This is not an accusation anyone could level at Daryl and Sharna Balfour, the
authors of African Elephants: A Celebration of Majesty (New Holland,
ÂŁ30, ISBN 1868257932). Each of the 168 pages bears a technically excellent
and often beguiling photograph. But one stands out: the shot of an old tusker
charging the photographer. Moments after the shutter clicked, the latter lay
trampled almost to death, with a dislocated hip, fractured ribs and concussion
from a tusk blow. Both he and bits of his cameras survived to complete the book.
The authors’ respect for their subjects permeates their intuitive shots and the
accompanying text. Inevitably the elephants make us feel rather small.

For a book to make you feel completely insignificant, you’d have to go some
way to beat Origins: Our Place in Hubble’s Universe by John Gribbin and
Simon Goodwin (Constable, ÂŁ15.95, ISBN 0094775508). Supported by images
taken from earthbound and satellite telescopes of varying quality, the book sets
out to explain in plain language what the Universe is all about. You are left,
nonetheless, with a nagging feeling of nothingness. When you have it spelt out
that you come from an eminently unimpressive planet of a fourth-division star’s
solar system in a Universe that is 15 billion years old, it is difficult to
retain a sense of being, let alone proportion.

A welcome read to follow Origins, if only to be back in familiarly
parochial territory is The World of Weather by Brian Cosgrove (Airlife,
ÂŁ19.95, ISBN 1853107654). In this logically structured book, Cosgrove
examines all aspects of weather, revealing just how complex meteorology is.
Cloud formations, tornadoes and tropical storms, and even a background to the
instrumentation used are all explored and illustrated. The quality of the
illustrations is patchy, but taking a sharp picture of fog was always going to
be tricky. At the end of it all, you get the feeling that despite the technology
available and the data collected, the prediction of the weather is not, in the
long term, that much more sophisticated than “Red sky at night . . .”

To find out why red sunsets are red, grass is green, and chameleons pretty
much any colour, Penelope Farrant’s Colour in Nature(Blandford,
ÂŁ25, ISBN 0713723513) has all the answers. As well as a staggeringly large
number of high-quality illustrations, there are break-out boxes on all aspects
of the chemical, optical and visual elements of colour. Illustrations run from
NASA pictures of auroras to macro shots of butterfly wings, covering all points
in between. In an honest, albeit slightly self-defeating page near the back of
the book, there is even an explanation as to why colour film cannot reproduce
colours the same way as we see them—not even in books about colour.

Farrant’s book and the Balfours’ volume on African elephants stand head and
shoulders above the rest in terms of the quality and quantity of their
illustrations, information content and clarity. Put them on your Xmas list.

A perfect example of the compilation is Africa’s Vanishing Wildlife
by Chris and Tilde Stuart (Swan Hill Press, ÂŁ29.95, ISBN 1 85310 817 0).
This is more a book for cartographers than photographers, as each animal entry
is accompanied by a map representing the past and present distribution of the
animal which, like the British Empire, shows a receding area of pink.

Where there are photographs in this 200-page volume, they are generally
record shots (“Springbok herd in the Kalahari”) of variable quality. The action
pictures tend to be of commonly photographed safari animals. The most moving
parts of the book are the entries where there is no picture: just a small logo
saying “extinct”.

Making rather better use of the photography available to him—his
own—is Tom Brakefield in Kingdom of Might: The World’s Big Cats
(Swan Hill Press, ÂŁ14.95, ISBN 1 85310 785 9). It has a strong
conservation message, and permeating the text is a sense of the awe in which
Brakefield holds his subjects. That fewer than half a dozen photographs show the
cats looking at the lens at the moment of exposure is a testament to his
stalking skills. It is this talent which allows Brakefield to empathise so
closely with his subjects as they hunt. The defining sequence of the book shows
a leopard pursuing a baboon through tree tops, culminating in a beautifully
silhouetted picture of the leopard carrying its dead prey back along a branch by
its neck. There is not a single duff shot and, although the accompanying text is
a little close to the eulogistic, I can forgive the author anything for the
quality of his photography.

Making photogenic animals like the big cats look good is far easier than
making rattlesnakes visually engaging. This is amply demonstrated by Chris
Mattison’s Rattler! A Natural History of Rattlesnakes (Blandford,
ÂŁ20, ISBN 0 7137 2534 6). Given their facial resemblance to petulant
four-year-olds, rattlesnakes are never going to score as highly on the “aah”
factor as the felines, but Mattison gives it his best shot. In an attempt to
break up the scaly scowl pictures, he includes the occasional small mammal shot.
This backfires when you realise these are just snacks for the main players. The
other shots are merely expanses of rocky hillside where rattlers lurk.

If this type of photograph appeals, you’ll be delighted by Marco Ferrari’s
Deserts (Swan Hill Press, ÂŁ19.95, ISBN 1 85310 788 3). In a
succession of vivid and captivating images, the book depicts an enchanted desert
world says its publisher. Sadly it is not an unbroken succession because,
although some shots are beautifully taken on high-quality film, others have been
blown up well beyond a reasonable quality threshold. A few were of poor quality
to start with.

Mike Lucas’s Antarctica (New Holland, £29.99, ISBN 1 85368 743
X) sometimes falls victim to the “over-blown” picture syndrome, but is generally
more restrained in the sizing of the few lower quality pictures. The colour
balance of the pictures’ film stock indicates that these are all pretty modern.
I suspect that some of the lower quality pictures are a result of poor
scanning.

Big places do deserve big pictures, but only where the original picture can
take it—a lesson all designers with nature publishers would do well to
learn. This is a mixed bag of works whose word content is, with the exception of
the overly poetic Deserts, informative and entertaining. But where
pictures the are primary motive for buying the book, greater attention to detail
is required. That attention seems to occur only when the author and photographer
are one and the same person.