Product Description

This book/eBook package is your guide to getting more interesting and creative photos with the 6 megapixel 12x zoom Canon PowerShot S3 IS. (The book also has links to 50 or so animations BUT you need broadband Internet access to play them. They will not play over a dial-up connection.) If you want to learn more about the concepts of photography, this book/ebook is for you. It discusses every camera setting on this amazing camera in a clear, well-illustrated style, but it also does much more. You'll see why and when you use specific settings, not just how to set them. You ll find that this guide helps you quickly master your camera so you ll be getting the kinds of photos you hope for. The book is printed in black & white and has a well-liked spiral binding that lets the book lie flat or be folded back. The accompanying eBook on a CD disc is a printable and searchable full-color version of the same book in Adobe's popular PDF format. It can be read on a PC or Mac using the free Acrobat Reader or any current Web browser. Just some of the things you'll learn are how to take pictures in fully automatic point and shoot mode and how your camera captures digital images; how to play back and manage your images; use buttons, dials, and menus; control image size and quality; shoot continuously, use all of the camera s exposure modes and exposure controls to get photos that show the scene exactly as it is, or as you want to interpret it; using histograms and the RAW format for the highest possible quality; how to control sharpness in your photographs; and how to use focus, depth-of-field, sharpness, softness, and blur creatively. Learn all about light and color and how to use them creatively. Understand how they change throughout the day and seasons, how they re affected by the weather, and how light s direction and quality affects highlights and shadows. See how to set white balance to capture colors the way you see them. Learn how to use lenses creatively when photographing

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #619751 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-02
• Released on: 2006-10-02
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 144 pages

About the Author
For the past three decades Dennis Curtin has been an editor, author, and publisher in photography and computing. His latest books on digital cameras and digital photography have been widely praised for their quality and simplicity. They have been used by most of the armed services, many police departments, and even some camera companies to train specialists in photography. On the publishing side, Dennis was editor-in-chief of one of Time-Warner's educational divisions and also held similar positions in Prentice-Hall's technology and engineering program and Prentice-Hall International. In those roles, he has worked extensively with Ansel Adams and other leading photographers of our generation. In his roles as publisher, editor, and author Dennis has been fortunate to publish or write many best-selling books in photography and computing.

Customer Reviews

like this book
I fully agree with L. Satin's review. The manual that comes lwith the camera is inadequate unless you are already familiar with digital cameras.

If you own the Canon S3 IS you need this this book

No Index-What Was He Thinking?
Nobody should ever write a technical manual without a thorough, alphabetical index at the end. If I want to find out about making movies with this camera, I should be able to find it in seconds by looking up the word Movie. No such luck here. The author includes what he calls an "index" on page vi, but it's actually just a table of contents, organized by page number. So, in order to answer my movie question, I have to scan through fifty entries until I come to "Capturing Movies". Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I was also irritated by the section on Image Stabilization, a feature of the camera that Canon thought important enough to include in the name of the camera (the IS part). The author tells us how to select one of the three settings for image stabilization, but gives us no clue why you would want one setting over another. I found out by reading the Canon supplied manual. Why did I buy this book again?

This manual does have some good sections and it contains many useful tips (if you can find them). However,for the whopping price of forty dollars, I would expect a much more detailed, professionally organized product than this. More of a glorified pamphlet than a user's manual.

A very good book
A very good book that taught me a lot about not only the Powershot S3 IS but also about digital photography. Put in a very systematic way and an easy to grasp way. I love the CD and their animation web site although a bit slow.
I recommend this book highly because the original user guide only explains the functions of each option. This book however explains why and what to do with that function.