David Pogue’s Digital Photography The Missing Manual [Book Review]

If there’s one huge bonus about starting the photography book club it’s that I’ve been getting more photography books to review in the mail. I’ll continue to review these books mid-month so they aren’t confused with the more participatory “book club”.

avid Pogue's Digital Photography The Missing Manual

David Pogue’s Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

About The Author

David Pogue , Yale ‘85, is the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. His funny tech videos appear weekly on CNBC. And with 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world’s bestselling how- to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the “For Dummies” series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music). In 1999, he launched his own series of amusing, practical, and user-friendly computer books called Missing Manuals, which now includes 100 titles.

About The Book

Part 1, The Camera, is a distillation of everything that I, your cheerful author, have learned in eight years of testing and reviewing digital cameras for the New York Times. It’s the ultimate buying guide. It tells you which features are worth looking for, and which are just marketing blather.

Part 2, The Shoot, is a course in photography and digital cameras. These chapters cover composition, lighting, shutter speed, aperture, when to use the flash, eliminating blur—and how your digital camera controls all of these parameters. Chapter 6, in particular, is a gold mine: It features all the classic professional photo types (frozen action, silky-smooth waterfall, car-headlight trails at night, and so on) and tells you precisely how to achieve those effects yourself. This section of the book creates a bridge between everyday snapshots and the kinds of emotionally powerful shots you see in magazines and newspapers.

Part 3, The Lab, covers the fundamentals of getting your photos into iPhoto or Picasa, organizing and filing them, searching them, and editing them to compensate for weak lighting (or weak photography).

Part 4, The Audience, is all about the payoff. This is the moment you’’ve presumably been waiting for ever since you snapped the shots: showing them off. It covers the many ways you can present those photos to other people: as a slide show, as prints you order from the Internet or make yourself, as a published custom book, as a Web page, as an email attachment, as a slide show movie that you post on the Web, as a photo gift, and so on.

Initial Impressions

The subtitle of the book is “The book that should have been in the box” and I think it’s somewhat accurate. The simple truth is that I don’t necessarily think that this is a book that regular readers of Your Photo Tips need to rush out and buy for themselves. If you’re very new to photography however, this is a great book to start off with.

David does an excellent job of breaking down technical jargon and allowing his readers to grasp the various functions and menu items that come with today’s digital cameras. I do enjoy books that are easy to consume and this photography book is easy to read. It’s filled with great cross reference points and little tips along the way. There are some really great explanations into some of the more technical aspects of capturing better photos. This book was actually pretty entertaining to read. I did actually chuckle a couple of times because of David Pogue’s writing style. It’s good.

The Bad

My one real gripe about this particular photography book was the section on RAW. David almost drives the reader to shy away from shooting in RAW mode because JPEG is fine enough and RAW takes time to process. I know his target audience is the newbie photographer here but my stomach actually wrenched a little when I read that section. Yes, JPEG is “easier and faster” but I think a little encouragement in the direction of RAW would have suited his readers better.

The Good

I did particularly enjoy the sections on “The Not-Boring Vacation Shot” and “How They Did That”. Pogue encourages his readers to be creative and think outside the box with great examples and witty commentary. Lot’s of tips throughout and reference pages make reading this book similar to surfing the web. I kinda like that. Tons of screenshots of camera menus and software programs help photographers navigate much easier in real world situations.

Conclusion

When a book on digital photography is this elementary with image editing sections for iPhoto and Picasa you’ve got to ask yourself: Is this book for me? If you’re a regular reader of this photography blog(or any photography blog for that matter) then the answer is probably NO. This book, however would make a great gift for a relative or friend who is just getting into photography. It will take a new photographer from buying a camera to sharing better photos on the web, email, or even print. In fact, if you buy someone their first “real” camera, this book would make a great companion. This will probably keep their questions to you about “how to do something in photography” to a minimum. Just tell them to skip the part on RAW/JPEG and you can show them the real brilliance behind RAW(when available). You are shooting RAW aren’t you?

You can get your copy of David Pogue’s Digital Photography The Missing Manual and other fine photography books at O’Reilly or at Amazon.

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