150 Projects to Strengthen Your Photography Skills: Essential Techniques, Exercises, and Projects for Aspiring Photographers (Aspire)

Titles in Barron s Aspire Series offer students of the arts self-teaching tutorials in the form of progressively more challenging projects for them to complete. Carefully structured lessons encourage students to develop their own styles and aspire toward professional careers. In this book, author John Easterby describes photography as the art of storytelling through visual images. Focusing primarily on digital photography, he discusses cameras of different types and sizes and the uses of supporting photographic tools, such as tripods, interchangeable lenses, and lights. He advises on studying the work of professional photographers in galleries, books, and magazines as an important first step in understanding how to look at photos. Tutorial projects include remaking a well-known photo by a famous photographer, shooting a natural light portrait, using backlighting, shooting scenes at night, expressing movement in photos, freezing action, keeping a photographic diary, photographing sports events and crowd scenes, using a series of pictures to tell a photo story, and many others. Readers learn how to set up a desktop studio, edit images, and build their portfolio. The enlightening text is supplemented with more than 400 instructive illustrations.