David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Introduction

Digital photography is just about the only kind of photography left these days. At this point, 99 percent of all cameras sold are digital. Yes, it's taken awhile—the first consumer digital camera came out in 1994—but film photography has been reduced to a niche activity. No new film cameras are being designed, and very few companies still sell film.

It's easy to understand why digital has taken off.

• The quality is there. Practically nobody is still arguing that film photos look better than digital ones. The color, the tonal range, the resolution—it's all caught up with and even exceeded film.

• It's free—and freeing. When you shoot digitally, you don't pay a cent for film or photo processing. You can shoot dozens of variations of a shot, experimenting with angle, camera settings, lighting—and then throw away all but the winners.

  That's incredibly liberating. You'll become a much better photographer much faster, because you can experiment forever without spending any money.

• Feedback is instantaneous. You can examine a photo on the screen a second after taking it. If something bothers you—like the telephone pole growing out of your best friend's head—you can just delete it and try again.

  Digital photographers sleep much better at night. They never worry about how the day's pictures will turn out; they already know.

• You can be your own darkroom tech. Even an amateur can retouch and enhance photos, experiment with cropping and effects, and make prints and enlargements right at home.

• People will see your pictures. What's happened to most film photos taken by most people? Where are they at this moment? Probably still in their drugstore envelopes, stashed in attic boxes. Very few of them ever really saw the light of day.

  Digital photos are another story. You can blast them to your friends by email or post them on a Web page. You can turn them into screensavers or desktop pictures. You can watch them play all day on a digital picture frame. You can create gorgeous slideshows, with music and crossfades, that play on your computer or TV.

  And you can have them printed on just about anything with a surface: posters, mugs, towels, underwear, Christmas ornaments, mouse pads, U.S. postage stamps, blankets, and on and on.

But this is just rational stuff. Creative freedom, instant gratification, economy, and easy distribution—what people really love about all that is the emotional high it gives them. So many obstacles have been taken out of the way that there's almost nothing left standing between your vision and your audience. It's a blast!

All right, all right—down boy.

It turns out that this kind of talk really bugs veteran film photographers. Plenty of them resent all of this breathless digital-camera hype—or secretly fear it, thinking it might make all of their hard-won expertise obsolete.

The truth is, though, that veteran shutterbugs usually wind up becoming the best digital photographers. The basics of photography haven't changed. It's still your moment, your vision, and how you see the light falling on your subjects and backgrounds. All you're really losing is a lot of expense and chemicals pouring down the drain.

Even so, the curmudgeons are right about one thing: There are still some "negatives" in digital photography.

Digital cameras are generally more expensive than film cameras. True, you make up the cost very quickly with the savings from film and developing. But technology marches on ridiculously fast; the big camera companies come out with new camera models (and retire old ones) every six months. It's critical that you buy your camera carefully and spend those dollars well. (See Chapters Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.)

There's plenty of complexity, too, both in the "digital" part and in the "photography" part. Now you're expected to learn both photography jargon (ISO, white balance, depth of field, shutter-priority mode…) and computer jargon (JPEG compression, EXIF tags, image resolution…).

Finally, there's the little issue of what to do with all those pictures. People wind up taking a lot more digital photos than they ever did with film, simply because it's free and easy. Before you know it, your hard drive creaks with 60,000 pictures of your kid playing soccer.

But what then? Dump them all on your hard drive, tens of thousands of JPEG files, stashed in folders?

People can still look at and enjoy photos (the paper kind) that were made 200 years ago. But will our JPEG files still be there for our ancestors in 200 years? Will the JPEG format even exist in 200 years? How about 50?

About This Book

This book was born to address all of these issues, and more. It's divided roughly in half, which you can think of as "photography" and then "digital":

• Photography. First, this book provides a complete grounding in professional photography. It gives careful consideration to the artistic factors involved in shooting—composition, lighting, and exposure—and how to apply them using the 37 billion features in the modern digital camera.

  And by the way: Unlike most photography books, which concern themselves primarily with SLR cameras (those big black ones with removable lenses), this one lavishes equal love on the compact pocket cameras. They do, after all, represent 91 percent of all cameras sold.

• Digital. Second, this book provides a full course on what to do after you've taken the pictures. It follows the entire life cycle of those photos: transferring them to your Mac or PC, using free "digital shoebox" software to organize and edit them, and finally sending your pictures out to find their audience. Every conceivable distribution method is covered in this book: email, Web, prints, slideshows, desktop wallpaper, collages, movies, screensavers, even jigsaw puzzles and underwear.

Note

This book provides a guide to two photo-management programs: Picasa (for Windows, free from Google) and iPhoto (from Apple, preinstalled on every Mac). It covers these two programs because they're (a) brilliant, (b) easy to use, and (c) free.

If you own Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, which are much more hard-core photo editors, then congratulations—you're ahead of the game. Picking up either Photoshop: The Missing Manual or Photoshop Elements: The Missing Manual will bring you 900 more pages of digital-photography goodness.

About the Outline

This book is divided into four parts, each containing several chapters:

• Part I, 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 II, 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 III, 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 IV, 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 slideshow, 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 slideshow movie that you post on the Web, as a photo gift, and so on.

At the end of the book, Appendix A offers some Web sites and magazines that will help fuel your growing addiction to digital photography; Appendix B offers a tidy summary of the 10 best tips in this book; and Appendix C lists the credits for the photos in this book.

About → These → Arrows

Throughout this book, and throughout the Missing Manual series, you'll find sentences like this one: "Choose File → Open." That's shorthand for a much longer instruction: "Click the File menu to open it; from the menu, choose the Open command."

About MissingManuals.com

At www.missingmanuals.com, you'll find news, articles, and updates to the books in this series.

But if you click the name of this book and then the Errata link, you'll find a unique resource: a list of corrections and updates that have been made in successive printings of this book. You can mark important corrections right into your own copy of the book, if you like.

In fact, the same page offers an invitation for you to submit such corrections and updates yourself. In an effort to keep the book as up-to-date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, we'll make any confirmed corrections you've suggested. Thanks in advance for reporting any glitches you find!

In the meantime, we'd love to hear your suggestions for new books in the Missing Manual line. There's a place for that on the Web site, too, as well as a place to sign up for free email notification of new titles in the series.