Reddit reviews Edge of Darkness: The Art, Craft, and Power of the High-Definition Monochrome Photograph
We found 2 Reddit comments about Edge of Darkness: The Art, Craft, and Power of the High-Definition Monochrome Photograph. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
I'd strongly suggest updated books. Ansel Adams, while a genius, had to work with more limited materials that we have available now.
For example, masking, split contrast printing, unsharp masks, toning, reducing, bleaching and the like are barely mentioned in the above books. Some of them because of material unavailibility, some of them because of his particular brand of photography.
Some suggestions:
If you're serious about learning photography starting from the basics, then you could do a lot worse than doing black & white and developing your own films. You get a real appreciation for how each part of the process fits together, and how delicate parts of it are. If you develop your own, you can experiment with different developers - personally I liked Agfa Rodinal and DiXactol. The latter was developed by Barry Thornton, who goes into a lot of detail about this and other aspects of B&W photography in this book, which is highly recommended. DiXactol is pretty hard to get hold of these days though.
Developing your own (B&W) films is easy to do without a darkroom and with minimal equipment. Unfortunately printing requires much more space and equipment, so it might not be an option. There's always the option of a half-digital setup, where you develop the film and then scan it to get prints. Speaking of which, IME you'll get better results with a film scanner than a flatbed scanner, and the former will allow you to use slide film as well as negative film with equal ease.
One thing I learned too late myself is not to experiment with too much at once. I spent a lot of time geeking out and trying to perfect the technical side, which drew my attention away from creative photography. I ended up with results that were at best well-executed but soulless, and often just wholly bad. Using digital has actually freed me up a lot by preventing me from worrying about the various steps that I now can't control, fun though that part of the process is.