Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Digital Photography 2.0: Taking,...

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 480 pages
• Published by: W. W. Norton
• Edition: 2nd Edition January 22, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0393329143
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0393329148
• Book Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.9 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 3.4 pounds

Book Description
"Clear, concise, lively, well-organized and opinionated."-Popular Photography and Imaging

In this thorough revision of his best-selling guide, Rick Sammon covers all the steps in the digital photographic process. The book teaches basic technical picture taking and the art of photography, plus introductory and advanced digital techniques.

Orchestrating over 1,000 images into easy-to-read lessons, Sammon uses an approach of "learning to see and seeing to learn" with pairs of images, software screen shots, and the best photographs from his own shooting assignments.

New for this edition, all the image editing tips feature the popular Adobe Photoshop® Elements®; file format discussions now include working with Camera RAW files; and more than 170 new color images have been added. 1000 color photographs.

About The Author
Rick Sammon writes on photography, travel, and conservation. Guest host on ESPN's Photo Safari, he also has two photography series on the DIY Network and is a frequent photography workshop instructor. He lives in New York's Hudson River Valley.

Reader Reviews
I'm giving this book four stars based almost solely on Rick Sammon's enthusiasm. He is obviously a person who enjoys what he does and likes interacting with others. His writing was lively enough so I read the book in one afternoon. The bottom line problem with this guide is the same bottom line problem I'm finding in all digital photography guides I've encountered. The first thing they want to do is teach you a little basic photography knowledge and the next thing they do is tell you how to use Photoshop tricks to create "artful photos" that, in effect, minimizes the need for knowledge of basic photography. Photography is more than tricks and "secrets of the pros" and Photoshop is a fine tool for photographers to augment their work. Unfortunately, most digital photography teaching vehicles today emphasize the ghastly and tasteless manipulations in Photoshop and fail to emphasize learning basic camera technique. To Rick Sammon's credit, he does provide a measure of how to use tools available for in-camera control as opposed to relying solely on Photoshop corrections and manipulations in post production. But when the chapters on the various Photoshop tools and manipulations come into play, it's still a lot of ghastly and tasteless trickery that takes center stage. The higher quality, professional and advanced amateur digital cameras that are available today are so sophisticated, it's difficult to really screw up your pictures if you have a basic grasp of photography and how to use the camera's features. Despite this, a lot of people are screwing up their pictures in post production by relying on photo editing software. Sammon's examples in the Photoshop Elements portions of this book point this out very clearly. The "before Photoshop" photos are often preferable to the "after Photoshop" photos. I'm not speaking of basic operations such as minor color corrections, cropping, sharpening, etc. I'm speaking of the use of filters and borders and the cut-and-paste collages that Sammon often refers to as "artistic" which are, in fact, perfect examples of over-processed pseudo-art. I'm not really picking on Rick Sammon here. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I've enjoyed Sammon's writing and photography in other publications as well. It's just that we really don't need more people playing around with their computers to create the photographic equivalent of black velvet paintings. Comment | | (Report this)