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): Nifty book that covers what it promises to. Twelve chapters of suggestions on how to improve your photography skills and post-shooting tweaking, with examples of what professional photographers or very serious amateurs do with their cameras. It's very useful, but a slightly tough read for me, since it uses the technical vocabulary - f-stops, aperture, white balance, depth of field - that I have very little experience with and can mostly merely approximate with my splendid little camera. It makes me eye the expensive professional and "prosumer" models frequently referenced with dreams of avarice. The two driving themes of the book seem to be "with forethought and practice, you can take great pictures with any camera" and "more equipment and more software never hurt, if you know how to use them." Both are true; one of them is much more useful for people who aren't planning on sinking lots of money into their photography in the near future. I'm tempted to say this book was pitched for people a little more familiar with photography and cameras than I am, but it was still really useful. Though I suspect I'm not going to understand what f-stops and aperture do until I get a camera that lets me experiment with them.

Comments

Re: Single Lens Reflex 101

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I've read more than one explanation of the f-stop and aperture does, but I'm still shaky on which way does what (ie, does increasing f-stop increase or decrease the amount of light the film/chip is exposed to). I can read the definitions, and repeat them, but the vocabulary's just confusing enough to make my eyes blur a bit, especially since it's not immediately applicable to the equipment I've got. It's a "discuss, repeat and experiment until understood" problem, if that makes sense.

The last time I checked, digital SLRs were working down toward $1,000 for the body (not including lenses, memory card, and battery). Those are the "serious amateur" cameras, not the pro monsters - which still run into the thousands of dollars - but they're fairly sophisticated. This is definitely an interesting time to be in the field of photography: digital quality's only really become competitive with film within the last five years, so both formats are still in fairly wide use. Almost everyone's converting to digital from film; it'll be interesting to see how digital cameras change as more first time photographers (casual or otherwise) start with digital, rather than film.