Michael Freeman on Color and Tone: The Ultimate Photography Masterclass

Fifteen years after the publication of the hugely influential bestseller The Photographer’s Eye, Michael Freeman returns with fresh ideas on the medium, in the third book in the exciting new series from the master of photography guides.

Color isn’t ’just there’ in photography, an ordinary fact of life. It’s much more special and can be a subject and pursuit in its own right, because it triggers an emotional and aesthetic response like no other. Color is processed not in the eye, but in the mind, and that makes it personal.

In this third book in the series, Michael Freeman talks about color in photography in a completely fresh, thoughtful and useful way, unlike any other book on the market. In recent years, photography-about-color has exploded as a shooting phenomenon, taking inspiration not just from the great colorist photographers like Outerbridge, Haas, Gruyaert, Leiter, Eggleston and Porter, but from the new freedom that modern sensors and processing software give.

This book both celebrates and advises this new trend, drawing on Freeman’s long experience editorially and professionally, spanning the two eras of film and digital color.

Michael Freeman, professional photographer and best-selling author, was born in England in 1945, took a Masters in Geography at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and then worked in advertising in London for six years. In 1971 he made the life-changing decision to travel up the Amazon with two secondhand cameras, and when Time-Life used many of the pictures he came back with, he embarked on a full-time photographic career.

Since then, working for clients that include all the world’s major magazines, most notably the Smithsonian Magazine (for which he has shot more than 40 stories over 30 years), Freeman’s reputation as one of the world’s leading reportage photographers has been consolidated. Of his many books, which have sold over 4 million copies worldwide, more than 60 titles are on the practice of photography. For this photographic educational work he was awarded the Prix Louis Philippe Clerc by the French Ministry of Culture.

Freeman’s books on photography have been translated into 27 languages.