Image Clarity: High-Resolution Photography

Williams' understanding of the material he covers is every bit as impressive as his ability to convey it. He writes beautifully. His explanations of the complex phenomena affecting image quality are brilliantly edifying. No student of the photographic process can come away from reading this book without having learned more than anticipated. I've so enjoyed reading (and re-reading) this book that I hesitate to say anything negative about it, but I'm compelled to add that I am disappointed by the conspicuous lack of any practical strategy for tying together all the theoretical discussions that should influence aperture selection. Having equipped us with an understanding of the limits of human vision, a means to quantify degradation caused by defocus and diffraction, the impact of enlargement factor and viewing distance, the limits imposed by lens and film, and the mechanisms behind several other variables, when it comes time to tie it all together, he just drops the ball. He may have overestimated his readers' ability to deduce things for ourselves, but for someone with my modest IQ, it just feels as if he has given us a fine bottle of wine, with no corkscrew. He does a great job providing practical coverage of many other areas affecting image quality, but the first half of the book, that which I personally found most interesting, falls moot for lack of any means to deploy it. Don't let that stop you from reading this book, though - I, for one, cherish it.