Digital Photographer's Handbook [Hardcover]

This book tells you all of that and much more. One of its added bonuses is that it gives you troubleshooting tips on most any problem/mistake I can think of in understandable English without neglecting to mention the jargon and without sounding condescending. Kudos to the author.

Another thing I love so much about this book is the abundance of high quality colour photographs used. There are of course black & white photographs to be seen when the author discusses black & white photography, but colour pictures aren't suddenly 'deadened' by the use of black & white copies of the picture.

Since I am a PC fan and do not work with a Mac, I am very happy to see that eventhough there's a Mac picture in the part about the digital darkroom, the author does not try to force a Macintosh computer on you and also mentions (IBM compatible) PC's.

He also mentions quite a few digital cameras. However, a book with digital equipment can never be completely up-to-date. I would suggest getting information on the latest models straight off the Internet of from your local shop, since digital cameras are very popular and I have found that several of the cameras I liked were sold out very quickly. (Tip: if you read about a camera you like and you are serious about getting it, order it. Otherwise it might be gone before you realise it.)

That being the only flaw I cound find, I still rate it 5 stars since it's very comprehensive and pleasantly written. So if you're looking for a fountain of knowledge on digital photography and want info on photography in general as well, this book will be a great help to you.

The reason I bought a book on photography was to learn how to better use my digital camera. I am fairly new to photography, and wanted to learn more about exposure settings, composure, using flash, topics like landscape or portrait photography etc. Ang does spend a few pages on this, but it was so superficial and gave dissapointingly little information I could use in practice. Now don't get me wrong, I did learn a thing or two, but one page on exposure was less than I was hoping for.

The second half of the book (actually a bit more) is mostly spent explaining how to use picture editing software. My issue is that he doesn't direct his attention towards one program, neither towards PC or Mac. Which in my oppinion makes the information provided hard to actually use. He might spend a page explaining what the dodge and burn tools are (in general), but I suspect that once you fire up your software of choice to actually convert that knowledge into practice, you will have no idea what to do and results will be poor. I wanted to use Photoshop so I also bought "The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby. Now THAT book was just brilliant in letting you know how to actually do something with your pictures. It was not at all too advanced, he just spends a few more pages for explaining screenshots and procedures in an easy to understand step-by-step fashion. There are other similar books for other software. If you want to start learning some editing skills I strongly suggest buying a more specialized book like that instead.

All in all the book had a bit of what I was looking for, but it was discussed over maybe 80 pages. The rest was decent enough to read, but did nothing to make me a better photographer or able to work the digital darkroom.