Product Description

The classic, picture-perfect manual for taking great photos gets a freshening up, with a brand-new, special section devoted to digital. Written by the world’s bestselling author on photography, it’s an image-filled and practical guide for beginners eager to start shooting—but who feel put off by technical jargon and complicated techniques. And Hedgecoe focuses on the most commonly owned starter cameras, too, as well as offering an invaluable list of “Twenty Ways to Improve Your Photos”  and 250 of his own inspiring pictures.
 
“Hedgecoe uses the most commonly owned beginners’ cameras...to demonstrate how the camera works in simple, nontechnical language.”—Photographic Trade News
 
“The lessons are easy, given the well-laid-out visual examples.”—Booklist
 
 “One of the best introductory texts...my highest recommendation.”—Shutterbug

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #721157 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

Two words: stay away
John Hedgecoe is a veteran photographer with years of valuable experience, but he keeps publishing what I call "very pretty but very useless" photo books, and this is (yet another) one of them. The book is beautifully published (as are his even more lavish DK books), and very well written, but the information is often quite out of date (he teaches you how to load a roll of film; but the words PIXEL or MEGAPIXEL or CMOS do not even appear in the index; on the other hand, the term CLOUDS has 5 multi-page references - go figure).

It is worth noting that while the book claims to be for beginners,it illustrates all points by using National Geographic-caliber photos. No - even if you follow the advice, your photos will not look like that. Hedgecoe is an accomplished, very experienced photographer - there is no doubt about that, but the photos included here were shot using equipment that costs thousands ("teaching" you how to take pictures like that w/ a point-and-shoot is cruel and pointless), and even one brief look at many portraits suggests that elaborate flash setups or professional studio lighting was used - using this stuff to illustrate how to use a point-and-shoot is a joke, and will leave you frustrated and disappointed. Even worse (perhaps very tellingly) virtually none of dozens of beautiful photographs are accompanied by ANY shooting info. (type of camera, speed/aperture, lens, etc.). I'd venture a guess that not one of them was shot using anything like the basic PandS cameras shown in the intro. How are you supposed to learn if you can't even know this basic info about the photos used as "examples"? What a joke!

If you want a coffee-table book, there are better ones; if you want to learn how to take better photos, try something else (e.g., Peterson's Learning Exposure or any Lee Frost books).