Digital Photography: The Missing Manual - Chris Grover, Barbara Brundage

...the change from film to digital photography? Unsure about printing, backing up or memory cards? This newish title from O'Reilly could be just what you're looking for. Unlike many books, it doesn't just cover taking pictures but instead covers a whole range of issues and options that you may encounter with digital photography. It is however rather Windows-centric.

As is common with the series, Digital Photography The Missing Manual ...
...say the rate at which digital has taken over has caught many people off guard, not least of which the many companies who previously thrived in the traditional film marketplace. With many familiar faces disappearing from the market place, there are huge numbers of people coming to digital both as first time photographers as well as those more experienced in the picture taking but totally lost when it comes to all the other skills and knowledge that ... more

Are you struggling with the change from film to digital photography? Unsure about printing, backing up or memory cards? This newish title from O'Reilly could be just what you're looking for. Unlike many books, it doesn't just cover taking pictures but instead covers a whole range of issues and options that you may encounter with digital photography. It is however rather Windows-centric.

As is common with the series, Digital Photography The Missing Manual has an easy going style full of subtle humour and plenty of anecdotes and tips. It provides a thorough grounding in the subject and despite being reasonably thick, isn't at all intimidating and given the subject matter, it is good to see the book is in full colour throughout.

It's safe to say the rate at which digital has taken over has caught many people off guard, not least of which the many companies who previously thrived in the traditional film marketplace. With many familiar faces disappearing from the market place, there are huge numbers of people coming to digital both as first time photographers as well as those more experienced in the picture taking but totally lost when it comes to all the other skills and knowledge that digital requires.

Digital Photography The Missing Manual is a book of four parts. The first part covers the basics of photography. Much of this is stuff that applies to traditional photography such as aperture, film speed and shutter speed. However, because of digital's ability to allow almost cost free experimentation, these are probably new areas for many people who have only ever used their film cameras on automatic. I did find some of the instructions a little vague though in the attempt to cover as many cameras as possible without concentrating on specific models too much.

More directly related to the digital medium are issues like white balance, shutter lag and the perils of dirty sensors on digital SLRs. The book then goes on to discuss particular types of photography such as weddings, night time and portraiture although the coverage here is fairly lightweight. There are many specialist books that focus (sorry) on particular areas of photography though so these sections can be forgiven for their relative brevity.

Part two concentrates on organizing your photos and for many people this is an area that soon gets them in to trouble once they have saved more than a few pictures on their computer. As well as looking at the various popular programs that you can use to manage your photos such as iView's Media Pro, the book explains the value of tags and different ways of sorting and indexing your growing collection. You also get a good discussion on the more popular online storage and sharing services such as Snapfish and Flickr. It doesn't cover the new photo tagging features in Vista though.

Equally if not more important is backup. Various methods including CD-R, DVD-/+R and external hard drives are examined with discussion on the pros and cons of each one. I'd not trust anything important to any form of recordable DVD myself having lost files once too often so the inclusion of external hard drives was a welcome addition.

One of the big advantages of digital is the ease of editing. This may seem like cheating to those who had to get their pictures right first time back in the day but it does make life so much easier if you can adjust colour balance, contrast and sharpness on photos taken under difficult conditions. Some of the before/after screenshots suffered a little here due to their size and lack of resolution making it not always clear what had changed. Other adjustments you may want to make include cutting no longer favoured people out of family shots or cropping for a more balanced image.

The editing examples tend to favour the excellent Adobe Photoshop Elements but this is no bad thing. There are also examples for Picasso and Kodak EasyShare so everyone should find this section useful. The section on panoramas is well worth checking out as the results can be surprisingly good using the various automated tools available.

Part 4 covers sharing your pictures whether via email, online photo service or printing. The latter covers both home printing or via the various kiosk based and online services available.

Finally there is a section on creating calendars, getting mugs printed and other such things. I personally find it rather difficult to get enthusiastic about those sort of things but perhaps I'm just too straight laced.

The book finishes off with some samples of design documents plus a short bibliography.

Conclusion

On balance this is another winner in the Missing Manual series. I did feel there could have been a little more on actual photographic techniques but the breadth and thoroughness of coverage more than makes up for that. I found a good number of useful snippets that were clearly based on experience and would save many a novice photographer from suffering any number of mishaps. Whilst aimed at beginners, even experienced photographers who are making the transition to digital will find much of use here. If you want a single book at a very good price that will cover all the bases then Digital Photography The Missing Manual is well worth looking at.

 

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