What is a good book to learn more about photography?
I feel I am at a moderate level -- I have owned my DSLR for 2 years now. Any suggestions?
When I first bought a dSlr about 3 years ago the first book I bough was Scott Kelby's Digital Photography book, and it was a tremendous help. His layout of the book makes it easy to read, and pick up pointers page by page. It also lets you skip parts you are not intersted in, such as macro photography, etc.
I read the first version, but he has updates. Below is an amazon.com link to his set of updates:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321678737/uncrate-20
If you ever listen to podcasts, This Week in Photography is a pretty helpful podcast. A good website is photofocus.com.
12 Answers
A friend gave me the book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. It has given me some good tips for my photography. Hope it helps.
When I first bought a dSlr about 3 years ago the first book I bough was Scott Kelby's Digital Photography book, and it was a tremendous help. His layout of the book makes it easy to read, and pick up pointers page by page. It also lets you skip parts you are not intersted in, such as macro photography, etc.
I read the first version, but he has updates. Below is an amazon.com link to his set of updates:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321678737/uncrate-20
If you ever listen to podcasts, This Week in Photography is a pretty helpful podcast. A good website is photofocus.com.
I'll second Will's suggestion. Stick to anything by Scott Kelby. He is the President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, and has written many books on digital photography. The Digital Photography Book series (vols 1,2,3) are excellent guides to get started.
While we're on the subject, I'd also recommend looking into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for managing your photo library and post-processing. Kelby also has several books on getting started with lightroom.
The Scott Kelby - Digital Photography Books (volumes 1, 2 and 3) are spot on. Other good sources of information (free) are digital-photography-school.com which recently put out a pdf book for I believe $20 which covers all of the basics in one place. A great source of recurring information is the podcast This Week in Photography (twiplog.com). By listening to this each week, there is no way you won't aborb new information and new tricks to go out and try.
KODAK Pocket Guide To 35MM Photography. I have over 20 photography books and this is by far the most useful. It was a gift from my friend, a top photojournalist. Each page describes a different element of composition (contrast, scale, pattern, texture) with lots of examples (extremely helpful). I keep it in my camera bag at all times.
For a more comprehensive photography book, check out Photography: 10th Edition by London and Stone. It's a standard. You can buy an earlier edition on eBay for about half the price and most of the information is the same.
I found Tom Ang's Fundamentals of Photography to be a great overview, with a huge number of images illustrating different effects/settings/etc. I also covers both film and digital work.
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375711572
Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting