An absolutely stunning book written by one of my favorite photographers. This book is an incredible dive into adventure photography (and photography in general) on learning the craft of photography. He is writing and teaching what he has learned over his career into incredible lessons. Some cover basic ideas of having a vision for your photograph while other lessons show the true grit of a great photographer: putting in the work and being out there when no one else is. This isn’t the book for how to take easy pictures, this is the book to show you what great takes.

I loved the style of this book. Corey uses the book to document his journey of being a photographer and discussing sentinel images in his portfolio and how they changed / developed his career. He really takes a human approach and acknowledges some shortfalls of using a flash as well as showing his confidence in his vision. He seems like a relatively unknown photographer given a lot of us have probably seen his images yet had no idea.

Jimmy Chin is a photographer I have admired due to his humbleness and drive. This book follows his career and really shows the definitive moments of progression. I loved the longer stories of some of his trips and understanding what it took to get some of his most incredible shots.

Magnum is the great photography cooperative started in the 1930’s. For those of us that remember developing our own film and creating contact sheets, this shows the decision process of incredible photography. This is breaking down iconic photos and the rolls of film they came from. How did that one shot get selected? This book is insight from editors discussing shots and what made them great. The bonus? We get to see just how many photos are taken to get one incredible shot. When there’s 1 published photo per roll, we get to see all of them, how they made changes to their composition, and truly how difficult it is to capture that one moment.

I grew up in the heyday of cycling and the Tour De France (at least here in the U.S.). Camille was one of the great cycling photographers during that time. This book has a lot more of the photos with little snippets of background all throughout. I loved the nostalgia of each page and really appreciate his vision of photography for himself. He showed that he was a unique photographer and had a unique vision of what he wanted his pictures to look like. Most importantly, he didn’t back away from it to sell more photographs or to fit in to certain ideals of the time. He stuck to his style and it paid off as being one of the best.

Chris is what I would call a gritty photographer. He had a vision for himself and went after it. This book covers his career well and shows what it took to get him to where he is today. While some stories show the recklessness of some of his decisions, his overall career and grit can certainly be appreciated in these stories.

Fred was a relatively unknown photographer living in Canada. He was developing his craft at a time when color negatives were new. His style was more of a documentary look at Vancouver from 1961-1990. Here we get to see documented life as well as some very unique compositions of story telling. This book has such a great look into a unique style of photography and I appreciated how looking through it helped me question my ability to tell a story with pictures.