Title - Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Author - Linda Q. Thede, GCPCUG Member

Category - Book

Subject - A reference and how-to book

Date - November 2006

This O’Reilly Missing Manual book, by authors Chris Grover & Barbara Brundage, focuses on digital cameras, the art of taking pictures, editing and organizing your photos, and sharing them. It’s a combination reference and how-to book. The book has many instructions and illustrations plus boxes within the text to delve thoroughly into topics that do not fit the narrative. To aid in searching for a topic, the outside corners of each page contains keywords that describe the main topic of each page.

If you have not yet purchased a digital camera, or are considering a new one, but are not too familiar with the various options digital cameras have, you will find chapter one helpful. Information about the differences between the resolution necessary for printing versus onscreen viewing, the size of a memory card, and file formats is presented as is an explanation of the various types of batteries. Lens quality, types of zoom available, and an excellent description of shooting modes such as AV, TV, P and other functions such as rapid burst can also be found in this chapter.

Chapter two addresses the absolute basics of “pointing, shooting, and composition.” In chapter three is detailed information to assist in various types of shots. Several pages are devoted to taking action shots, including suggestions such as using a fast shutter and burst mode. For taking portraits the authors suggest putting the sun behind the model and forcing the flash to go off (I tried it and it really works! This chapter also explains when you would want to use the different modes (AV, P & TV). If you have a camera with these many options and find that the manual that came with the camera tells you how to use these features, but is clueless as to why you would bother, you will find this chapter will encourage you to experiment with them. For example, use a lower F-2 aperture to create a soft background and use the cloudy light feature for open shade or window-illuminated interiors. As the authors point out, it does not cost you a dime to play with the various options. There is also information about taking pictures of weddings, on stage performances, sunsets, night shots, star trails, objects, kid shots and even camera phone photography as well as digital movies.

The bulk of the book is devoted to what to do with your photos after you take them. Various methods of getting photos into the computer are presented. There is even a discussion about using a scanner that starts with choosing and installing the scanner and then describes three ways to scan an image. How to instructions for using Windows XP, Kodak’s EasyShare Albums and Google’s Picasa to organize photos is the focus of chapter 5. Confused about storing your photos online? Chapter 6 provides answers including a table that compares online storage features of EasyShare, Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Flickr. There is also a box that provides words of caution about relying on online storage. The necessary, but too often neglected, step of backing up your photos is the focus of chapter 7 along with steps for using EasyShare and Picasa to accomplish this. Tasks addressed in chapters 5 to 7 are presented for Adobe Photo Elements in chapter 8.

Part three addresses editing your photos. Information about how to accomplish various tasks such as rotating, cropping, fixing red eye, and fixing exposure and color problems is addressed for the freely available products, EasyShare and Picasa in one chapter. Then two chapters are devoted to how-to instructions for these tasks using Adobe Photo Elements. Another chapter explains how to use some of the more advanced editing techniques such as sharpening photos and removing unwanted color that are part of Adobe Photo Elements, but not the freebies. This section concludes with a chapter about creating special effects using EasyShare, Picasa, and Adobe Photo Elements. There is a table that compares the effects possible with each of these products.

The last section is about sharing your photos with a box about pros and cons of this practice. Instructions for using EasyShare, Shutterfly, Flickr, and Photo.net for this task are given. I only wish that friends who send me photos that exceed the size of my screen knew the information in the chapter about emailing photos! There is also a chapter about printing photos at home, in kiosks, or using an online service. The final chapter addresses creative photo projects and with one exception provides how-to’s for only Adobe Photo Elements. The one exception is PhotoShow which enables you to produce a slide show. It is free software although there is also a pay version available.

The information in the book is straight forward, easily understood, and applied. Novices to digital photography, the computer, or both, would find this book helpful both in getting started taking digital photos, and in working with them afterward. Computer newbies will appreciate the basic information about storing, moving and deleting photos as well as detailed how-to instructions along with illustrations about how to obtain, install and use freely available products. The tables that compare features in each of the freely available products as well as the $100 product provides readers enough information to make decisions about which product will meet their needs now and in the future. With this book, a beginner could invest only in a camera and experiment with software that is free.

Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Chris Grover & Barbara Brundage

ISBN 0-596-00841-4

Pogue Press O’Reilly