The Digital Photography Book - Scott Kelby

...Kelby, author of many of the better photography boooks out there has now come up with the antidote. The Digital Photography Book is a mere 200 odd pages and is just slightly bigger than A5 in size yet contains a whole lot of useful information that will almost certainly improve anyone's photography.

I was initially wondering quite what Scott Kelby had been smoking as the first few pages were somewhat surreal. Even the author noted ...
...After that somewhat shaky start the book morphed in to something far better. Each page is a self-contained tip or concept, often with an inspiring image for illustration. The text is rarely more than a paragraph or two yet manages to get important and useful stuff covered concisely and clearly.

Taking for instance, a chapter on tips for getting sharp pictures. You get a page for tripods, ballheads, cable releases, self-timers, mirror ... more

There are lots of big shiny books out there that tell you all about digital photography and while many of these are great books, they can be a little intimidating too.

Scott Kelby, author of many of the better photography boooks out there has now come up with the antidote. The Digital Photography Book is a mere 200 odd pages and is just slightly bigger than A5 in size yet contains a whole lot of useful information that will almost certainly improve anyone's photography.

I was initially wondering quite what Scott Kelby had been smoking as the first few pages were somewhat surreal. Even the author noted they included lame (his word, not mine) humour.

After that somewhat shaky start the book morphed in to something far better. Each page is a self-contained tip or concept, often with an inspiring image for illustration. The text is rarely more than a paragraph or two yet manages to get important and useful stuff covered concisely and clearly.

Taking for instance, a chapter on tips for getting sharp pictures. You get a page for tripods, ballheads, cable releases, self-timers, mirror lockup (for really sharp pictures), Image stabalization, aperature, lens quality, ISO, sharpening, pro-sharpening and steadier hand held shots. All in a few pages and without leaving you feeling short changed.

The rest of the book continues with coverage of flower photography, weddings, landscapes, portraits and so on. Unlike many digital photography books, the bulk of the information presented is aimed at getting the original photos right, not in fixing things in Photoshop. Best of all, as the cover notes, much of it applies to point-and-click cameras as well as Digital SLRs.

I particularly liked the last section which presents a number of recipes for certain types of photo. In each case there is a great looking image such as a landscape, some sports cars or a pair of musicians, each with an accompanying list of things to do to achieve the sort of shot shown.

Another useful (albeit potentially expensive) side effect of this book is the discovery of all sorts of interesting accessories you could or indeed should be considering. Things like flashguns and tripods are pretty obvious but stuff like spirit levels, extension tubes and neutral density filters may be news to some. Certainly, for landscape photography, a graduated nuetral density filter is a must have.

The last section is a mixture of all sorts of interesting things such as printer paper, monitor calibration, selling photos online, further reading and an ad for Scott's Adobe Photoshop TV weekly podcast. Most of these should be considered inspiration for further research by the reader though as they don't contain much real meat.

I thought this was a great little book. The content is pure gold for the beginner to middle ground photographer and there are nuggets here which will make even fairly experiences readers think 'Ah ha!'

It's small, it's easy to read, has great content and is reasonably priced. As such I can't recommend it highly enough. To prove the point, three people have now borrowed my copy and all three have bought it.

 

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