Acknowledgments

This book stands on the shoulders of the photographers, teachers, scientists, and engineers who built the craft and the science of the image over nearly two centuries — from the chemists who first fixed light onto a plate to the computational-photography researchers reshaping what a "photograph" is today.

It owes an obvious debt to the great photography educators whose clarity set the standard we reach for: to Bryan Peterson, whose Understanding Exposure taught a generation to leave Auto mode; to Michael Freeman, whose work on the photographer's eye made composition teachable; and to Henry Carroll, who proved that the essentials can be taught with warmth and brevity. Where this book succeeds, it is often because it learned from them; where it falls short, the fault is entirely our own.

We are grateful to the named photographers whose work appears throughout as described, attributed studies — Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and many others — whose images taught the world to see and continue to teach every photographer who looks closely.

Finally, this book is for the reader with a phone and a question — why does this photo work, and that one not? That curiosity is the only prerequisite that ever mattered. This is an open educational resource, released under a Creative Commons license so that it can be freely read, taught, translated, and improved. If it helps you make one photograph you are proud of, it has done its job.