Complete Digital Photography
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Complete Digital Photography Details
About the Author Ben Long is a San Francisco-based photographer, writer, and teacher. The author of more than two dozen books on digital photography and digital video, he is also a senior contributing editor to Macworld magazine, a contributing editor at CreativePro.com, and the author of several best-selling Lynda.com photography courses. His photography clients have included 20th Century Fox, Blue Note Records, Global Business Network, the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the Pickle Family Circus, and Grammy-nominated jazz musicians Don Byron and Dafnis Prieto. He has taught and lectured on photography around the world, including workshops at the Santa Reparata International School of the Arts in Florence and a class for imaging engineers at Apple, Inc. He occasionally dabbles in computer programming and has written image editing utilities that are used by National Geographic, the British Museum, and the White House. Read more
Reviews
This book is excellent, and it's huge: 600 pages. It's profesionally edited with beautiful illustrations and photos. It's organized well. It covers everything from how an image sensor works(in detail) to how to employ the most-used functions in an image editor. Photoshop is the software he takes examples from in the book.Other subjects he covers that aren't often found in other photography books: how to use a white balance card; calibrating your monitor so the image you see on the screen is accurate; a couple of tidbits on Canon SLRs that aren't in the Canon manual(i.e. in spot, partial, or center-weight metering mode, if you press the shutter button halfway down, hold it, and reframe, the camera will automatically re-meter your scene and choose new exposure settings; but in evaluative metering mode, the exposure locks once the shutter button is pressed halfway down, even if you reframe); proper settings to output your images, whether it's to attach to an email or print at home.Because this book covers almost everything you can imagine, the author couldn't go into great detail about every subject. If you want to learn how to improve your flash photography, you'll need a dedicated book on flash photography. The author touches upon reflectors, but doesn't cover everything you can do with them. The chapter on lighting covers 18 pages; the book is 600 pages thick. If you want to know what camera settings you'll need to shoot a low key image, you won't find that here.The second half of the book covers software -- editing your images, printing, importing, workflow, etc. Even though the author covers quite a bit on photo editing in Photoshop, you'll want a dedicated book or DVD on how to use Photoshop. He doesn't always give you all the steps you need to perform a particular function, but then again, this isn't a how-to book on Photoshop.This book is fun to read. It's easy to read. Everything makes sense and the author is encouraging throughout. I think it'll inspire you to want to improve your photography. I know it inspired me.I own this book, a book dedicated to flash photography(Syl Arena's Speedliter's Handbook), and a Photoshop instructional book. Photography can be a complex hobby, so i'm sure i'll keep reading and studying as the months go by. But this book by Ben Long will keep any beginner/intermediate photographer busy for awhile as you start to employ all he has taught you.
