| The Photograph: Composition and Color Design |  | Author: Harald Mante
Publisher: Rocky Nook
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
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Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 383,602
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 280
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.6
Dimensions (in): 11.3 x 8.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 1933952261
Dewey Decimal Number: 770.11
EAN: 9781933952260
ASIN: 1933952261
Publication Date: March 15, 2008
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Product Description
Harald Mante, one of the most distinguished teachers of the photographic arts in Germany and an internationally recognized master of photography, brings his teaching to us in the English language for the first time in more than 30 years. In The Photograph Mante explains the elements that are essential to achieving the highest level of visual design in photographs. This book is geared toward the serious intermediate and advanced photographer who strives to create outstanding images. While a deep understanding of photographic techniques is required in order to master photography, technical knowledge alone is not sufficient to create outstanding images. Beyond the technical aspects, the crucial elements that determine the quality and strength of a photograph are the content of the image and its organization within the image frame. This is where the "art" of photography comes into play. Truly creative photography is based upon knowledge and mastery of design and of how the viewer perceives images. The creative photographer can exploit this knowledge and push image-making in new directions. Mante explores the principles of line, shape, point, color, contrast, composition, and design in significantly greater depth and at a higher level than most any book available to date. He also covers a number of techniques to enhance expressiveness in a photograph to support the photographer's intentions. These in-depth lessons are beautifully illustrated with more than 600 images from Mante's own portfolio, plus over 160 diagrams. The Photograph is a unique book that is sure to become an invaluable reference for anyone involved in photography-from the hobbyist to the professional; for both the digital and analog photographer; and for those practicing, studying, criticizing, or administering in the visual arts.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
 The Best and Most Timeless Such Book May 3, 2010
K. Tanaka (Midwest USA)
Search for books on "photographic composition" and you'll get an enormous list of mostly middling pap titles aimed mainly for snap shooting your family and vacation. Whittle away the apparently requisite, but entirely superfluous and often freshness-dated, material on cameras, printers, and computers and your left with little more that a pretty thin pamphlet of weak, populist recommendations.
That's where Harold Mante's book is different. Its real strength is that it's not really a book on photography, per se. Rather, it's a timeless treatise on 2-dimensional composition that even a painter could find useful. Mante treats the subject in an elemental manner, exhibiting how image elements such as points, lines, patterns, strong forms, strong colors, proportions, figure ground, etc. can be brought together to create specific effects. This is a very powerful approach that can greatly reward the devoted reader, almost like taking a semester of two of good collegiate art practice courses.
But if you're looking for a more casual book on shooting puppies, babies, and sailboats skip this book and grab a Kodak or National Geographic guide. This book will probably too powerful for most casual readers.
 Useful Book Despite its Great Flaws December 24, 2009
M. Ent (New Jersey, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Before I purchased the book, I read many praises and criticisms written here. In many respects the reviewers are right; however, with many of their points I do not agree or these points bother me the least. I do not want to repeat what has been said by other reviewers - I am here to give my impression of the book.
Unfortunately, the star-system of grading the book is too narrow and produces a wrong impression. My overall grade of 3 stars does not exactly represent the overall value of the book to me. Below, I break down my grade by what I consider important to me.
5 stars - for the visual quality (quality of hard cover, paper, photographs, diagrams, visual readability of text, visual impression).
5 stars - for the topic collection and organization (logical progression of topics of chapters and subchapters). It seems that the book offers a full bag of compositional tricks: Point, Line, Shape, Contrasts, Colors, etc.
5 stars - for the uniqueness (this book is probably unique in what it is intended to be; other books on photographic composition cannot be considered as substitutes but rather as complementaries and/or supplementaries to this one.
1 star - for the translation. In general, there are two types of translations - literal and interpretive. In literal translations, each word is translated but the meaning is really lost. In interpretive translations, the meaning and the intent of the author is conveyed to readers. The translation of this book is probably literal and is probably done by a person who lacks an "internalized" understanding of either English or the subject matter of the book. It really feels as if the book was translated by a cheap computer program.
Let me cite one of excruciatingly many examples: page 48, "Rotating one's head to the left or right easily doubles the extent of the visual field..." At least to me, the word "rotation" implies making at least one revolution of 360 degrees. So the translation feels comical to me. It is hard to believe that words "turning" or "panning" were not familiar to the translator; hence I assume that the author used the word "rotate" in German - and in German, it has a proper connotation. I will not elaborate on the meaning of the phrase "rotating one's head" - you decide for yourselves.
