Landscapes are immensely popular subjects for photography. Standing in a beautiful landscape, we can easily see and feel its beauty. Capturing its beauty, however, is a much harder process. For this reason, thousands of books exist on the subject. Here is one such book which aims to explain the process of producing appealing landscape photographs. It covers equipment, technical aspects and examples of various situations, from sunrises to starlit landscapes. Unfortunately, Landscape Photography does not live up to expectations. It briefly covers many topics, with vague advice and little depth. A much better book on landscape photography is Boyd Norton's The Art of Outdoor Photography.

Lonely Planet, publisher of Landscape Photography, has several photography books in the same series. One of them, People Photography, provides great teachings on its subject. The impression it left may have set the bar too high for its sibling on landscapes.

Peter Eastway, author of Landscape Photography, is an award-winning photographer. The book reveals that he won the Landscape Photographer of the Year award three times from the Australian Institute of Professional Photography. As attested by the numerous color photographs which appear on nearly every page of this book, he demonstrates some level of photographic skills. All his sample photographs are well exposed and most are skillfully composed.

There are two major problems with this book. The first is its vagueness. The author fails to clearly describe his process for making successful images. So, even though his images show photographic skill, the text does not provide the information necessary to transmit it. The second major problem is shocking. The majority of images in this book have technical problems and show abuse of image manipulation. At least one out of every two images is so heavily vignetted that it completely overwhelms the subject. Wether this is caused by a poor lens or by an inappropriate filter, it is simply unacceptable for a professional photographer. Many of the book's images have also been manipulated to a point where its subject is barely recognizable.

At least, Peter Eastway is honest right from the start about his approach. He says he does not care about reality and he can spend hours or even days digitally manipulating a single image. There are even a few pages on image manipulation with Adobe Photoshop in the book's last section.

There are two ways to betray a photographs. One is manipulating it too much and the other is not correcting it. In this book, the author undeniably demonstrates both. In several images, colors are so over-saturated or have sections artificially blurred in a noticeable way. In the case of vignetting, obviously the result of some poor technical choice, there is no reason why it was not corrected. Photography is about the image, not the camera or software used to produce it. When we notice manipulation, we notice the software. When we notice vignetting, we notice the lens. Either way, the viewer got distracted from the image. As Alain Briot said in his latest essay on The Luminous Landscape:

"The world, when we frame it into either a rectangular, panoramic or square composition, does not suddenly get darker at the corners of our composition. Instead, the world continues to be the same tone as it is in the center of the image, or along the image borders, or anywhere else in the framed composition for that matter."

In sum, we were much less impressed by this Lonely Planet photography book than by the previous one we reviewed. This book is simply not worth it.