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Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: Although this book may at first be intimidating for someone who has never handled a SLR Camera, it is actually a thorough beginner's book. It is not overly "technical", although any book on exposure will be full of numbers when talking of aperture, shutter speeds, ISO settings, etc. Once you begin to get a grasp of these concepts, the reading is easy and enlightening. (no pun intended) For those with a little experience, this book will clear up many of the exposure mysteries that you may have faced. I think it is a "must read" for beginner to intermediate shutterbugs.
Rating: 
Summary: Learn creative ideas, not techniques
Review: Bryan Peterson's "Understanding Exposure" is a book geared toward beginners, as it talks about topics (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) that any advanced photographer would deem "mundane."
However, the book is best used not as a guidebook on how to set the various exposure modes on your advanced SLR camera, nor how to set up a state-of-the-art studio with fancy lights. It discusses how to make *creative* exposures (not just technically correct ones) in natural lighting situations. I do wish the author had presented some clearer explanation on certain technical aspects, e.g., how to preset focus and how to get teh most out of a light meter, hence the 4 stars instead of 5. Otherwise, it's a book that helps you think about how to create a photograph, not how to use every feature of your camera.
Most of Peterson's instructions are taught through his own wonderful photos. Each photo is well captioned about the context, his thought process, and his technique. Again, this is not a "read and memorize the f-stop" kind of thing. It's all about provoking ideas, and Peterson includes a lot of exercises (some more useful than others).
I've been an advanced beginner for almost 20 years, and my photography has not improved much. I hope this book can help me get over the hurdle and take better pictures.
Rating: 
Summary: fluffy
Review: i bought this book partially because many ppl recommended it. I have to say it was disappointing. The pictures were fantastic however the information was sparse. There's like 5-6 pages worth of information the rest of the few hundred pgs are fluff. There are other better books that will cover the info in this book and more.
Rating: 
Summary: Purely basics
Review: I bought this thinking it would have a lot of in depth information about exposure. However I went through the book within 30 minutes and did not find anything new or quite interesting. It's a very basic book in understanding the importance of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture and how they work together. Not really much past that. I would definitely recommend this to beginner's, but if you want to save a few bucks you can learn all the information provided in this book via online resources, just use your favorite search engine ;)Was also kind of upset that they mentioned anything about digital cameras seeing as how there was maybe 4 pages at the end of the book that talked about irrelevant fluff.
Rating:
Summary: Great examples of photo composition and exposure selection
Review: I found this book to be very helpful in understanding the selection of good exposure to achieve artistic effects with my photography. I like Peterson's differentiation between "creative exposure" and "correct exposure," and found his tips for deciding what you wanted to emphasize in a photo helpful.
I also read the Grimm Basic Book of Photography at the same time, and although that book is *much* denser and longer, learned less about composing a photograph and selecting exposure while reading it. Peterson's many colorful comparisons helped me understand his methods and reasons for choosing his exposure.
This book is a quick read, and is the opposite of the Grimm book in terms of depth of discussion of equipment and history (if you want to learn details about different film grains and all of the pieces of equipment you might want to buy for your portrait studio, by all means, get their book instead). However, for a very concise book with great examples on SLR photographic composition, I can't ask for much more.
A final word for digital photographers. This book touches little on specific differences between digital and film photography, but does not ignore digital. Peterson makes a good point that digital retouching can fix a lot of mistakes, but that good composition and exposure saves a lot of time later, whether you're using film or digital. I have to say, though, I'm still looking for the book that will explain in-depth how to properly select white balance for digital SLR.
Rating:
Summary: A Terrific Read for Photographers
Review: I have read many books, articles and reviews on photography. Bryan's book is the best. It is not full of the tech-no jargon you see books (by some pretty famous photographers) who I believe get caught up in the "technical language" resulting in books that are difficult to follow and impossible to utilize in the field.
Bryan, explains, shows examples and you can go outside your front door and try some of his techniques. The results are amazing. Buy this book with the realization you will carry it with you in your bag for reference.
Walt Paholak
Rating:
Summary: Simply the Best!
Review: If you need to understand Aperture, Speed, ISO and Light meter as well as depth of field in a straight forward way, then this book is it. This book also has full color photos throughout, and they are absolutely beautiful. I have read various materials explaining those terms and this one is clearly the best.
Rating:
Summary: A little basic
Review: This book is a reasonably good introduction to exposure for the absolute beginner. If you've had an introductory photography class or equivalent experience, much of what is written in this book will be very basic and redundant. (There's actually very little text in this book - you could read the whole thing in a couple hours or less.) Note that Peterson is exclusively a color photographer, so any kind of discussion of black and white tonality and contrast is totally missing. The book covers the basics of aperture, shutter speed, and different lighting conditions (though it lacks specifics on how to shoot in these different lighting conditions), plus a little bit on multiple exposures and polarizing and neutral-density filters.
A more thorough introduction to zone system concepts than this book provides would be useful. For that, I'd recommend reading "The Confused Photographer's Guide to On-Camera Spotmetering" by Bahman Farzad (which errs in the opposite direction, running these concepts into the ground) along with this book. If these two books were combined and a happy medium was found between Peterson's brevity and Farzad's beating to death of simple concepts, you'd actually have one solid introductory book on exposure.
Other drawbacks - Peterson is mainly a stock/magazine photographer and his photographic style is, to my eyes anyway, rather boring, and I found little inspiration in looking at his photos. Also, his writing style is rather goofy, with lots of exclamations over less than profound photographic insights and silly terms for substitute reading methods like "The Sky Brothers" (various kinds of skies when used for exposure) or "Mr Green Jeans" (vegetation used for exposure).
In the end, I picked up a few useful tidbits from this book, but turned around and resold the book right after reading it, as it really wasn't valuable as a reference.
Rating:
Summary: Understanding Exposure: How to shoot Great Photographs
Review: This is one of the most outstanding books on photographic technique that I have read. Examples are extreemly well explained. What you think is impossible to do, Mr. Peterson shows you how. This book is a must for any beginning or intermediate photographer. And, his wife is very good looking!
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely amazing!
Review: Wow! This book is amazing! I am fairly new to photography and have been looking for a book that will answer the fundamental questions with regards to exposure but couldn't find one. Until now, I have never taken the time to write a review on Amazon but if I can coax even one person into buying this book, I will be helping that person make a great investment in their photographs.
The book as a huge assortment of top-notch color photographs which are explained in-depth by the author. He actually takes the time to say, "I used this exposure and this shutter speed and here's where I metered the scene and here's why". I learned so much just from the captions for the pictures - not to mention the amount I learned from the text itself.
Please, if you're interested at all about photography, this book is a MUST have. You will learn more from this 160 page book than most 400+ page books on photography!
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