great for beginners and serious amateurs, Understanding Shutter Speed is the definitive handy guide to mastering shutter speed for superb results.
Patterns: Art of the Natural World (Damiani) documents photographer Jon McCormack's meditation on the
geometric patterns that define our planet's most breathtaking landscapes and ecosystems. Through McCormack's
documentation, the Earth reveals itself as both architect and storyteller. Across continents and scales, from
microscopic mineral blooms to vast aerial geometries, the images trace a living grammar of pattern, rhythm, and
resonance that connects the intimate to the immense.
KAOS by Albert Watson is far more than a retrospective monograph spanning more than fifty years of photography. To me, it immediately felt like an object of art—something that insists on being present. With its imposing XL format and nearly eleven pounds, it’s not a book you casually leave on the side of a sofa or slip into a shelf. You place it somewhere with intention. On a table, in full view. Not just as decoration, but as something that invites attention, something you return to
Venezuelan Youth by Silvana Trevale is a powerful photography project exploring identity, resilience, and coming of age in contemporary Venezuela. Blending documentary and portraiture, the series offers an intimate and poetic perspective on youth navigating life amid social and economic challenges. Published by Guest Editions, this compelling body of work redefines visual narratives around Venezuela through sensitivity, depth, and hope.
Still Life: A Photographer’s Journey Through Grief and Gardening by Jane Fulton Alt presents forty-five photographs of a native garden and the flowers and plants that inhabit it. Following the unexpected death of her husband, Howard, Alt assumed responsibility for the nascent ecosystem he had planted in response to his growing concern over climate change. What began as daily stewardship gradually became a source of creative focus and sustenance amid mourning.
Seasons of Time is an intimate photographic exploration of transformation, identity, and the passage of time. Through deeply personal imagery, photographer Nathalie Rubens presents a visual dialogue between two interconnected yet profoundly different stages of life: the emergence into young adulthood and the transition into post-menopausal womanhood. The project brings together portraits of Rubens and her daughter Ruby, creating a powerful meditation on aging, family bonds, and the cyclical nature of human experience.
“It’s unclear who first said, ‘The best camera in the world is the one in your hand,’ or words to that effect, but most of the photographs in this book are the result of having one, or sometimes two with me while on brief holidays or visiting people around Britain.” – Berris Conolly
Released today by Reporters Without Borders, Malick Sidibé, 100 Photos for Press Freedom celebrates the work of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.
Through a selection of iconic images, the album revisits the vibrant world of Malick Sidibé, whose photographs captured the spirit of a generation coming of age in post-independence Mali.
In the winter of 2021, Luke Oppenheimer arrived in the Tien Shan mountains of central Kyrgyzstan with a straightforward assignment: document the wolves that prey on livestock in the remote shepherding village of Ottuk. Each year, wolves descend from the high ridges to kill dozens of horses and countless sheep. For families whose wealth is measured in hooves and wool, these losses are catastrophic. The men ride into the mountains during the harshest winter months to track and hunt the predators, navigating blizzards and subzero nights in defense of their herds.
The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway is a groundbreaking photographic and historical project by Charleston-based photographer Virginia McGee Richards, published by MIT Press in April 2026. The work uncovers a little-known chapter of American history, revealing a 300-mile network of colonial-era canals—called “cuts”—dug by enslaved people between the 17th and 18th centuries along the Atlantic coastline from Charleston, South Carolina to St. Augustine, Florida.
