There aren’t many living photographers you can refer to by first name. In fact, Annie Leibovitz might be the only one.  Certainly the only modern photographer any non-photographer has ever heard of.  I’m not a fan of all of her work, but most of it is beautifully done.  So when I heard she was coming out with a book about her ‘at work’ I went and pre-ordered on amazon that day.

Well it was released last week and while I can’t highly recommend it as a reference book, it was definitely worth the read.  She goes into little depth about technical matters, so if you’re looking for details on her lighting setups, look elsewhere, or rather look at her photographs and experiment until you figure it out.

The things I most took away from it were more basic realizations. For example she talks about shoots that went badly, or times that she screwed up technically or conversationally.  It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who makes mistakes. Simple stuff, but sometimes easy to forget if all you ever see if the final polished retouched glossy shot in Vanity Fair.

Also it seems she was a fan of polaroid 665 pos/neg film.  She mentions it a few times specifically, well she mentions polaroid negatives repeatedly and then shows images that could have only been made on medium format.  I myself was a big fan of polaroid 55. In fact I’ve got about 12 slices left that I’ve got to use before they go bad.  Time to pull out my 4×5.  <grin>