digital photography

What a great extension to the Dummies concept! I love Dummies books, but always finished each book wishing there were more information. This "All in One Desk Reference" has that information! It's two or three times the size of a typical Dummies book at 800 or so pages, and it's all meat. Everything you need to know about digital photography and basic image editing is in here.

The emphasis on photography, rather than digital technology, is refreshing. Certainly, there are chapters on how digital cameras operate, and guidelines for choosing a digital camera. But the center of the book has solid chapters on good old fashioned photography, as it applies to digital cameras. There's a chapter on composition, one on close-up photography, another on sports photography, and a great travel photo section. The thick section of color photos are great, too. It's good to see color images in a book about color photography.

The sections on image editing are fairly complete and will get beginners started and more experienced people trying some new things. Both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are covered, but there is a chapter that evaluates most of the popular image editors and compares and contrasts them. This book really is thorough.

However, if you want to buy this book, purchase it for its great coverage of digital photography. That alone makes this the leading digital photography book. The other chapters make it a useful "All in One" reference book.

Dummies books always make good introductions to a topic, but this thick book really dives deeply into digital photography. Most digital photography books ignore the photography aspect in favor of techie discussions of hardware, sensors, and gadgets. Either that, or they expend most of their pages discussing image editing rather than photography.

This one covers all the bases. I loved the extensive chapter on shooting sports and action photos, the detailed coverage of portraiture, a very nice discussion of useful tricks for getting the best travel pictures, and an in-depth discussion of close-up photography. All of it relates to the special capabilities and needs of digital photography, too.

There's plenty of information on image-editing, too, for those who want to know how to fine-tune their digital images. I even liked the chapter on scanning.

Everything is well-organized into separate "books" which each have meaty chapters dealing with a specific topic. It's easy to zip through the table of contents and find the exact information you need. This is one of my favorite Dummies books!

I teach digital photography at a community college, both for college credit and in evening adult education classes, and have found this book to be the perfect textbook for my beginner and intermediate courses. The first Overview book is about 82 pages long, and provides a good introduction to digital photography. My students learn a little about digital equipment, how to acquire photos, do simple editing, organize them, and make prints. I generally either skip the second book or assign it for extra credit, because it talks about choosing a camera and accessories, setting up a computer, and working with printers and scanners.

The Taking Great Pictures chapters in the third book are the core of my curriculum for both the beginner and intermediate classes, as the content is easy to understand, explains photographic techniques clearly, and can be applied by any digital photographer. The beginner classes simply receive less challenging picture taking assignments, as they work with composition, close-ups, portraits, and sports photography. They also get a lot of use out of the section on scenic photography, as the landscapes here are spectacular.

The beginner classes stop when they finish the fourth book on the Basics of Image Editing. The more advanced image editing chapters, which use Adobe Photoshop Elements, are reserved for the intermediate classes. I do put both groups to work learning to restore old photos, because everyone seems to enjoy this.

All in all I have found this book to be a wonderful learning tool, and like it better than traditional textbooks for teaching digital photography.