One of the best bits of enablement I've received recently was a slim book by Neil van Niekerk, Direction & Quality of Light: Your Key to Better Portrait Photography Anywhere.
What makes this book unique and so much more useful than hundreds of gear-oriented books is that it starts from the position of "what do I do to get better portraits" and works backward to explore how light quality (ie hard/soft) and posing (eg face into sun, or away from sun) affect the outcome and what you do to optimize your given situation. Neil covers purely ambient light, ambient with flash fill, flash with ambient fill and all flash. He keeps it simple and rarely uses more than a single flash in his examples. He introduces a trivial trick for bounce flash that results in softbox quality light and requires only some black plastic foam and a couple of elastic bands. Best of all he pairs nearly all the shots with alternate takes that demonstrate the intermediate steps to getting the best shot. He also includes pull-back shots that show the setup. The most bang for your twenty buck bill you'll get all year, imho. Here's my review of it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.ca/review/R3F430QNHE12TW -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
