Michael Freeman continues to write informative photography books and his latest title considers black and white photography. If you click on the book's cover at the top of the page you can open Amazon's Look Inside option and see the Contents page which will give an idea of how comprehensive it is. I would guess that about sixty per cent of the title is pictorial and a thing I liked was the frequent use of the same photo to show alternate mono versions, for example, page 145 has four images showing contrast variations like high, high red, low red 1 and low red 2. The four are mono photos of a colour photo on page 144. Another nice touch is the frequent use of screen grabs of tonal charts that slightly butt into a relevant photo and reveal the changes from one image from another.
As is usual with this type of semi-technical photography book the pictorial contents vary between images taken by world famous snappers to those from the author and others. Many of course aren't worth a second look in the creative sense but are included to make an interesting technical point. A surprise was finding eight pages at the back of the book giving step-by-step instructions for developing your own black and white film, so let's hear it for sprocket holes (this seems to me a bit like the resurgents of the LP record).
Overall an interesting book with a pleasing to the eye presentation and printed with a 175 screen on a matt art paper. If you have Freeman's 2014 Black and white field guide you'll already have a lot of what's in this book.
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