Recently Craft&Vision published a free e-book titled “11 Ways to Improve Your Photography”. For those of you who are not familiar with Craft&Vision project it was started by David duChemin, pretty well known photographer. In this project he publishes books about photography, some of which he writes by himself, and some written by other photographers. These books are sold in PDF format usually for $5 USD, and you get a discount when you buy a bundle. I have bought about twenty books and read them. Some I liked more and some I liked less, and maybe in the future I’ll write a few of my own reviews on these books.

The special thing about this book though is that you can download it for free and get a taste of the “Craft&Vision type of book”. The main point that David makes in most of his write-ups on his blog and his books is that photographer’s gear is much less important than his vision and in some of his books he suggests ways as to how you can improve your photographic vision. This book was not an exception and you won’t find there anything about photographic gear, except printers in the chapter on “the power of print”.

“11 Ways to Improve Your photography” has 11 chapters (obviously 🙂 ) written by various photographers, each chapter suggesting a different way you can improve your images. If you want just to quickly to see the contents of the book before you download it, here’s the chapters:

1.Make your images more dynamic 2.Tame your digital exposures 3.The power of the print 4.Learn to direct the eye 5.Understand the stages 6.Create projects and collaborate 7.Refine your composition 8.The power of the moment 9.Forget lens stereotypes 10.Slow down and learn to see 11.Make stronger portraits

In my opinion this book is not special in its suggestions, and if you have been into photography for a while you probably heard most of this advice, but sometimes it is good to refresh your memory. There were two chapters that I liked the most – one is “Understand the stages” by Alexandre Buisse, in which he describes his understanding of the different stages that a photographer goes through from the moment he/she picked up the camera. A very interesting read.

The second chapter that I liked is “The power of the moment” by Eli Reinholdtsen, in which she shares her experience in street photography illustrating the text with her wonderful photographs.

I would also like to mention another chapter, “Make stronger portraits” by David duChemin, not because I liked it, but exactly the opposite. While the advices that David gives in this chapter are ok (nothing special though), the portraits that David chose to illustrate his points are not. In my opinion they are not “strong” as David presents them to be. They are just pictures of people. Some of them are pictures of unusual people, but merely this fact doesn’t make for a  strong portrait.

You can download the book by clicking on the image above (which will take you to the Craft&Vision website). I would really like to hear your honest opinions about this book.