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Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Digital Photography
A lavishly illustrated reference to digital photography and editing electronic images covers introductory digital photography for beginners, digital image and Photoshop techniques for experienced shooters, and an advanced bonus section on taking glamour shots, producing e-books, and setting up a home studio. Simultaneous. 30,000 first printing.
- GenresPhotographyReference
512 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 31, 2008
I'm on the hunt for digital photography tips & tricks. This book is full of them. I liked how the book is divided in to short little lessons. You don't need to devout large quantities of reading time in order to actually gain applicable knowledge. If you study and apply a couple lessons at a time, your skills could really improve. Mr. Sammons has a newer version of this book (ISBN 0393329143) that I'd recommend buying. Unfortunately for me my library didn't have the new version.
August 12, 2008
The complete title here is actually Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Digital Photography: 107 Lessons on Taking, Making, Editing, Storing, Printing, and Sharing Better Digital Images, and the book pretty much delivers on that. It covers an impressive breadth of material related to digital photography --everything from buying a camera and other equipment to composition and lighting to editing and touching up in the digital darkroom.
What I like about Sammon's writing is that it's very approachable, easy to read, and occasionally entertaining. Each of the 107 chapters is only a few pages long at most, so they're easy to breeze through and skim if you're using the book later as a reference. I also like that the work is replete with --who'd have thought?-- photographs. Just about every single point Sammon makes about photography or digital image editing is accompanied by one or more photographs or screenshots. This is good, because for photography it's as important to show as it is to tell.
What I didn't like was that while the book has impressive breadth, it lacks depth in some areas where I'd like it and spends too much time on areas of no use to me. I'd really have appreciated more nuts and bolts chapters on creative composition, lighting, or tricky situations like shooting in high contrast scenes or in low light. Other chapters are pretty much worthless to me. I don't need, for example, a discussion about choosing a Mac or PC or how to select a printer. Those are foregone conclusions for me and probably most readers. A lot of the other chapters also felt like filler to me --they barely introduced a topic before ending, having only covered the bare basics.
Where I did get great value was the section on using Photoshop to enhance and alter pictures. Sammon covers simple topics like cropping, but also goes into more advanced stuff like adjustment layers, curves, filters, plug-ins, and layers. Just learning about how to use the dodge and burn tools to lighten or darken parts of the photograph selectively was great, but I also learned to do things like change the saturation, brightness, or contrast of an entire photo or better yet just part of it.
So overall, I think this is a pretty good book for beginner to intermediate photographers to have lying around. It's got some solid, if brief, advice on the basics, and the digital darkroom stuff is really indispensable if you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
What I like about Sammon's writing is that it's very approachable, easy to read, and occasionally entertaining. Each of the 107 chapters is only a few pages long at most, so they're easy to breeze through and skim if you're using the book later as a reference. I also like that the work is replete with --who'd have thought?-- photographs. Just about every single point Sammon makes about photography or digital image editing is accompanied by one or more photographs or screenshots. This is good, because for photography it's as important to show as it is to tell.
What I didn't like was that while the book has impressive breadth, it lacks depth in some areas where I'd like it and spends too much time on areas of no use to me. I'd really have appreciated more nuts and bolts chapters on creative composition, lighting, or tricky situations like shooting in high contrast scenes or in low light. Other chapters are pretty much worthless to me. I don't need, for example, a discussion about choosing a Mac or PC or how to select a printer. Those are foregone conclusions for me and probably most readers. A lot of the other chapters also felt like filler to me --they barely introduced a topic before ending, having only covered the bare basics.
Where I did get great value was the section on using Photoshop to enhance and alter pictures. Sammon covers simple topics like cropping, but also goes into more advanced stuff like adjustment layers, curves, filters, plug-ins, and layers. Just learning about how to use the dodge and burn tools to lighten or darken parts of the photograph selectively was great, but I also learned to do things like change the saturation, brightness, or contrast of an entire photo or better yet just part of it.
