Customer Reviews:
 Celebrating Landscape Photography December 27, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I couldn't wait for this book, and I am please that this exciting event has had a book printed in its honour. Charlie Waite, one of the UK's most celebrated and respected landscape photographers is this events brainchild and the book is published by AA Publishing.
The book opens to an introduction, covering the competitions categories, the sponsors and special prizes. There is then a foreword by Charlie, giving his thoughts about the subject of landscape photography, environmental issues, the judging and expressing his love of the land.
The book is very well put together physically, the pages are of very high quality, and the images are printed to a very high resolution, meaning the viewer receives their full impact and details. Each image has a page dedicated to it, some bleed onto two pages. Where this happens, I find that the image becomes slightly disjointed and the viewers eyes are unable to rest on the image as a whole, however, it is not too much of an issue. Each image is credited to the photographer, with a title, followed by a small written piece about the location and the reasons behind the photographers justification to taking the image. Unfortunately there are no technical details at all covering camera, exposure, film, filters and post production etc. I don't think it would of been too much of an issue to include such information, after all, most people who will purchase this book will be photographers. Again, the photographers themselves have their website details printed at the back of the book giving the reader a chance to visit and view further works.
To sum up, a very good quality book, in both materials and presentation, lacking a little with information, however this is not detrimental over all, and the images are of a good size giving the viewer satisfaction. Well done Charlie, well done the AA.
Great book, with hopefully more to follow! December 6, 2007
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
The book starts with a page of information about the competition and it's categories. The descriptions of the categories are quite succinct and in a way I would have liked to have known more as to what the judges were looking for in each of the categories. There is then a couple of pages about the judges.
The photographs in the book are divided up according to the categories of the competition (classic view, living the view, your view, and phone view) and further subdivided by adult and youth. The categories of the competition do seem a little unusual and I did wonder why an image might have been submitted to 'my view' rather than 'classic view'. I enjoyed the 'living view' category as it had some beautiful images, with people as their subject, that were a welcome departure from those in the 'classic view' category. There weren't many images in the 'phone view' category!
It is a credit to the organisers of the competition that, in this first year, the standard of the images was so high. Almost every image is stunning. The reproduction quality is very high (although my copy has been misprinted on a few pages). The paper of the pages has a good feel to it and the book sits open nicely on a table when reading. This last point is important as quite a few of the images spanned two pages. I don't normally like this as it makes the image harder to view. I appreciate that the images can reproduced larger like this, but I'd still rather view an image on a single page. Reproducing the image as large as possible seems to be high on the agenda as usually the images are printed edge to edge. Again, I'd prefer a little white space around the image. Otherwise the layout is good. There is never more than one image per page (except at the end in the 'phone view' section), and each image has the photographers name, the location and a photographers comment on the image. The only other thing I found myself wanting to know was what equipment was used to produce the photograph.
Lastly there are a couple of pages with the photographer's websites listed. This is a great idea as many of the photographer's websites are setup for print purchase.
Cracking shots October 10, 2007
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book shows some of the best landscape images but I do find myself wanting more information about how the photographer made them. Some simple exposure information would have been nice and wouldn't have taken up much more space.
Apart from that though it's a great coffee table book.
 Excellent October 2, 2007
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
An excellent book with some top class images. An inspiration to anyone with a camera and a passion for British Landscapes.
Graeme Pollock
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