Explains the elements that top photographers look for to create great photographs.

Michael Freeman’s unrivalled compositional advice, first presented in the bestelling The Photographer's Eye, is explained in a new and deliberately visual manner in The Photographer's Eye: A Graphic Guide. Photography is a visual language in itself, and therefore lends perfectly to visual explanation. Drawing on his long professional experience as an editorial photographer, Michael Freeman shows exactly how images work by using a beguilingly simple technique. His unique style of illustration (which he does himself ) deconstructs photographs in a way that is clear, elegant and thoughtful. The information in this book can be absorbed in minutes, but last you a lifetime.

Learn to ask better, more helpful questions of your work so that you can create stronger and more powerful photographs.

Photographers often look at an image—one they’ve either already created or are in the process of making—and ask themselves a simple question: “Is this a good photograph?” It’s an understandable question, but it’s really not very helpful. How are you supposed to answer that? What does “good” even mean? Is it the same for everyone?

What if you were equipped to ask better, more constructive questions of your work so that you could think more intentionally and creatively, and in doing so, bring more specific action and vision to the act of creating photographs? What if asking stronger questions allowed you to establish a more effective approach to your image-making? In The Heart of the Photograph: 100 Questions for Making Stronger, More Expressive Photographs, photographer and author David duChemin helps you learn to ask better questions of your work in order to craft more successful photographs—photographs that express and connect, photographs that are strong and, above all, photographs that are truly yours.

From the big-picture questions—What do I want this image to accomplish?—to the more detail-oriented questions that help you get there—What is the light doing? Where do the lines lead? What can I do about it?—David walks you through his thought process so that you can establish your own. Along the way, he discusses the building blocks from which compelling photographs are made, such as gesture, balance, scale, contrast, perspective, story, memory, symbolism, and much more. The Heart of the Photograph is not a theoretical book. It is a practical and useful book that equips you to think more intentionally as a photographer and empowers you to ask more helpful questions of you and your work, so that you can produce images that are not only better than “good,” but as powerful and authentic as you hope them to be.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Better Questions

PART ONE: A GOOD PHOTOGRAPH?
Is It Good?
The Audience's Good
The Photographer's Good

PART TWO: BETTER THAN GOOD
Better Subjects

PART THREE: BETTER EXPRESSION
Exploration and Expression
What Is the Light Doing?
What Does Colour Contribute?
What Role Do the Lines and Shapes Play?
What's Your Point of View?
What Is the Quality of the Moment?
Where Is the Story?
Where Is the Contrast?
What About Balance and Tension?
What Is the Energy?
How Can I Use Space and Scale?
Can I Go Deeper?
What About the Frame?
Do the Elements Repeat?
Harmony
Can I Exclude More?
Where Does the Eye Go?
How Does It Feel?
Where's the Mystery?
Remember When?
Can I Use Symbols?
Am I Being Too Literal?

PART FOUR: BETTER PHOTOGRAPHS
The Heart of the Photograph
Index

The source of any photograph is not the camera or even the scene viewed through the viewfinder-it is the mind of the photographer: this is where an image is created before it is committed to a memory card or film. In The Photographer's Mind, the follow-up to the international best-seller, The Photographer's Eye, photographer and author Michael Freeman unravels the mystery behind the creation of a photograph. The nature of photography demands that the viewer constantly be intrigued and surprised by new imagery and different interpretations, more so than in any other art form. The aim of this book is to answer what makes a photograph great, and to explore the ways that top photographers achieve this goal time and time again. As you delve deeper into this subject, The Photographer's Mind will provide you with invaluable knowledge on avoiding cliché, the cyclical nature of fashion, style and mannerism, light, and even how to handle the unexpected. Michael Freeman is the author of the global bestseller, The Photographer's Eye. Now published in sixteen languages, The Photographer's Eye continues to speak to photographers everywhere. Reaching 100,000 copies in print in the US alone, and 300,000+ worldwide, it shows how anyone can develop the ability to see and shoot great digital photographs.

As a photographer it’s possible to train your mind to see inspiration in any situation, and this book will show you how. By introducing you into her creative process, Brooke Shaden—one of the most recognized names in modern art photography—reveals techniques and exercises that you can undertake in order to be inspired by your environment, everyday, everywhere. In addition to the exercises, you’ll learn how to compose, plan and shoot colorful, atmospheric, fairy-tale artistic photography, so you can adapt Shaden’s techniques and apply them to your own photographic style. Indeed, all artistic photographers seek to achieve their own style, but it’s not always easy to see how to get there. This book provides the perfect balance of insight and instruction to help you find inspiration whenever you need it, and capitalize on it every time.

In The Photographer's Vision, international bestseller Michael Freeman examines the work of photography's greats, explaining how to view a photo and how to learn from looking at it. Photographers featured include some of the most distinguished names in photography's history: Nick Knight, Frederick Henry Evans, Frans Lanting, Tim Page, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin, Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman, Elliott Erwitt, Trent Parke, Jeff Wall, Paul Strand, Romano Cagnoni and many more, making this book visually stunning as well as intellectually rigorous.

Design is the single most important factor in creating a successful photograph. The ability to see the potential for a strong picture, then to organise the graphic elements into an effective, compelling composition has always been one of the critical skills in making photographs. Since its first publication in 2007, The Photographer's Eye has established itself as the essential work on this subject, and a key book for modern photographers, with hundreds of thousands of copies sold. It explores all the traditional approaches to composition and design and, crucially, also covers digital possibilities like stitching and HDR. In keeping with the book's purpose "to expand the possibilities of the medium without compromising the photographer's vision" this edition has been completely remastered to celebrate its tenth anniversary. All-new digital reproduction, not available when the book first came out, gives the author's photography a fresh new look, while retaining the know-how that has given a generation of photographers new purpose.