Because of the literal translation, you will re-read some sentences (and there are great many of those) more than once in order to understand what exactly the author had meant. After a while even when you think you have got it, you remain unsure still.
3 stars - for the purpose. What is the purpose for this book? Is this book a textbook for a college or grad school course? Is this a manual for a practitioner? Is this a handbook covering many things and rarely in-depth? This book has properties of all (except literary works).
As textbook it has some background material and definition that seem to clarify certain compositional concepts. As a manual, the book tries to give the reader a "bag" of tools to be used in composing a photograph. As handbook it describes all of these tools while trying to condense the explanation of some terms used.
My issue with this approach is that it creates a book, which is "neither here nor there", which wants to appeal to all sorts of readers by making a great deal of compromises. As a textbook, it lacks definitions and explanations. It makes statements that are impossible to verify from the material presented. For example, page 91: "Generally, contrast of shapes refers to the visual play of different shapes in the image." If you try to find out whether any two shapes in any sorts of "play" are contrasty - good luck(!): you will not be able to find anything anywhere in the book that clearly substantiates or contradicts the sentence. Neither will you find out the definitions or even the description of the concepts of "stress" or "tension", and in what sense there is "stress", and in what sense there is "tension" in a photograph or among the compositional elements, and what these terms really mean when the author uses them.
As a manual, this book is by far too complex because the manual usually implies a checklist and an how-to instructions. You will not find such lists and instructions. Besides, I am not even sure if one can produce such instructions unless you present and contrast the "good" and "proper" against the "bad" and "improper" usage of compositional tools and elements.
As a handbook, unfortunately, it lacks a single reference even though it makes statements about visual perception and good photographic practices. Many statements and the organization of the book remind me of the concepts which Rudolph Arnheim in detail and with great mastery presented in his seminal books "Art and Visual Composition. Psychology of the Creative Eye" and "Power of the Center. A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts." And yet, there is not even a single mention of these pioneering works, which to my belief have greatly contributed to the topics covered in the book.
1 star - for visual organization of written material. The author does not seem to believe in using paragraph breaks. Each subchapter is one big paragraph even though more often then not the author presents a bunch of different ideas there. This lack of structure makes the comprehension of the meaning much more difficult on top of the poor translation.
1 star - for captions of the photographs. There are many photographs in the book and all of them have captions. However, the captions have nothing to do with the subject matter of the subchapter referring to them. You really need to read the text of the subchapter to understand the reasons why the photographs were placed there - you cannot deduce the reasons from the captions. In other words, the captions are totally useless.
1 star - for sufficiency of information. If this book had been the only book ever written on the subject of photo composition, it would be a terrible book. When you read it you would constantly ask yourself a question "so what?" What is the goal of what the author tries to convey? To what purpose does the author tell you that a line, for example, is really a trajectory of a point moving in a certain direction? To what purpose does he tell you that forces acting in opposing direction on the point moving along a straight-line trajectory produces a wavy line? How does the notion that a line is an continuous and infinite collection of points help in understanding and applying the compositional techniques and elements? I could not find answers to these and many other questions in the book. If you want to find answers to the statements made in this book, you would have to be prepared to do a lot of bibliographic research on your own.
The author uses many terms which one finds in a physics textbook. Forces, stresses, tension, etc. Does he really think that such terms are universally understood or intuitively felt? Without Arnheim, this book is gibberish of a good photographer who has a problem explaining himself.
So what is my overall recommendation? You may think that my attitude toward this book is quite antagonistic. That, however, is not so. Despite all the flaws of the book, I still recommend it.
You may ask, how come? Well, the first reason is that the book contains information that other books on photographic composition either skip or portray rudimentarily (e.g., among the books and articles that I have read, the fist section of the book titled "The Point" contains the most comprehensive exposition of design considerations when photographing discrete subjects). The second reason is that this book is a good supplement to the works of Arnheim, the supplement that deals explicitly with photographs. Once you have read the two books I mentioned above, this book begin to make much greater sense. The third, there have been very few books on photographic composition. I have four such books (this one, and the books by Michel Freeman, Axel Brück, and Freeman Patterson), and I can tell you that none of them is sufficient to be good on its own. When you combine, though, the information in them and filter it through Arnheim's approach you really begin to appreciate the concepts of that Mr. Mante wanted to present.
On The Language of Photography, More Than Anything Else November 22, 2009
Bulent Celasun
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am a humble photography enthusiast, an advanced amateur, whatever those may mean... I read books on photography and lighting; I occasionally buy albums of leading photographers and I sometimes attend to local exhibitions. In short, I am more or less like the readers of reviews like this.
