Digital Sports Photography : Take Winning Shots Every Time

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 358 pages
• Published by: Wiley September 2, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0764596071
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0764596070
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 8 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 2.3 pounds

Reader Reviews
The author is the official photographer for the International Fencing Federation. While his own experience is mainly in fencing, he also incorporates the work of other sports photographers in his book, which according to the introduction, is aimed at every photographer except full time professional sports photographers. The book is divided into four main parts. Understanding digital sports photography includes a general introduction, a section about workflow and a discussion of equipment and techniques. Shooting sports on location groups the approach to different sports depending on their venue. Working in the digital studio discusses the requirements for digital processing and processing techniques. A section on presentation talks about everything from printing through earning money from your photographs to legal issues. I found the section on shooting sports on location the most useful. For example you can turn to the chapter on indoor competition sports and find a number of hints that may prove useful in such a venue. Unfortunately, other parts of the book are less useful. While the author is undoubtedly a good photographer, his organizational skills as a writer are weak. He will repeat the same advice over and over. For example on a single page he will ask "[W]hat if you inadvertently click the wrong setting and delete all the photos..?" and then a few sentences later say "Don't be in a hurry. More than one photographer has deleted a card without meaning to...." He often gives wrong advice. For example, he states that you cannot upgrade from Photoshop Elements to the full blown Photoshop. Yet for some time now, and as of the date of this writing, Adobe has given a $100 discount to Photoshop Elements owners on the purchase of Photoshop. He also gives contradictory advice. On one page he recommends establishing a digital darkroom with "a good-quality monitor, preferably the CRT kind, not an LCD display." A few pages later he says "a good quality LCD will be perfectly sufficient." His discussion of digital processing could have been limited to a discussion of some of the possibilities of Photoshop. Instead he provides just enough instruction to confuse any would-be user. But the biggest problem is that he leaves out the discussion of factors that are important to new digital photographers. For example, one of the tools that separates film from digital in the control of exposure is the in-camera histogram. Yet there is no mention of the facility until the chapter on darkroom processing and then it is given short shrift. For another example, digital cameras shoot in various formats like Raw and JPEG, which is not as flexible for post-processing as Raw but creates smaller picture files. Digital cameras store picture files in a buffer before they write the data to a memory card. When the buffer is full, the camera will not take a photograph. For this reason sports photographers, who often shoot in long bursts, prefer JPEG so that they can store more pictures in the buffer. Timacheff does not even suggest that this might be a reason for selecting JPEG over Raw. If you purchase this book for the tips on shooting in sports locations, you may find it useful. Otherwise, you will probably be disappointed. Comment | | (Report this)