Good book for taking digital photos - intermediate | Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures...

Most up-to-date book for the "transitioning" photographer | Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures with Your Digital Camera | Mikkel Aaland

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	• Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures with Your Digital Camera Mikkel Aaland Sybex, 2006 - 287 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great for the intermediate digital photographer

This book is clearly not pointed at true beginners (and says as much). It fills a huge gap in the existing material, a book for the intermediate shooter. I teach a digital photography class at the local community college, and the author addresses most (if not all) of the questions that the more experienced students ask. My students are not professionals, many are beginners, and I recommend this book to any students that might want to continue their studies. The book is also not for the advanced photographer, is a great middle step for those that find "beginner" books to basic, and feel they don't quite understand some topics in "advanced" books.

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Good book for taking digital photos - intermediate

It's a good book - easy to understand - not necessarily what a pro would need but very good for the beginner to intermediate.

Most up-to-date book for the "transitioning" photographer

Wonderful book for the experienced hobbiest/prosumer film photographer finally making the transition to serious digital work. I've been shooting film for 30+ years; however, I've been doing mostly digital "point & shoot" with a Lumix LZ2 for the last two years. I made the transition to a serious digital camera and technique a couple of weeks ago with the help of the author's second edition, published in 2007.

Highly recommended for all (with the exception of the beginner who will need to know the basics regarding f-stops, , focal-length, shutter speeds, ISO, and depth-of-field). If you're finally making the transition like me, you'll find this book enlightening to the point of rekindling the joy of photography.

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Review of 2nd Ed: Not much appears to have been updated since 2003

There are numerous tips and tricks revealed in 'Shooting Digital, SECOND Edition' published in the fall of 2006, with xvi + 287 pages. As I am a beginning photographer just learning to use my Sony DSC-H5, I wanted to get recent good books written for digicam novices such as myself. Unfortunately, there are not many good recent books specific to the needs of digital photo amateurs. So I settled for this book, which at least is recent and aimed at beginners.

The book has been reorganized some since the 1st edition was published in 2003, though there are numerous anachronisms testifying to the laziness of the editors, who did not bother to update as much of the book as they should have. It is true that many of the techniques do not necessarily require up-to-date information to have teaching value, but it would have been nice to see more discussion of the present and future capabilities and shortcomings of modern digicams.

That said, there is much valuable info concerning digital, as opposed to film, cameras. Many example photos illustrate well the points made in the text. However, many included pictures simply seem to have been selected from a variety of stock photos and selected on the basis of being "good enough" to illustrate the point. Also, there should have been more photos overall and more of the photos used should have been of the side-by-side self-explanatory type, so that novices can see what they've done wrong, and what a correctly shot image would look like nearby. Thus, only about half the photos in the book are instructional in some way. But that means about half are not instructional. Indeed, this latter half seem to serve little purpose other than to anchor text to the page in a manner that was pleasing to whoever designed the layout of the book. Also, many of these purposeless images are not impressive: not as examples, not as art, not as well-exposed or well-composed suggestions, and even, like the large photo chosen for the cover of this 2nd edition, not of subjects worthy of photographing at all.

Although the second chapter of this 2nd edition is called "Shooting RAW," about half the chapter concerns itself with choosing the proper camera settings and shows a bit about how images can be tweaked via software. But time and time again throughout the book, examples of image editing via software refers to Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, both of which topics the author has written books about. These frequent references strike me as embedded advertising, both for his books as well as for Adobe. Since I do not use Adobe software, his sidebars on image editing really only serve as examples of what _can_ be done to fix marred photos after the shoot, rather than providing useful instruction. But if you have Adobe software, then you may find these sidebars valuable.

Finally, I'd like to point out that the pages in this book are NOT sewn in signatures, and the thickness of the pages combined with the stiffness of the perfect binding, means that the book will not lay flat when opened. The idiot who designed the book decided to put the wide margins on the OUTSIDE of the pages (instead of the inside where the pages are joined), so that it becomes difficult to read the text as your eyes move to the inside margins, and you have to keep turning the book back and forth in your hands. Also, the stiff binding combined with the lack of signatures means that, if you use the book frequently, then eventually the binding may break and the book will fall apart.

I will say, however, that the 9-page, two-column index is quite good, allowing you to lookup in the book some subject you remember and to find that subject discussed where you remember reading it. This is important, because the book has no glossary. So if you forgot what some term means, you can find it in the index and turn to the place in the book where it is defined.

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A unique, full-color guide to the art of taking amazing photos with a digital camera

Aimed at photographers of all levels and ranges of interest, this new edition of Aaland's popular guide takes readers beyond the technology of the latest cameras and equipment to teach them the unique aesthetics of the digital image. Helpful examples explain how to take full advantage of RAW file formats, JPEG 2000, panorama automation, and more.

Mikkel Aaland (San Francisco, CA) is an award-winning photographer and author whose photography has been published in magazines and exhibited around the world.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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