Photography

I am a beginner to Adobe Photoshop. In fact, my first introduction to Photoshop was on my first DMAG meeting I attended in February 2010. As a beginner I find just opening Photoshop to be intimidating and the few Photoshop books I do have to be an exhausting read that only further detours me from the learning process. That is not the case with this book! This book makes learning fun! The Photoshop Darkroom is an easy and fascinating read with amazing photo illustrations. I found the books layout to be informative, clever, creative and inspirational. The author gives step-by-step explanations, handwritten notes with additional guidance/reference and amazing photo illustrations of the editing process.

Although this book focuses on landscape photography, it is written as a general photography course and would be very informative for beginner to relatively experienced photographers of any subject.

Besides the usual treatment of landscape specific topics, of which there are many, there are plenty of little valuable nuggets to be found buried in the text to be applied to any style of photography. For example, when discussing lens selection, the authors point out the various tradeoffs in using anti-shake technologies, including specific scenarios when you should or should not use it, or even if you should spend the extra money to get those lens features in the first place.

Digital cameras have made taking snapshots a snap. No pun intended. These days everyone knows how to take a picture. Point, look at view pane and shoot. Does that mean you have just taken a great picture? Well… I’m sure for most of us not always.