Welcome to How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera, Second Edition. This is not your typical book on digital photography—I wrote it to answer all the questions I had about digital cameras and photography techniques when I was starting out.
I’ve been a photographer for about 20 years, and in that time I’ve read a lot of books and magazines about the art and science of photography.
I figured that this was a good time to write a book that would hopefully explain it all in the space of a few hundred pages. A tall order, I know.
Nonetheless, I know what it feels like to have a new digital camera and search fruitlessly for the answers to seemingly obvious questions.
I’ve read too many books that make passing references to “control your depth of field with the aperture” without explaining what either the aperture or depth of field actually is.
Or mention that you need a lot of pixels to print an 8 × 10-inch picture without ever telling you how many pixels you actually need.
So when I wrote this book I mapped out all the things I thought you might need to know. I went right to the beginning and decided to cover photography techniques like lighting, composition, and close-ups.
And hopefully you’ll find that the book walks you through the key steps of using a digital camera—from working with memory cards, to file formats, to editing images on a PC, to printing, and finally, to sharing your images.
The world of digital photography is changing fast. It’s just crawling out of its infancy, but it has a long way to go before digital is as common—or easy to use—as a 35mm point and shoot camera.
But this is a great time to purchase and use a digital camera, and I hope that some of my enthusiasm for the digital medium comes through.
I love the freedom and flexibility that a digital camera gives me; armed with my Olympus e10 or Nikon CoolPix 995, I can take pictures without worrying about buying film or using it before it expires.
I can instantly preview my work and download just the images I want to keep. And I particularly like the fact that I can print 8 × 10- or 13 × 19-inch enlargements exactly the way I want without trying to convey imprecise instructions to some tech in a photo shop. I’ve even used a Nikon CoolPix 990 underwater when I scuba dive, and that, too, is a whole new and exciting world of photography that is made dramatically easier with digital cameras.
I wrote this book so that you could sit down and read it through like a novel if you’d like to—but I realize few people will actually do that. If you’re looking for specific information, I’ve organized the book so topics should be easy to find.
