Author: Harold Davis
Published by O'Reilly
Copyright 2008
176 pages
Review done by member David Elliott
I must admit that I approached this book with some misgivings. Hundreds, if not thousands of books have been written on the subject of light and exposure. Some of them are excellent (the Time-Life series of photography books come to mind). This raised the question `Why do we need another such book?' My hope for this book lay in the end of the title `for Digital Photographers' and the fact that it is published by O'Reilly (the publisher of some of today's great technical texts). This book would be worth reading, I thought, if it covered the digital aspects of photography to a useful depth. Before I get to the review, let me say the following about myself. I am an avid amateur photographer. I am faculty at a US college of medicine where I am a medical researcher and I teach microscopy and digital imaging. 1) This book is written by an amateur for less advanced amateurs. It has little to offer middle or advanced photographers. 2) I was very intrigued by the authors idea that "... this book is rich in pragmatic details. For example, you can find the exact lens and exposure settings I used for every photo in this book.... It's very reasonable to start with this book by finding a few photos that interest you, and discovering how they were made." I thought this was a wonderful idea. It is unfortunate that the book can't be used this way. Many of the pictures have obviously been extensively post-processed and no mention of this processing is made in most of the picture captions. Thus, the information presented will not permit replication of the results shown. 3) The book needs better editing. There are multiple examples of wrong page numbers or images being cited out of order. 4) In a book for beginners, I would have liked to see more side-by-side examples. For example, showing a lovely picture is fine, but if one is discussing depth-of-field it would be useful and informative to show the same composition with several depth-of-field examples. The same can be said for several shutter speeds to show the effect on the final image. 5) Many issues are treated so sparsely (i.e. the entire topic of Layers, Blending Modes and masking is covered in a small box on one page) that they are not useful. I would recommend either concentrating the book on fewer things at a greater depth or writing a longer book. Lastly, the book contains many technical errors. This is particularly distressing since the book comes from O'Reilly. These errors will lead to confusion for the beginner since they do not know enough to ignore the obvious errors. Taken together, I can't recommend this book.