This is a great book. It is one of the few I own on professional photography that has not been published by Amherst Media, and I think it could well be better. A great deal of lighting techniques are covered. A great deal of different situations for sessions such as modelling portfolios. In fact, I shot my first modelling/glamour session ever after reading this book and WOW! I've never created such stunning images - they were really beautiful.

This book doesn't go into lighting techniques as much as, say, an Amherst publication might, but it definitely does go into lighting, it just does it in a different way, which is nice. What this book offers that is just great is a context, a place to come from, an approach to photographing women. Within that context the photographer has more freedom to create stunning images because (s)he hasn't been taught a 'series of poses' to put people through. Not only that the authors are professional stock and modelling photographers. With so much of the market now desiring to look like women do in magazines, this is a boon to portrait photographers as they have a new and fresh outlook on photographing women that they might not have gotten when they were taught portraiture (I, for one, certainly wasn't).

I give it 5 stars and would buy another book from these authors in a heartbeat.

If you have tons of equipment, a great studio, and ready staff, you'll like this book because everything mentioned in it should be within your grasp. For a beginner, however, who is trying to make beautiful images with very little equipment, no studio, and few (if any) assistants (and none who are paid professionals), this book becomes 'boring' from repeatedly thinking "that's way beyond what I can do." It would be very easy to walk away from the book thinking that if you haven't made it already, you never will. There is some good information and ideas in it, else I'd have given it an even lower rating, but it was generally disappointing. It struck me as a litany of "here's how we did this as established photographers" versus "here's what you can do" and that's really not what I had hoped for.