Trying to write a review on a book like "The Photograph: Composition and Color Design" is not an easy task. This is mostly due to the nature of the potential readers, the target audience. Perhaps, I should first handle that: This is NOT a book for those who like photography books that contain a "down to earth" narrative and lots of "practical" advice. Those who like psychological approaches and journeys to the human mind may, however, want to re-read the book in its entirety just after finishing it! As you guess, I am one of those! In fact, I have slowed down towards end of the book, trying to postpone its ending! For those that are in between, a careful reading of reviews might be helpful, indeed.
First, the physical characteristics (oh, men!):The book is in full color, it is nicely printed on good quality paper and contains hundreds of photographs. Some photographs are just about the size of a postage stamp but they still serve the purpose very well.
Secondly, this is a translation and I have not noticed any issue of significance due to it. The readers should know beforehand that this is a book about "the basics", "the roots" of all the photographical experience and at this level, your vocabulary is limited to perhaps a hundred words or so: Point, line, color, balance etc.. Just imagine trying to re-write Moby Dick with such a limited vocabulary! I say this because some may find the text difficult to understand at first reading. They should realize that it is neither the author's nor the translator's fault; the subject matter imposes this indirectly. Also, the book does really not deal with the shutter speed, the aperture (just a few words on those), the cameras, the sensors, the pixels, post-processing, printing etc. You already know all of them by heart, anyway. Don't you?
As you have read in the title of this review, the book is on "the language of photography"; its words, its sentences, its grammar... This, more than anything else, makes "The Photograph: Composition and Color Design" a "must read" for people like myself, who want to understand the basics of an activity before pursuing it any further... A few talented men and women are born with this knowledge and they can create great works without flipping thorough any book of this sort. For the majority, however; some knowledge -other than technical- is required to, at least, satisfy their curiosity and to help them reach a higher level in their endeavor.
The book may help you answer questions like below:
- Do the borders of a landscape format image carry the same meaning (independent of the subject matter)?
- When and how a partly shown item (like a ball) becomes part of a successful composition?
- When shooting a scene with yellow and blue parts, what kind of composition do you choose to make a better photo?
- Which viewing angle and lens may be better in shooting a place to give the impression of power and stability better?
If questions like the above sound interesting to you and you wonder both the answers and the reasons for those answers; you have come to the right place!
Uninterested? Perhaps you should consider buying another book.
Just to prevent you from becoming suspicious of me being an undercover agent of the publisher or of the author, I will also point out an annoying thing about the book (relieved?): The number of figures in each chapter is too high and one has to continually flip forward & backward to see the images referenced in the text. Since I am no expert in book design, I have no idea how would they arrange them better.
I have truly enjoyed reading this book and I wished it was larger. This just feels like a handbook of a much larger series of -yet to be written- textbooks on the language of photography. There is still too much to learn...
Recommended without reservation to like-minded readers!
Invaluable for advanced photographers who want to dig deeper October 25, 2009
Street Shooter
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is IMHO a master class in picture design. Like any master class it's definitely not for beginners. I think one needs to understand at least the basics of composition and design. This book IMO is an opposite and at the same time comlementary to Michael Freeman's "Photographer's Eye. Michael's book is written from a view point of a photography practitioner. The language is easy to follow, the reader gets to see a photograph as a whole. This book is more academic and its Bauhus lineage is clearly seen. The author goes deep into the components of a picture and what effect these components have on each other and on the overall picture. The components are presented in a logical progression: points, lines, shapes, colors etc. The language is somewhat heavy, but I do not believe it's a translator's fault. As a German reviewer indicated here the book is written in a style of a German university professor although a photographer as well.
Reading this book I began to understand why some Freeman's picture design components had a certain effect. I think one needs to go deep to understand that. And that's where this book complements Freeman's.
This book needs to be read slowly allowing time for the information to sink in. In fact I went out and practiced compositional decisions after reading each section. I now use it as a reference book and keep coming back to various subjects as I feel it's going to take a lot of time and practice to make my compositional decisions intuitive.
If one owns both Freeman's and this book I'd suggest start with Freeman's Photographer's Eye
Great resource for learning the artistic aspects of photography October 7, 2009
Robert Quan (DC, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ths is a wonderful book to advance one's understanding on the fundamentals of relationships of shapes, lines, and colors and how it comes together to form an image on a canvas. This should be a "must have" for all advance and professional photographers. The one drawback in this book is its organization of the images. One has to constantly flip back and forth to view the images referenced in the text.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
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