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Perception and Imaging, Third Edition: Photography--A Way of Seeing | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard D. Zakia
Publisher: Focal Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $21.00
You Save: $18.95 (47%)
New (33) Used (7) from $17.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 234959
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 7.3 x 1
ISBN: 0240809300
Dewey Decimal Number: 771
EAN: 9780240809304
ASIN: 0240809300
Publication Date: July 2, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
How do you experience a photograph? What do you want a viewer to feel when they look at your image?
Perception and Imaging explains how we see and what we don't see. Relevant psychological principles will help you predict your viewer's emotional reaction to your photographic images, giving you more power, control, and tools for communicating your desired message. Knowing how our minds work helps photographers, graphic designers, videographers, animators, and visual communicators both create and critique sophisticated works of visual art. Benefit from this insight in your work.
Topics covered in this book: gestalt grouping, memory and association, space, time, color, contours, illusion and ambiguity, morphics, personality, subliminals, critiquing photographs, and rhetoric.
Provocative color images demonstrate the power of visual perception
Photographs by Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Nathan Lyons, Lisette Model, Barbara Morgan, Man Ray, August Sander, Pete Turner, and Edward Weston
Paintings by Degas, Escher, Hockney, Holbein, Kandinsky, Magritte and Warhol
Hundreds of inspirational quotes from famous photographers, painters, and writers
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Zakia Photography Book April 5, 2008
New edition of a classic textbook by a well-known expert. Quite theoretical but very instructive. People take too many pictures unthinkingly, and should read on theory.
The Photographer's First Skill is Seeing; This Provides Your Foundation March 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book takes you--step by step with clear and often startling examples and with exercises to apply them--through the fundamentals of perception. That is the most basic of a photographer's necessary skills. Understand the concepts, practice seeing, do the exercises, understand your perceptions. Become a better photographer and, in the process, enrich your daily life as you see and understand your world in new ways. Highly recommended.
 Jumbled and inconsistent January 19, 2008
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
Encyclopedic in scope, but equally shallow and choppy.
This is a textbook. Illustrations are student grade, margin notes are random, and exercises are strained. May be useful if you never took a basic design class or thought much about perception. Book gives a survey, oriented toward defining terms and concepts, but it never takes them anywhere.
 Unfortunately, little more than a collection of specific but disconnected information December 18, 2007
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
I know that I will draw a great deal of critique for this review, but personally i did not find this book worth my time.
For how well it might be written, for how easy and understandable the examples might be, for how precisely documented it is, it does not have what I was looking for in it: a partly theoretical and partly practical toolbox to expand my creativity when I create an image.
The text is, as I said in the title, little more than a collection of well-catalogued, wide-ranging information regarding different fields of perception. Some of them are overly and uselessly technical, some are little more than tautologies, few are actually useful or stimulating. I could not find any reference, for instance, to "the rule of the thirds" (which might not be the ultimate principle of composition but is still an important starting point) but on the other hand there were more than a dozen paragraphs on colour notations and names, constantly moving between the obvious, the superfluous and the merely technical.
On a sidenote, I do not understand why American writers in general assume that their readers have the attention-span of a goldfish and try to fit everything they have to say on an argument in half a paragraph, only to start a completely new one immediately after. It doesn't help, it creates unacceptable over-simplifications.
Teaching is not made of putting on the table individual information, sweetened by a profusion of quotes and aphorisms. Teaching is a sequential activity, it involves a long propaedeutic phase, it entails the creation of foundations and builds upon them to get in the end to the real content. A book that teaches well cannot be accessed randomly at any page without missing any context. Useless to say, this one can.
Andrea B., Verona
Great Book Helps Us to "See the Shot" November 13, 2007
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
While it is true this book is somewhat erroneously subtitled WRT to the Photography bit -it is relevant not only to photographers but also painters, illustrators and others- there is a wealth of information presented in a detailed and well-illustrated manner. This book covers everything from color relationships and meaning, to "geometric" fundamentals such as symmetry and gestalt grouping, to the human physiology behind why some things appeal to our eye and others do not.
In short the book provides not only examples of what works in photographic composition (or a painting's composition), but explains *why* it works, without boring you to tears with a doctoral thesis in every chapter. Some books (such as Itten's color tome) do exactly this and it makes them almost painful works to finish, even though the information is valid. It provides just enough scientific context to give understanding, and then gets out of its own way by providing real-world illustrative examples (be they photos, drawings or illustration) to demonstrate the current concept.
And there *are* many references to things specific to photography such as a sub-section on color management systems and how color is controlled in the digital world. Is it the same as reading one of Bruce Fraser's works on color manegment? No, but it gives you enough to put it in context and understand why it's important. So it is with all the other chapters in the book. Highly recommended if you are an art student or photography student, or even a professional looking to hone your skills.
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