Creative nature photography

Lake

Pond

Birch and fir

Street

Hazel

Path

Today I managed to go out for a walk, but it was already getting dark at that time. I had to use ISO 500, and even then motion blur spoiled a lot of photographs.

After writing about Tom Ang's book Digital Photography Step by Step I felt that I may be complaining too much. Aren't there any good books on photography?

Well, there are. As an example, have a look at Bill Coster's book Creative nature photography (New Holland, 2011; ISBN 978-1-84773-784-7).

This is not a book for gear-lovers, although there is a section on selecting gear right in the beginning. (Summary: select either Canon or Nikon, go full frame and get the best lenses.)

The book consists of chapters describing different environments, and each chapter includs both landscape photographs and photographs of flora and fauna. Coster is a skilled photographer, and best of all, he usually doesn't overdo saturation and other such tweaking. (Although I suspect this of a couple of photographs.)

Coster is not avoiding post-processing. He demonstrates cloning of background, tweaking the white balance to get maximum effect, and removal of distracting elements from a photograph. In this Coster is approaching art photography, but of course his main point is that he lives by his photography, so he needs to get images that people will buy.

Coster seems to travel the world in search of photographs, together his wife, who seems to be of great help - "two pairs of eyes are better than one" - for example helping as a lookout when Coster put up his tripod in the middle of a road.

I was happy to see that some photographs were taken in Finland. Birds and bears seem to be popular reasons to come here.

In summary, this was a good book, demonstrating various environments and how to get creative with nature photography. A worthwhile addition to the genre.