BEHIND THE SHUTTER

Press, 21 October 1978, Page 11

BEHIND THE SHUTTER

Know Your Camera. By John Johns. A. H. and A. W. Reed, 103 pp. $6.50.

(Reviewed by Roy Sinclair)

“Know Your Camera,” by John Johns, is the first practical book about photography to be published in New Zealand. The author is the official photographer for the New Zealand Forest Service and he is well known for his fine photography. His love for the outdoor life is evident in many of the photographs used in this book. Mr Johns points out that even when using the most modern equipment, there is more to photography that just pointing the camera and releasing the shutter. He writes clearlv about many subjects including choosing a camera, types of film, picture composition, and artifical light. The book is well illustrated and many of the picutres are typical of the type of work attempted by ambitious amateur photographers. More advanced workers will be interested in a few of the author's photographs

which are truly outstanding. Most of these are of animals and other small creatures.

What will worry some photographers is that the author took most of these photographs with a halfframe camera, and has achieved picture quality one would expect to see from a much larger negative. Mr Johns says that a print should be so good in tonal values that it shows a third dimension.

The book contains only seven colour photograph and one of these, credited to the Olympus Optical Company, is an intrusion into what is mainly a New Zealand theme. It is a little unfortunate that, except for the striking front cover, the colour photographs do not have quite the same impact as the black and white. In the appendices the author gives a useful guide to building up equipment and some hints on processing black and while film. All the photographs in the book have captions explaining how they were produced. John Johns gives inspiration along with his good advice.