Bill Lemon has just published his newest book, “Professional Digital Techniques for Nude and Glamour Photography” (Amherst Media, Inc., $34.95).
If you don’t know Bill Lemon, let me start by telling out that he has been taking pictures and writing about them for more than 40 years. He is the author of over 20 books on photography, most of which are currently in print.
Bill isn’t just a skilled photographer with a long record of taking a publishing great pictures. He’s a real Old School guy who has enthusiastically made the transition to the digital age. If you learned your skills all those years ago on film cameras and you aren’t getting as much fun or quality out of your digital work, take a look at this book.
The Bill Lemon way is not to start out with long chapters on “the basics.” He organizes his books around the settings of his pictures and the types of his shots. For each shot, he covers selection of the location and theme, lighting. posing, equipment, settings and digital effects. You don’t have to start with a dull string of chapters about “Getting Started,” “Choosing Your Subject” or “Packing for Location Shoots.” Bill just plunges right in.
Each shot introduces some new concept or application, but the most important subjects – lighting, composition and camera settings – are emphasized over and over again, until, painlessly, you suddenly begin to see the shots as Bill sees them. (About a quarter of the pictures in the book are not quite satisfying to Bill; he’s constantly explaining how he could do the shot better over again.)
Lemon is adept at getting models to bring their own creative ideas to the shoot and he explains how to make posing a collaborative process between the photographer and the model.
Old Bill Lemon fans will be interested in this book because he revisits some of the locations and shots from his earlier books and re-does them as digital photos enhanced by the latest technology.