Arts & Music Books > Art & Design Arts & Music Books

Advantages: Superb nugget sized tips, fits the camera bag nicely
Disadvantages: None

...Kelby, author of many of the better photography boooks out there has now come up with the antidote. The Digital Photography Book is a mere 200 odd pages and is just slightly bigger than A5 in size yet contains a whole lot of useful information that will almost certainly improve anyone's photography. I was initially wondering quite what Scott Kelby had been smoking as the first few pages were somewhat surreal. Even the author noted they included ...
...shaky start the book morphed in to something far better. Each page is a self-contained tip or concept, often with an inspiring image for illustration. The text is rarely more than a paragraph or two yet manages to get important and useful stuff covered concisely and clearly. Taking for instance, a chapter on tips for getting sharp pictures. You get a page for tripods, ballheads, cable releases, self-timers, mirror lockup (for really sharp pictures), ... Read review

Advantages: In depth analysis of different interpretations of sight
Disadvantages: I could find no faults with this masterpiece of literature

I found in my reading of John Bergers "Ways of Seeing", that the way in which Berger discusses the way we view art both aesthetically and culturally was explored in such great depth. "Ways of Seeing" offers a view of our culture and emphasizes in particular the way that, nowadays, culture reproduces and makes use of images of the past. Placed in museums, on bulletin boards, on T-shirts and in advertisements, the images tell a story of us, seen from ...
...there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past". He describes the art museum as an instrument of the state, being its function to manipulate our view over the past. By means of the propaganda we are experiencing nowadays, museums have acquired besides the cultural, educational and aesthetic function, political and social functions. This is a Marxist idea ... Read review

Advantages: Have a look for five minutes or three hours...
Disadvantages: If anything it is the size..

...later he had it returned. The thoughts and concepts of being so simple with design really opens your mind to thinking differently about everyday objects, this collection of Alan Flectcher's work is just a retrospective of all his excellant ideas, i would be satisfied with a book just on his average ideas, this man seems to be able to think outside his mind and think about other people's too. The layout of this book, the order, the colours within ... Read review

Advantages: Quick and simple, not too much information - no overload
Disadvantages: only a bit of information on an artist and the picture is too big

...Artist, this is one of the many art books I have in my collection. Half of these books are the kind of book you skim through looking for a well known picture or an extract of information which is a sentence and this book is one of those. It is a collection of artists from every art background - from modernism to renaissance to aboriginal art. They are of course sorted by surname and consist of only one page per artist so you can imagine how much ...
...picture. If you ignore the simple nature of the book, it is in itself a very handy little companion which sits in your collection. When looking up a certain artist, you can therefore then have that little amount of information, the one main picture of that artist to your knowledge so that when you look further into you artist on the internet you are not going to be looking at another artist with the same name, which happens more than you think. ... Read review

Advantages: vital factors covered
Disadvantages: not to much detail

...: 1. Notes on the Fretboard (very important factor to learn) 2. The major scale 3. Two movable chord Shapes 4. The 1st 3rd and 5th chord families 5. The DAF Roadmap 6. Chord Fragments/families 7.The circle of Fifths 8. Variations on two movable chord shapes 9. movable major scales 10. Movable blues scales 11. sliding pentatonic scales 12. A Movable double note lick Over all the book provides strong key information into building your knowledge ...
...much detail in each section but provides good step by step instructions to give the basic understanding of the theories. I would recommend this to players who want to get a quick grasp of alot of different basic skills without having to read hundreds and hundreds of pages. In fact the whole book only has 64 and it covers all of the above. All in all a good little book for beginners especially and intermediate players wouldn't be sorry for reading ... Read review