The Digital Photography Book

The second photography book I read on SLR photography was The Digital Photography Book: The Step-by-Step Secrets for how to Make your Photos Look Like the Pros by Scott Kelby.  Apparently this is one of the best selling digital photography books out there and I can understand why people like it.  Kelby has established himself as quite the guru when it comes to digital photography.

The book is quite light hearted and as Kelby says it is intended to read like he was with you on a shoot (or preparing for a shoot) and he was giving you advice on how to get photos.  It is not very technical which can be good and bad.  He is telling you how to get the shots, but not why you are using those settings.

The first chapter provides advice on how to take sharp photos (tripod! it's not a big secret, every site and book talks about, but he has other useful sharp photo tips as well).  He then gets into some basic scenarios and provides advice on how to take good pictures.  There are chapters on shooting flowers, weddings, landscapes, sports and portraits.  He covers composition, metering, lighting, and all sorts of topics related to setting up, preparing for, taking, and post-processing pictures.  He also advises on how to avoid problems (backing up shots, extra cards, etc.).  He concludes with recipes for specific types of shots.

Providing shooting advice without too much technical content is an interesting concept but sometimes it is useful to understand the why so when you encounter a new situation you can make decisions on your own.  But this is a good start.

It is a lot of information to take in during the first read because the book covers such a wide range of shooting scenarios and I will definitely be going through it again.  On the next read I plan on designing myself some exercises to try out some of the techniques.

Update notes: Three years later and I still haven't really gone through the book again in detail but I still want to.  Now that I know a little bit more about photography the "how" that Kelby provides is still useful and I can use my own knowledge to fill in the "why".  I still plan on looking at the book in more detail and creating some personal assignments for the different topics.

Originally published: 13/08/2009
Updated and republished on the date of this post.