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The Basic Book of Digital Photography: How to Shoot, Enhance, and Share Your Digital Pictures Excerpt from The Basic Book of Digital Photography: How to Shoot, Enhance, and Share Your Digital Pictures

by Tom Grimm and Michele Grimm



Read This First

Digital photography is fascinating, fulfilling, and just plain fun.

Little wonder that in relatively few years it has become far more popular than film photography. (It was 1994 when the first consumer digital camera appeared.) In our fast-paced times, we all want instant gratification -- and that's what you get with digital photography. There's no more waiting for the film to be processed to see how your pictures came out. These days you can literally point and shoot a camera -- and immediately see the results.

For those of us who grew up shooting with film and making photo prints in a darkroom, it is a challenge to learn about things called pixels and image-editing programs in order to produce pictures in today's world. But once you press a digital camera's shutter button a time or two, and soon watch beautiful full-color photos appear on your computer screen or desktop printer, you're hooked.

There are two big steps to making great digital photographs: understanding how to use your camera, including the ways to compose good pictures, and knowing how to improve the results with your computer. In this book we provide many stepping-stones to help you along the path to outstanding images.

The chapters are necessarily filled with technical stuff so you'll understand all the lingo digital photographers are using these days. (Our glossary at the back of the book is very helpful, too.) But mostly we give practical hands-on advice about choosing and using digital cameras, perfecting your pictures with image-editing software, and then sharing and showing off your best digital images.

As our book title indicates, this guide is all about digital photography. Of course, because of similarities in equipment and techniques, there will be references to film photography, which might pique your interest in that time-honored approach to photographic imagery. If so, you should read our all-inclusive volume, The Basic Book of Photography, now in its fifth edition and also published by Plume.

-- Michele and Tom Grimm
San Clemente, California
January 2009

The above is an excerpt from the book The Basic Book of Digital Photography: How to Shoot, Enhance, and Share Your Digital Pictures by Tom Grimm and Michele Grimm. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.

Copyright © 2009 Tom Grimm and Michele Grimm, authors of The Basic Book of Digital Photography: How to Shoot, Enhance, and Share Your Digital Pictures