National Geographic collection books review

There is a series of best National Geographic images photo books. “Wide angle” with photographs of places, “In focus” with most interesting portraits and “Through the lens” with general best images. We picked them up from the local library – it was a few pounds of books :). They made for an interesting browsing for few evenings.
I am an avid reader of National Geographic magazine (although their marketing mail drives me nuts!), and I am really fond on their images. But when you really have a chance to look at them without the context of the story, you are going to be surprised. In the books, there are new and old images included, some are from digital era, some from film times, there are pictures as old as from 1910! They are often grainy, out of focus, technically not perfect at all. Although composition in most cases is sticking to the rules. Some of them work, some are … weird? Which makes you consider, that image does not to be technically perfect to do what it needs to do – illustrate the story. And then it is better to take high ISO image or no image at all :).
Another observation I made was how often I do not pay attention to photographers name on the articles. I knew few names of the artistss included in the collections, I recognized Reza (I heard about him on some podcast in context of war photography), Annie Griffith Belt (I read her book some time ago) and Frans Lanting (from his column in Outdoor Photographer). But there are people I never heard of before, like Sam Abel, Jodi Cobb, or Gerd Ludwig, and these are people whose images are dominating in the series!