From the author, David Lowe:

I wrote Beautiful to help people see beauty in things that are overlooked. I am a busy physician in the smallest state, and have little time to travel. My lifelong hobby, landscape photography, needs to be done close to home. From the questions I received about my work I soon realized that people are often blind to the beauty around them.

Beautiful, the book, is based on two premises:

1. There is inexplicable joy in experiencing beauty.
2. To see the world again, in an unfiltered way we must give up preconceptions that society has ingrained in us.

I wanted to share with my readers the joy of experiencing beauty in the everyday world around them. Now that the book is done I have the shameless pride of a proud parent with a new baby. 

The book was almost finished three years ago.  When I went to a writing seminar at that time, all the participants shared their works for critical review.  It was extremely helpful to be in front of a jury of my peers.  Their verdict:  The photos were beautiful but the text was long winded and pedantic.  For the book to be successful the text had to be as beautiful as the pictures. They were right and I was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor with my word processor. I had to take my ideas and themes and put them in words that were simple, elegant and insightful.  I discovered that you can never teach someone by telling them anything.  You need to reveal things that they can discover for themselves.  You must never put yourself on a level above your student.  You must acknowledge your ignorance and the thoughts and actions you took to lessen it. Only when you display humility and wonder before an incomprehensible universe will readers become receptive to alternative ways of experiencing the world.

The philosophy behind this approach is Western epistemology, from the ideas of Hume and Russell.  The prose, however, is Eastern, modeled after the poetic Haiku where two disparate thoughts meld into a new insight or discovery.

As stated in the introduction of Beautiful:

Although there are many photographs in this book, it is not about photography. And although its central theme is beauty, it is not intended to show you what is beautiful. Its purpose is to help you find what is beautiful to you.