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.

Ouch, unthinking grammar mistakes like that are the most embarrassing type, so I fixed it so no one will ever know I wrote it.
I have a tendency toward those kinds of mistakes when adding something at the very end of a project. After I’d submitted the final copy for my first book and was exhausted, the publisher asked for one small addition, so I added a sentence. Two months later when the book was finally in print, I handed a copy to my brother and within five minutes of having it in his hands, he found an its/it’s mistake. I was mortified. It was in that last sentence inserted. —Jeffrey

I guess it’s pretty hard for most people to concentrate on getting the message across, whilst *at the same time* concentrating on avoiding the pitfalls of the English language. That doesn’t excuse the sort of nonsense you’ve quoted above, which is in a different class; the editors must take a good deal of blame, too. I’m just glad I’ve not laid out hard-earned cash to buy the books you mention! The Briot one could take prizes, so I hate to imagine what the Peterson one is like.

Peter

The kind of “good” I mean in “good writing” is more than just grammar and spelling (that’s “good proofreading” and important, but not so much as good writing, but both are very important to a good book). Good writing is knowing how to break down and present, putting yourself in your reader’s shoes, then working from the big picture down to the individual sentences. When working on my book, sometimes the prose just flows, but more often I have to hack at it over and over and over. Often, I’m left with a lingering feeling of “something’s not quite right,” and if so, I leave it and come back to fix it later, because if the tiny voice in my own head notices a problem, it’ll be screaming out to the reader who is not as blindly enamored with my writing as I am. —Jeffrey

Mike.

Of course egos are a part of it… no one likes to be told that their writing isn’t good any more than someone proud of a photograph likes being told that it’s not great. Writing a book is not usually very rewarding from a financial point of view, so there’s little financial incentive for a good photographer to take time away from their day job to write, and little financial incentive for a publisher to spend the money on a good writer to pair up with the photographer. That’s my haven’t-really-thought-about-it-much guess. —Jeffrey