Vistas - Landscape Photography by Nigel Danson | My Photo Bookshelf
This is Vistas by Nigel Danson, a landscape photography book crammed full of photos of some of the most beautiful big vista landscapes in the world.
Author’s synopsis
This book highlights my love of the big vista in landscape photography and showcases some of my favourite images from The Faroe Islands, Iceland, Scotland, Norway, The Lake District and Yosemite and has been careful created to showcase my painterly style of photography.
My thoughts about the book
“Vistas” is the first of what will be a trilogy of landscape photography books by Nigel Danson and having followed his work for a few years, I was keen to get a copy and see his photos come to life in the printed form. With the follow-up books being “Woodland“ (already released) and “Seascapes” (due later in 2022), this book is, as the title suggests all about the big vistas, the epic views Nigel has captured both in England and further afield.
It’s a stylish grey canvas lined cover with silver text and feels sturdy and well made. On build quality alone, I had already felt the relatively modest investment was money well spent before opening the book.
Having already studied much of Nigel’s work, I knew this book would include some stunningly beautiful images but it was nice to see plenty I hadn’t seen before and the sequencing of the book works well with the photos grouped in chapters based on location such as England, Scotland, Faroe Islands, etc.
In terms of narrative, there isn’t a huge amount of text in the book. Each photo has a title, location and Exif data, a nod to us fellow photographers I imagine. Every few pages there is a small paragraph of text about a particular image which is a welcome addition, but given that I’m quite partial to a “behind the photo” story and love to get under the skin of photos I particularly like, it would have been great to see just a little more text in this book. That being said, it is very much a personal preference.
My only slight gripe with the book, (and it’s something that will split opinion) is how some photos span multiple pages as I can find it quite distracting. It probably doesn’t bother most people as its common to allow for bigger images and although with the way this book is made, it doesn’t look too bad, I would still prefer each image to remain on a single page. As I said, a small subjective gripe.
Like I said, Vistas is the first of three books Nigel has planned and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I’ve already got the follow-up (Woodlands) on my bookshelf ready to read and I’ll be first in line to order the Seascapes book too. If you can still buy this book directly from Nigel’s website, I highly recommend you do so before they are gone for good.
Book Details
Hardcover
Size: 240mm x 300mm
Pages: 120 Litho printed pages
Availability at the time of writing: 2nd Edition with limited availability at https://www.nigeldanson.com/products/vistas