Customer Reviews

How Digital Photography Works (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Anyone with a solid background in photography and digital imaging can tell you that popular digital photography resources - particularly online, and particularly those with unmoderated user forums - are filled with partially (or entirely) incorrect information on this topic. As a rule, most people who use digital cameras on a regular basis, do not understand how they work... even when they think they do.

This book is a quick study and a tremendous aid in understanding the underlying technology, mechanisms and science behind digital photographs. There is also quite a bit of useful information on how lenses work, and rightly so as they are at least 50% of the "picture quality equation". The illustrations alone are worth the cost of the book. The writing style is down-to-earth but not dumbed down, which is refreshing.

My only complaint about this book is its layout. There is SO much information to convey about each aspect of the photography process, that the illustrations and text tend to get badly jumbled in some sections. Attempts were made to use a "1-2-3 bullet point approach", and it works in most areas but not all. Since much of the information necessarily must be conveyed on a single page, the solution for the next edition is to make the book slightly larger. About 2" in both directions would enable the effective use of empty space, allow larger fonts (some are extremely small), and in general make for a better layout.

Still, I have formal (collegiate) education in the field of photography, have worked in the industry for over five years, and still found many pages in this book to be a huge help / great refresher. Unless you are an engineer working for Nikon or Kodak, there is something in this book that will increase your understanding of digital photography. Definitely recommended.

This book is well written and loaded with great illustrations that get you inside the mechanics of the digital camera. It is clear enough for the hobbiest and detailed enough for a scientist. The graphics really tell the story. You can move as quickly as you want through the design for a quick reference or slow down and make yourself an expert. Your next camera will be bought on understanding the technology rather than on the marketing hype.

This is a great resource for educating yourself about digital photography. Easy to read and a must for anyone who wants to educate themselves before purchasing a digital camera.

Great reference- a great deal of information clearly written and well illustrated. Fabulous book.

seriously. everything is explained very clearly with a step-by-step process on each page that explains how something works or what makes something happen. the colorful illustrations and excellent and so well laid out, that you can often just look at them and figure out what's going on.

i give this book a 5 out of 5 because before this book even starts explaining how DSLRs work, it lays the groundwork and thoroughly shows you how film cameras, lenses and light all interact and work together- which you must understand first, if you really want to understand how DSLRs work. but, if you choose, you can just jump to a section and learn about it without difficulty.

i got this book as a gift for someone and am now ordering one for myself, because i miss reading it!

This is one of those books which promises much on the surface but if you scratch the surface a little bit, you will soon realise that it's really incomplete, and worse, misleading.

Errors and irrelevant or outdated info litter the pages of this book.

Examples:

1. Autofocus technology section: active autofocus is pretty much not in use with compact digital cameras these days. Passive contrast detect autofocus is pretty much the norm with such cameras. So this section is pretty much outdated at best, and at worse, utterly worthless in describing how your everyday point and shoot digital of today works (and mind you, this is the 2007 Second Edition I am talking about). Hell, the majority of compact digital cameras have been using contrast detect AF for at least the last 5 years!!!!! Worse yet: the author then erroneously describes DSLRs as using contrast detect AF when he should be describing the workings of the ubiquitous 'phase detect' AF common to all DSLRs on the market. Good grief man: Phase detect AF has been the norm in SLRs for well over a decade!

2. Light metering section: whilst not wrong, it's utterly useless in helping the neophyte understand how modern multi-segmented pattern metering operate. This is the default metering type across most consumer cameras and frequently used in DSLR cameras today (and for goodness knows how long already). Points no. 1 and 2 on Page 70 on "How Light Meters See the World" is a hodgepodge of pseudo-correct information that is largely irrelevant and meaningless.

3. The author obviously doesn't understand basic photography: page 65 "a setting of f/8 lets in as much light as f/4". Yeah right.

4. Olympus sensor self-cleaning system (page 136/137) - the vibration is 35,000 times per sec and not 350,000 times. The strips are also NOT replaced through regular cleanings of the camera! The whole idea of the Olympus dust cleaning system is so that the user does NOT have to do any regular dust cleaning ;-) Having the words "Oscillation circuit" pointing to the vibrating glass is meaningless.

5. Four thirds system (page 122): the author tries to explain to the reader in point 3 that the 4/3 system lenses use special glass to get the light parallel to "hit the pixels more directly". Uh huh? Look it's not the glass per se - it's about telecentricity of the optical design of the 4/3 Olympus lenses that's does this.

I should have seen the warning light go off not to buy this book when the author quotes Ken Rockwell!

It's clearly not hard to get a book published these days it seems.

So you may know how to make a great shot, but actually understand how your camera works makes you get more out of what you are trying to achieve. Sure it is important to understand about F-Stop and all those cary over terms from the analogue world of 35 mm photography, but the internal workings of the digital camera are different from the old 35's and are worth a look.

The book is broken out into four section. While the fourth section covering ink-jet printers, monitors etc under the heading of "How Digital Print-Making Works" , is under explored and frankly, seems a peripheral subject and not really paid much more than lip service in terms of content. The other three sections are on track and full of great visuals. The sections are 1. Getting to Know Digital Camera, 2. How Digital Cameras
Capture Images, and 3. How the Digital Darkroom Works. Each section has chapters which are backed up by Downs' great artwork. The graphic from encyclopedic approach works to merge the text and graphics to get each point across. While the aforementioned sections give you a good idea of the topics covered, the value out of the books topics comes in the form of greater knowledge of your tool to get a better result. A good example of this is the section detailing how your eye can control auto-focus. Sounds futuristic, but most mid level camera SLR's have this function that follows the retina to bring in view the subject.

Some of the book has items more suitable for the technique side of photography, but the book would make a good library item or one for the tween or teenage age group who is embarking on a photographic hobby.

If you enjoy cutaway drawings this is a book to get. It is absolutely full of extremely well done cutaway drawings that do a great job of explaining the concepts being presented. While the text accompanying the drawings is quite good, you could get 90% of the information presented by only looking at the illustrations. It is also a great book to pick up and open to any arbitrary page to browse. You will inevitably learn something you didn't know on almost every page.

After reading the enthusiastic reviews of this book, and always interested in technology, I decided to purchase it. I was extremely disappointed. Some of the plus factors that are mentioned in the other reviews are correct, great big color pictures, easy to read articles, etc. Although even that is not an unmixed blessing, White gives the same amount of space (two pages) to every subject, regardless of its complexity. But that's not my main objection, rather, it's the astonishing amount of errors in this book! It's difficult to read a page without seeing an error. These range the gamet, from pointers to the pictures pointing to the wrong object, up to completely incorrect concepts. While some are minor, others show a complete lack of knowledge by the author. Pages 32 and 33, for instance, are, as Wolfgang Pauli said about another subject, "not even wrong!" And there are errors on pages 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 also. Many will conpletely confuse the beginner. It's difficult to pick out just one example, but, for instance, on page 65, referring to f stops and the amount of light left in, he states ""Each smaller f-stop lets in twice as much light as the next larger f-stop and, of course, a setting of f/8 lets in half as much light as f/4." Any photographer can tell you that f5.6 lets in half as much light as f/4 and f/8 half of that. The entire book is saturated with this sort of thing. I see that it is the Second Edition, I shutter (pun intended) to think what the first edition contained. If this book sounds of interest, I suggest you wait for about the eighth edition, maybe by then they will have gotten it right. Too bad, it has potential.
Dave C