I am still new to photography, so I naturally searched for resources that would provide the basics I needed to use my digital camera independently. The first resource I found was the Photo Class website. That website helped me understand and apply fundamental photography concepts like the Exposure Triangle and image processing.

After working through the Photo Class website, I bought and read Henry Carroll's Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs. I will review the book in this post.

While Photo Class is skewed towards Exposure, Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs strikes a balance between Composition, Exposure, Light and Inspiration, the cornerstones of photography. Its treatment of these topics is elementary, but it does enough to leave the reader with an impression of how much should go into making a great photograph, and that the journey to mastery would be personal.

Its treatment of composition follows the popular 10 rules of composition. It doesn't provide insight you wouldn't find anywhere else. The book was particularly illuminating for me in how it presented Light: Soft vs Hard, the distinctions and interpretations each gives a photograph.

The last two chapters of the book, Seeing and Feeling, are topics I hadn't encountered in my fledgling hobby. As expected, these chapters are about the artistic and creative process of how master photographers see and feel. They were a lot more personal than the previous chapters.

Overall, Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs provided the most balanced introductory treatment of photography that I could find anywhere on the internet.