Check mine out at http://tourkick.com/2011/true-video-for-real-estate-for-dummies/

I am under no illusions about the quality, or rather lack of, of my own writing. I am a photographer.

Reading your post I would guess that you are a photographer as well. The phrase ‘glass houses’ was whirling around in my brain while I was reading this.

Quick examples:

“His whole section on “types of light” just smacks of this kind of wishy-washiness throughout. I hold hope for the rest of the book because personally, I’m reading it for its artistic side, so I can forgive its technical failings. I just wish I didn’t have to.”

Books don’t have sides people do and personally is redundant.

“(Pedantically, I shouldn’t say that light is a color, because electromagnetic energy doesn’t become a color until sensed by something such as our eyes, but that’s perhaps too pedantic to be useful here.)”

Umm…..

At the very least this post is need of a good hard edit.

I would never normally worry about the quality of writing on the web but you are guilty of that which you accuse others and that does warrant a comment.

To conclude, a thought about this phrase:

“…and it’s surprisingly difficult for a bad writers to recognize their own work as such..”

Most of us bad writers know that we suck – we have friends that are kind enough to tell us..

I don’t need to be a good writer in order to recognize and point out that someone else book is full of atrociously bad writing. But I am a good writer, and even this blog post (one of 1,500 I’ve written) is far superior to the book under discussion. —Jeffrey

The Briot book does have excellent concepts, but the book is essentially a collection of the Luminous Landscapes. Reading it late at night is indeed a sophomoric experience. Often essays need quite a bit of work to get them to work as a book and I’m not sure that happened there. Anyhow. If I was doing more stuff that required regular expressions, your book would be the first port of call.

Perhaps your point about collaboration is made by this blog with its many contributed comments though; it’s very interesting; a great read.;)

The kind of “bad writing” I talk about in this post has nothing to do with any particular language’s grammar or spelling, but about how to present ideas clearly. A good writer may have issues being 100% correct in a language, but a bad writer is bad in any language. Alain’s bad writing has nothing to do with English. —Jeffrey

One of the most interesting of Edward Weston’s green pepper pictures involved wrapping the pepper in “opaque” black cloth, putting the camera lens through a hole in the cloth, sealing the gaps around the hole, and exposing for several days. After enough time, he got a picture whose most interesting aspect is the beautiful diffusion, despite a very sharp lens, caused by the slowly changing shape of the pepper!

A note for readers not recognizing Fil’s name: he’s the principal author of the most-excellent Light — Science and Magic, the de facto textbook on photographic lighting. You can see some of the pepper pictures he mentions at Yahoo! Image Search —Jeffrey

I realise that putting it like that oversimplifies the relationship between writing and thinking because they tend, in practice, to stand or fall together. Doing either of them well requires attention, doing either of them badly manifests inattention, and people who are capable or incapable of attention tend to be globally so. But there are exceptions which prove that rule – books which are hard going but worth the effort. Responsible publishers hire skilled editors to reduce that effort.

Coming back to Mr Briot, there are people who think better than they write, and people who write better than they think. On the evidence of the passages quoted, I would put Mr Briot in the last group, at least when he is writing about history and culture rather than landscape photography. There are also people who can think, and write, better about some things than others. Mr Briot may also be in this group. I have read an essay by him on the Luminous Landscape web site that is interesting and not badly written.

Btw, many thanks for the zenfolio lightroom plugin (what brought me to your site in the first place).

Alan Briot is an excellent photographer, his pictures and technique outstanding, but the best outcome I’ve had so far from his book is that I’m falling asleep within a minute. As a sleeping pill I can give his book my full credit. But, as I understand, Alan Briot does not have English as his native language, and that often makes it much more challenging to explore the diversity of a language during writing. So, it might not be truly fair to pick monsieur Briot as a scapegoat here. He should at least get some credit for trying to get his message out, and I will read his book through – one minute at the time. I’m actually getting more upset when reading lousy texts by native English writers.

However, to copy Bill Bryson’s laidback style when writing a book on a photographic theme could be a bit challenging, I believe. I wouldn’t expect to burst out into hilarious laughter when studying color management or sharpening. I guess such matters fall almost into the same category as regular expressions regarding how funny they can be… . Teaching how to practice photographical techniques in the field, however, could have some potential for a good laugh.

I’m currently waiting for Scott Kelby’s book on Lightroom (ordered through Yawnazon April 8th, and still not shipped). As I understand from his blog, there have been some critiques regarding his weird sense of humor, apparently only present in the first chapters (according to Kelby himself). I just can’t wait to see what this fuzz is all about. Some people, apparently, are just too serious about life’s somewhat less important matters.

It’s a good point…. communication wasn’t nearly as important when we were all primordial ooze. (Rolls eyes…) —Jeffrey

No spelling errors, though.