The Betterphoto Guide to Digital Photography (Amphoto Guide Series) by Jim Miotke Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Betterphoto Guide to Digital Photography (Amphoto Guide Series)
Book Review: Excellent Book
Summary: 5 Stars
I had two people (both semi-professional photographers) look at this book and they both agreed that it was an excellent book to help new photographers. Very happy I bought it.Book Review: Just great!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I haven't complete my reading on this book but I have to say that I do not regret at all this purchase. I just got aroound the middle of the book and I've learned alot of things that I had no clue. My pictures have greatly improved. I made some deep research on different books before purchasing and finally decided to buy this one after reading comments and specially after seeing by myself the type of pictures taken by the author on his website www.betterphoto.com. Now, I'm completely decided to go ahead and buy another of this author's books since I'm convince that you really learn from them.Book Review: Great book despite talking about point and shoot cameras
Summary: 4 Stars
This book was really helpful. I've been into photography for a couple years now. I enjoyed the time spent on composition and technique a lot. He spent some time going over the basics, which was a good review, but the creative side of the book (although smaller) was much more helpful.
Definitely a book I will come back to over the years.
Book Review: Wonderful Book!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is really great for beginners. Very easy to read and follow the instructions! Book Review: Competent but Mediocre
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this book--my first about photography because--because of all the positive reviews. The writing is clear and competently explains the most basic concepts of photography. I think those explanation would make useful primer for someone wanting to exploit the capabilities of a point-and-shoot camera. But for anyone wanting more help understanding the greater potential of a dsrl, or even to do interesting stuff with a point-and-shoot, the book is embarrassingly simple.
On the up side, it includes many photographs illustrating such photographic princles as are covered. On the downside, those photographs are uninspired, dull, predictable, and bland. Implicitly, the photographs Miotke uses show us novices what we can achieve if we apply his principles. But those photographs look like what a lot of people produce with ordinary point-and-shoots and without reading any books, so what does Miotke offer?
Not that these photographic principles are themselves eye-opening. Miotke spends some time, for example, explaining that sometimes to improve the framing of a subject, we should get closer to it. Wow! He illustrates this with a picture of a cowboy putting a saddle on a horse. He points out that that picture is kind of ordinary, so his inspiration is to take a tight shot of one of the studded leather saddle straps. Now, that studded strap did look cool, but a better picture? I'm not so sure about that. They both looked pretty point-and-shooty, pretty daddy-playing-with-the-camera-on-the-family-vacation to me.
So much of the praise for this rather ordinary book is so extravagant and uncritical that my suspicion is that at least some of those 5-point reviewers are shills from the "Betterphoto" enterprise. I mean, the book ain't that great.