Digital photography's missing manual

New York Times tech columnist and camera critic David Pogue attempts to take the mystery out of digital photography in O'Reilly Media's new release, David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual.

In fairly concise, jargon-free terms, Pogue works to explain shooting, editing, and organizing pictures, and distributing them to your audience.

"These days, digital photography *is* photography. But even the cheapest pocket camera has over 100 features, half of which are never decently explained anywhere. I mean, come on, read the photo magazines: 'Boost the ISO to 1,600, dial up the aperture, or change the exposure compensation by 1/3EV.' Huh?" he notes.

And here, from the introduction of the new $24.99 book, are some of the subjects covered.

Part 1, The Camera, distills which features are worth looking for, and which are just marketing blather.

Part 2, The Shoot, is a course in photography and digital cameras. These chapters cover composition, lighting, shutter speed, aperture, when to use the flash, eliminating blur, and how your digital camera controls all of these parameters.

Part 3, The Lab, covers the fundamentals of getting your photos into iPhoto or Picasa, organizing and filing them, searching them, and editing them.

Part 4, The Audience, covers the many ways you can present photos: as a slide show, prints you order from the Internet or make yourself, a published custom book, a Web page, an e-mail attachment, a slide-show movie that you post on the Web, a photo gift, and so on.