Photography books?

[xela]

A friend mentioned the other day that she'd been thinking of taking a photography class or at least looking into a couple of books, which reminded me that I've had much the same thought kicking around the back of my head for a while now. When I was in college I was able to check-out an old-school manual Pentax for a term from the media center, and and a friend who was enthusiastic about photography to the point of evangelism taught me a few things. I played in the darkroom enough to be certain that I was not the least bit interested in that side of photography, which seemed in those days to be something you had to be into if you were going to be remotely serious. So I pretty much dropped it as a hobby, in spite of having made a few photographs people genuinely liked, including a candid portrait of a girl in my theater workshop that she used as her headshot and an available-light shot of a jazz guitarist performing in a small club that he asked to use for the cover of his first album. Both of those were the kind of picture I really enjoy taking: Capturing a person in a real, candid moment.

Fast-forward to the 21^st century and cheap consumer digital cameras. It's possible now to be serious about photography without having to play with a chemistry set in a darkened room. As I know some of you are. So: What's a good guide? I should presumably learn something about different kinds of light; about filters; about composition. What else? If you had a bright 15 year old niece or nephew who'd just gotten a digital SLR and wanted to be serious about it, what book would you give them?

Comments

[eichin.livejournal.com]

My question would be "why would someone *start* with a DSLR"... I did photography and darkroom as a hobby back in highschool and a little bit in college, and gave it up mostly because "learning by making mistakes" was way too costly. I didn't pick it up again until cheap (and I do mean cheap) digicams started to appear... and then took a key piece of advice from a photographer friend: "the way to get 10 amazing pictures... is to take 1000 pictures." Once you're taking lots of pictures, looking at them and thinking about "why do I like this one more than that one", at which point you have some hard examples to tie into basic vocabulary about framing and light, and you've got a good starting feedback path; you're also more likely to have shots that have subject matter that interests other people who can then be easily convinced to critique the shot itself (as long as you have a thick skin and/or good filters :-)

The reason I see a DSLR as a problem, in this case, is that with a cheap digicam (and by that I mean "$300 or less" which these days means "5MP, 3x zoom, 2G SD, fits in a pocket" and oh look, that's inexpensive but not actually *cheap* anymore) you can *always* have it on you (and by that I mean every single day... you grab your wallet and your camera when you get dressed; anything that doesn't meet that constraint is either too big or too pricy) and you can take 20 to 100 pictures a day without any further investment.

Of course there are lots of contexts where you can take *better* pictures with a DSLR, and there are certainly lenses I covet... but if you're trying to put effort into learning new things about photography (rather than SLR gadgetry in particular), I heartily recommend the "take pictures all the time" path.

(Checking my logs, I took about 1000 pictures in the first half of 2006, damaged my (3-year old) camera in an accident, and then took another 4500 pictures with the replacement. I've only taken about 500 pictures with it this year, so I'm slacking some :-)

[eichin.livejournal.com]

Since I posted this, I've taken another 1400 pictures, at least partly due to "discovering" Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge as a good source of scenery and wildlife, though the Lafayette Square construction has also picked up the pace. About 10% went on flickr, though that was as much "help me identify this" as "I think this is good enough to share". As you can see, it's an established pattern. Have you started shooting?

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I haven't been taking all that many, partly because you're absolutely right about the DSLR: Going out and taking pictures with it is just not a casual undertaking. And a new pocket camera is going to have to wait for me to find a job.

I've uploaded a few of my older pictures to my flickr account, and really should finish that project.