SitePoint, 2010. - 200 Pages. ISBN: 0980576873A hands-on on guide to digital photography, with a practical focus on the Web. Readers will learn how to make the most of their digital camera, while learning the basics of composition, exposures, filters and more.It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
With apologies to Charles Dickens, digital imaging technology is now common enough and cheap enough for almost anyone to take up photography. Chances are good that you have a digital camera included in a phone, PDA, or even a music player as an extra feature. The superseding of film and its processing in favor of the pixel has removed the biggest ongoing cost to practicing photography. The Web has given us a wall as big as the world on which to hang our pictures. Alas, most of the content is substandard.
It seems that for many people, the primary use of their digital camera revolves around taking happy snaps of themselves and their friends for their Facebook page. Preserving the memory of the moment is enough. Most camera owners skip reading their manuals beyond the instruction that tells them how to turn it on and how to take a picture. If that’s all you want, that’s fine—you have no need for this book. But if you want to make pictures that people will want to look at and enjoy … well, that’s a different scenario altogether.
Your camera’s manual will tell you how its functions work, but it won’t explain why you might use them, or why you might even want to turn off some of them. A camera left on automatic may produce a fairly ordinary image, but switching it to manual without knowing how best to capture the scene can lead to ruining the shot entirely. Given the choice between achieving a photo that’s merely okay and the risk of no photo at all, it’s unsurprising a lot of people let their cameras do the thinking.
You won’t learn everything you need to know about making your own photos from this or any book. There is a lot to learn, but most of it, once you’ve mastered a few basic concepts, can only come from practice—and lots of it. This book aims to teach you those basic concepts about how cameras function, how light works, and how we see and respond to what we observe. No replacement for practice can be found in a text, but this book will help you practice smartly, and assist you to understand and learn from practicing. It will help you overcome that first big bump on the road to becoming a more confident and skilled photographer.
And if we’re really lucky, we might start to see some more interesting pictures on our blogs, websites, and photo gallery pages.
