Perfect Digital Photography

I just finished a book by Jay Dickman and Jay Kinghorn called "Perfect Digital Photography" volume 2. I was initially attracted to this book as it was written by two Olympus photographers which is exceptionally rare. Dickman is a prize winning National Geographic photographer and Kinhorn is a Adobe Photoshop Certified Expert and Olympus Visionary Photographer. The book is basically a complete start to finish manual on getting the best images in the digital world. They talk about equipment at the beginning of the book, and while it was cool to see and Olympus E3 used as the example camera, there was no apparent bias as to which brand you should buy. The book then evolves into a discussion of photography theory with light, composition and telling a story with your photos. There is an interesting chapter on photographing people which was nice for me as it's my main focus and I was admittedly worried that the book would be all about landscapes and animals. They then wrap up the theory with a chapter on Travel photography before heading into the technical bits of the modern darkroom which is Lightroom and Photoshop. For someone using Apple's Aperture or an editing piece of software other than Photoshop this would be disappointing, but if those are your tools you are going to be surprised with the depth of the information. I learned stuff in this book about Lightroom that I missed in my highly regarded Scott Kelby Lightroom 2 book. I've always thought that too much software talk dated these books (and I'm right!) but in this case it seems appropriate. The book is trying to take novice or semi-pro photographers through the world of digital photography from start to finish (capture to output). They finish it all off with printing and other output methods.

The book was really very good. I'm going to admit to some bias as it was nice for me to read something written by 'Olympus guys.' Having said that, there is nothing here that is brand centric. A Nikon shooter would benefit from this book as much as a Pentax, Canon or Sony shooter. There are nice contributions from guest writers in the book as well, some very well known. You can find a link to the book on the right hand side of the blog as our current featured book if you are interested in it. If you are looking for a very complete, very robust book about all areas of digital photography, filled with beautiful full colour images, then you've found it.

Photo in this post is not from the book I should add. It was one I took last weekend in a fit of boredom with no weekend photo jobs booked. Yes, I resorted to my tripod and a landscape!