So overall, I think this is a pretty good book for beginner to intermediate photographers to have lying around. It's got some solid, if brief, advice on the basics, and the digital darkroom stuff is really indispensable if you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
November 20, 2010
Seems to be very comprehensive, and I'm loving the pretty pictures. I wish they had printed it on lighter paper, though: it weighs a ton! That makes it awkward for my intended purpose for it (bedtime eye-candy).
...
Notes:
composition: the subject should be in the highlights
aperture: lower number = wider = more light but narrower depth of field
exposure compensation: negative means make it darker, positive means make it lighter
composition: put subject at the intersection of tic tac toe board lines for nice framing in thirds
A subject looking out of the frame (off the edge of the picture) adds interest
Create a sense of depth: use a foreground element, shadows
To get a good picture of a person in a scene, put the person close to the camera and used a small aperture so the scene will be in focus, too.
Disequilibrium: put the camera at an odd angle for visual interest (but don't overuse this trick)
There was a lot of awesome stuff in this book, but to my surprise, the biggest trick this guy seems to use is Photoshopping everything later. Don't like your shot? Fix the saturation, color balance, cropping, add blur, do this, do that. Nothing wrong with that, but I expected the focus to be more on how to take/make a great picture in the first place. But rock on, now I won't feel like I'm cheating. I guess people would have done that stuff in the darkroom in the old days, so why not do it in Photoshop or Gimp now when it's so easy?
...
Notes:
composition: the subject should be in the highlights
aperture: lower number = wider = more light but narrower depth of field
exposure compensation: negative means make it darker, positive means make it lighter
composition: put subject at the intersection of tic tac toe board lines for nice framing in thirds
A subject looking out of the frame (off the edge of the picture) adds interest
Create a sense of depth: use a foreground element, shadows
To get a good picture of a person in a scene, put the person close to the camera and used a small aperture so the scene will be in focus, too.
Disequilibrium: put the camera at an odd angle for visual interest (but don't overuse this trick)
There was a lot of awesome stuff in this book, but to my surprise, the biggest trick this guy seems to use is Photoshopping everything later. Don't like your shot? Fix the saturation, color balance, cropping, add blur, do this, do that. Nothing wrong with that, but I expected the focus to be more on how to take/make a great picture in the first place. But rock on, now I won't feel like I'm cheating. I guess people would have done that stuff in the darkroom in the old days, so why not do it in Photoshop or Gimp now when it's so easy?
August 6, 2008
Rick Sammon collects 107 lessons on taking, making, editing and storing digital images in this book. As soon as I finished it and went looking for other reviews, I realized there was a second edition that I probably should have read instead. This one is a little old in technology years, but many of the techniques are still valid.
The book isn’t really what I wanted, but photography books are hard to read in most cases. I haven’t found one yet that focuses on what I need, but is still interesting.
This book gave some minor tips on actually using the camera, but it was mostly geared toward people that want to learn about manipulating digital images in Photoshop. I’m interested in minor tweaking, but this was heavy duty changes to images, something I’d rather leave for after I’ve mastered the actual photo taking first.
It is set up nicely, there are a bunch of color photographs demonstrating everything from where he put a reflector on site, to what tool he picked to smooth edges of a models hair. Everything is very simple and easy to understand, but there isn’t much depth. I’d look elsewhere if you’re more interested in training on using a camera
The book isn’t really what I wanted, but photography books are hard to read in most cases. I haven’t found one yet that focuses on what I need, but is still interesting.
This book gave some minor tips on actually using the camera, but it was mostly geared toward people that want to learn about manipulating digital images in Photoshop. I’m interested in minor tweaking, but this was heavy duty changes to images, something I’d rather leave for after I’ve mastered the actual photo taking first.
It is set up nicely, there are a bunch of color photographs demonstrating everything from where he put a reflector on site, to what tool he picked to smooth edges of a models hair. Everything is very simple and easy to understand, but there isn’t much depth. I’d look elsewhere if you’re more interested in training on using a camera
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August 16, 2010I'm moving back and forth in it as I please. Getting ready for DSLR ownership and a class I've signed up for in April.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews