Elements of Colour Photography: The Making of Eighty Images : a Photo Anthology

George Todd, a teacher of and writer on photography, selects 80 of his own colour images and describes the story behind each of them in this book. The subjects vary from the purely abstract to still life, architectural and landscape photographs, and the locations range from Italy and Greece to the Southern United States. In each case the author describes how the image was created, from the original conception of the picture, through the choice of viewpoint and composition to the final selection of the chosen exposure for printing. What all the images have in common is that they triumphantly demonstrate that colour can, in and of itself, be a compositional tool, and that the use of strongly contrasting forms and shadows need not be confined to classic black and white photography. On the contrary, as this book shows, colour can be just as much a fine-art form as monochrome and, indeed, that the bold and inventive use of the colour medium can give the photographer's work a valuable extra dimension.