With almost 10,000 photos on Flickr, 'Digital Photography From the Ground Up' was an easy book for me to pick review. Considering I started off as a reluctant amateur and have become a reluctant semi-professional digital photographer, I'm a hack. It all started with my first camera, a Canon PowerShot A40. If you asked me about focal length multiplication factor/crop factor, minimum focusing distance, f-stop or even hyperfocus, I would have just stared at you.
I won't anymore. Granted, some of the techniques I figured out on my own - but I didn't know exactly how things like the hyperfocus technique worked or how to refer to them when speaking with others; I just knew that they did. And most of the stuff I actually had not even bothered with, even when I was shopping for my last camera. The camera ended up being my present Canon PowerShot SX100IS 8MP Digital Camera with 10X Optical Image Stabilized Zoom.
It seems just about everyone on the Internet has a digital camera, and many of us are just fumbling through the pictures one at a time. Sometimes we get it right. Most of the time we get it wrong, and most of us don't even bother with the ones we get wrong.
Enter Digital Photography From the Ground Up.
I read most of the book and ended up skimming the rest since I ended up spending a lot of time fiddling with my camera to see what I could do with all the new conceptual toys that came in the book - some assembly required. As someone who found his eyes rolled back in his head when a true digital photography geek started talking, I found myself beginning to understand what all the terms meant and how it could help my photography. Granted, I don't expect to be doing shots for National Geographic any time soon, but if you have the digital photography bug you'll understand: It's a matter of always doing better with the equipment you have. And then getting more equipment. And then getting more equipment. And then getting more equipment.
Digital Photography From the Ground Up starts off with explaining the cameras themselves. Image sensors, camera optics, viewfinders, camera program modes and storage media for the cameras. In reading this section, I had wished the book was available before I decided to go shopping for a new camera the last time, since many of the explanations gave more depth to my understanding of the cameras. This section as well as the rest of the book demonstrate that the equipment used is not as important as camera manufacturers would have one believe; as noted in the sidebar on Page 4, most pictures within the book were taken with an old Olympus C-1400L - only 1.3 megapixels but good optics. They work very well in the book as examples.
Camera accessories are then covered and explained - the camera bag, rechargeable batteries, chargers, tripods, lens hoods, lens filters, lens adapters, auxiliary lenses, flash units as well as some other useful tools.
After these are covered, then - and only then - is the subject of choosing one's camera brought up. This is followed by the computer equipment one can use in conjunction with the digital camera, as well as an in depth look at image formats - including the new JPEG 2000. Pixels, points and lines are explained in a very practical manner, dealing with displays and printers. Color temperature, depth of field and aperture and shutter speed are then discussed in detail.
Photography composition is the focus of the 3rd section, from image considerations to composition diagrams to designing with camera techniques. It even discusses image elements and stockpiling them (as I do on Flickr, though this was accidentally done).
After all of this, we get to the meat of the book. In Section 4, different types of photography are then covered with explanations, images and even more images. Section 5 covers image editing and techniques to make the best use of the image editing ability inherent in digital photography.
Section 6 covers RAW conversion - something which my cameras have always lacked (Canon), but which makes me yearn a bit for the RAW ability of other cameras. Printing and Presenting of Digital Photographs is covered in Section 7 and Image Capture and Management is covered in Section 8. The appendices are indispensable references to ICC profiles, color temperatures and color spaces as well as image formats, resolutions and sizes - Appendix C has literature references and internet sources for those who wish to dig more deeply.
Overall, this book is great for the beginning photographer as well as the hack (such as myself). In my case, as someone who has slowly edged into digital photography and is now willing to spend the time on the technical and composition techniques to become better, this book is it. I was very impressed with the ease of explanation that the author, Juergen Gulbins, was capable of - as well as the pragmatic writing in tandem with the images illustrating the points.
Because this book is well written and is not likely to become outdated in the next 10 years, I have to score it highly. Because the author did such an excellent job in explaining things that now seem overcomplicated on the Internet and other places, I also have to score the book highly. Because this book has earned a place on my desk and not on my bookshelf, it goes from a high score to the top score I can give it: A KnowProSE.com 10/10. This is the best all encompassing documentation on digital photography this semi-professional digital photographer has come across, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
In a world when the media continues to become more important, this is one book that will make for better digital photography and therefore will contribute to more meaningful content. Or at least better looking content. :-)
Hats off to Juergen Gulbins, and thanks from someone who now has more concepts to play with!
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