Magic Lantern Guides: Nikon F100 [Paperback]

Arthur Landt (Author), Peter Burian (Author), Peter K Burian (Author), Peter K. Burian (Author)

Book Description

Series: Magic Lantern Guides | Publication Date: January 2000

The high-performance, lightweight Nikon F100 has made a hit with the most demanding users--photographers who want professional-quality pictures. Achieve that goal! This matchless guide begins by answering frequently asked questions about the differences between the more costly F5 and this model. Familiarize yourself with all its technological capabilities--from the powerful Multi-CAM 1300 autofocus module to the 22 custom settings to the new ten-zone 3-D matrix metering that makes "intelligent" decisions on exposure. It will whet your appetite for the technical smorgasbord the F100 offers! 176 pages, 30 color illus., 95 b/w illus., 5 x 7 1/2.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Sterling (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883403618
• ISBN-13: 978-1883403614
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #140,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 119 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Far exceeded my expectations, truly enlightening, March 5, 2000

By 

Frank Paris (Beaverton, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Magic Lantern Guides: Nikon F100 (Paperback)

I have several Magic Lantern Guides, and generally speaking, they are less than inspiring, usually little more than rehashes of the manufacturers' instruction booklets: a regurgitation of all the features, perhaps a little better organized, but not explaining what the features are actually best used for, or what circumstances they are best used in, or how to achieve specific goals given the functionality of the equipment being described.

This Nikon F100 book suffers from none of these liabilities. In fact, when I started reading it, I was initially confused by how much practical, general purpose information it contained. I thought to myself, buyers of the F100 are serious amateurs and pros. Why do these readers need all this discussion of basic photographic principles? I could get that from Kodak! But the book gets into the meat of F100 operations soon enough, and every feature is described within a solid context of photographic theory and principles. You will not lose your way in this book!

I thought I was in heaven when I read the section on autofocus tracking. The main reason I bought the F100 was because I was so disappointed in the performance of my N90 (not the N90s). It couldn't track my cockatoo on the wing worth beans! So when I read that the F100 had really fast tracking autofocus, I couldn't wait to put the money together to get one. Unfortunately, however, I couldn't make heads or tails out of the instruction manual that accompanied it, and I wasn't getting much better results than I got with my old N90.

Then this little book fell into my hands, and the fog lifted from my eyes! Their description of F100 autofocus is so CLEAR. I could finally see what I was doing wrong, and all the complexities of the F100 autofocus system crystallized into something that now seemed superbly designed and superbly thought out, and truly was light years ahead of that old N90 of mine. After reading this section of the book, I quickly mastered all of the intricacies of F100 autofocus and was able to perceive it as a system with a very logical structure, and I knew exactly how to set it up to accomplish my goals, and why I was doing it. And I did accomplish my goals.

The rest of the book is of equally high quality. Far more than a catalog of technical features, you are taught what they are all for, and how they can be used in the light of standard, good photographic principles.

Some pros may be annoyed by the "elementary" photographic principles that this book reviews. But I believe that there is a huge audience for books like this, for really serious amateurs who could use some good doses of sound photographic technique, highly integrated into a penetrating description of the technical features of a piece of photographic equipment. I'd love to see a book of this caliber on the advanced Metz or Quantum flashes, so I would be able to make an informed decision about whether it would be worth my while to make the sizeable monetary investment in one of those systems for the highly challenging task I've set myself, of photographing my pet cockatoo on the wing!

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Magic Lantern Guides Nikon F100 review by J.R. Markham, May 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Magic Lantern Guides: Nikon F100 (Paperback)

Bottom line. Do I recommend that you purchase this book? Yes. Do I like this book? No.

Magic Lantern Guides are simply infuriating. This one on the Ff100 is no exception. At least half of the book is drivel that can be found in any of a thousand books written for beginners in photography. Few, if any, people who purchase a Nikon F100 are beginners in photography. Statements like "Make sure to keep a variety of films on hand..." (page 51 appear under the heading The Well-Stocked Photographer) appear throughout the book. This useless information not only is a blatant effort to increase the page count of the book; but, more importantly, it makes the reader work hard to constantly sort the wheat from the chaff.

I come to the Nikon F100 from the N90s and had little trouble figuring out most of the controls on the F100. The Nikon's F100 instruction book was fine for the few controls that I had a question about, EXCEPT for the instruction book's explanation of the auto focus area mode. After reading through this section of the F100 instruction book several time, I still did not have a good idea of what each mode is used for. So.....I purchased the Magic Lantern F100 book. It's the only book that I could find on the F100.

The section I needed in the book is a scant four pages long starting on page 82 under the heading Focus Area and AF Mode Options. The explanation of the various AF options on these four pages is better than the explanation in the Nikon F100 manual. But, it would seem to me that this section should be twenty pages, not four. The explanations are crisp and concise, too crisp and concise. There ought to be examples of how each option could be used. There ought to be diagrams of the finder display correlated with these examples. There is, by the way, a misprint in a critical place on page 83 under the heading Dynamic AF Mode [+] with Continuous Servo AF (S). The "(S)" should be "(C)".

If you have questions after going through the F100 manual, this is the only book in town. But, it would have been much better from my perspective, if I were presented not with a book 224 pages long containing material that does not belong in the book, but with a book 100 pages long that was prepared for a correctly identified target audience.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A very bad book, December 19, 2001

By 

Boguslaw Lotko (Vienna Austria) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Magic Lantern Guides: Nikon F100 (Paperback)

Poorly written book with very poor pictures. I hoped to find there much more information than in very compact (but as I now could see much better written) manual of F100. Instead I found unclear "explanations", not finished desriptions and much less technical information than in the manual. (e.g. no errors description at all)
Don't buy it! Read carefully the manual, you will save some time and money.