Photography handbook or coffee table book – review of “Capture the moment” by Sarah Wilkerson

I was browsing mindlessly for another book to read. Nothing was appealing, and nothing was coming up with “photography” as a keyword. Until the cover image caught my eye and I decided to take a closer look at the “Capture the moment”. I read the short description and I was hooked.

I knew I made the right choice when the book arrived at my doorsteps. “Capture the Moment: The Modern Photographer’s Guide to Finding Beauty in Everyday and Family Life” is beautifully published book. Slightly larger than your typical novel, the black and white picture on hardcover adds to fine art feel, heavy and elegant. The good quality paper gives justice to amazing imagery, many double page spreads (see example spreads in the post – click on each to see larger version). This is how I interacted with the book at first, just picking it up here and there and browsing through images, like you would with a coffee table book.

The book, however, was not meant to be a coffee table book, at least not as the only purpose. It is also a basic photography handbook, explaining some basic concepts of photographing the world around you. However, “Capture the moment” is not filled with large blocks of text. Now, the teaching is done by the very short paragraphs, which can be read when you have a minute or two in your busy day. There is an informative phrase, like a bullet point, followed by a few sentences of explanation and an example image. That’s it. Learning photography in small bites. The tips are organized into following chapters: Natural Light, Composition, Storytelling, Fine art, Black and white, Low light. Each chapter ends with a number of creative exercises, to make reader pick up the camera and go out to explore the world, photographically.

This is not the book you want to pick up when you are beginning photographer and what to learn technical side of using your first DSLR. This is just not the focus of “Capture the moment”. This particular book is about creativity and finding subjects to photograph around you, in everyday life. I find it its strength, since there is plenty of technical manuals on the market.

And just to shortly mention – all the amazing imagery in the “Capture the moment” are of female photographers, part of the group “Clickin Moms“. Their vibrant community is worth checking out.

I have received a free copy of the book for the purpose of this review from Blogging for books. Additionally, the links in this post are affiliate links. See details of our affiliate policy here.