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80 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Digital Nature Photography - - Lite, November 5, 2003
This book will prove most useful to beginning digital camera users who are moderately interested in nature photography. The author covers the process from taking the picture to manipulating the image in the computer. More advanced photographers should look elsewhere.The book is divided into chapters first dealing with photography principles, like light and color, and then into chapters dealing with specific subjects, like sunrise and sunset. Each chapter is then broken up into subheadings, each of which gets a page or two. The author has tried to keep the information and guidance general so that it can be helpful to all digital camera users. The material is easily read. Unfortunately, his approach often creates broad generalizations that are of little use. Unlike film, where, after taking a picture, the medium can be brought to a photofinisher who will finish the job of creating a paper image or slide, digital media usually require some sort of downloading from the camera to a computer, and then a printer. While this process can be very simple for the user, (it's possible to download your pictures right to a printer, although to get the most from the digital process, some manipulation is usually desirable). The author recognizes this by showing a couple of before and after images that he has manipulated with Photoshop software. Unfortunately, in this chapter, he goes into a level of technical detail far beyond that contained elsewhere in the volume that only someone trained in Photoshop will understand. . In addition, I think the author may leave the impression that Photoshop's main use is altering reality. While that is one use, I consider the program to be designed to allow you to make a photograph look the way you envisioned it at the time you took the picture. A problem with the approach Cox takes is that anyone interested in the control that digital photography provides over the image will be unsatisfied. For example, many digital cameras provide histograms of the picture taken. (Histograms are graphic representations of the distribution of light values in a picture.) The histogram is perhaps the single most potent tool offered by the digital photography, allowing photographers to insure they got the best exposure possible for their vision. Yet there is not one reference to histograms in the entire volume In summary, if you are a beginner, interested in taking digital nature pictures, but not ready to immerse yourself too deeply in the technology, this will be a fine book for you. For those who want to delve more deeply, I can't recommend a single book. On the general topic of nature photography, John Shaw's "Nature Photography Field Guide" is outstanding, although there is no consideration of digital procedures. To examine what makes digital photography different from film photography and how to capitalize on the differences, I recommend "Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures with Your Digital Camera" by Mikkel Aaland (although I'm sure there are even better volumes out there with which I'm not familiar). Finally, for learning Photoshop I recommend "Photoshop Artistry" by Barry Haynes. This last provides a series of tutorials on Photoshop aimed specifically at photographers. It will take a while to work through but there's really no quick way to learn this most important piece of software for the digital photographer.
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