September 02, 2005
Digital Photography Hacks by Derrick Story
I bought my first O'Reilly & Associates book in 1986 at the bookstore on the Cal State Stanislaus campus where I was a Math/CS undergrad. It was a book about Usenet and I still have it, though I haven't used a news reader in close to a decade (unless you count the web interface at http://groups.google.com/, which I suppose you should now that I think about it). O'Reilly titles were always written for geeks by geeks, and this current volume is proof that they still are.
This is not a reference manual, and it's not a "how to take pictures" tutorial. It is just what the subtitle declares: "100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools". They're a wild variety of tips. How to take pictures of a white board. How to take soft focus portraits with a panty hose filter. How to take pictures of fireworks or little kids or the moon. Useful things to do with a camera phone. Common photoshop touch up operations. And lots of other stuff. You can look at the Table of Contents for yourself. I won't use every single one of these hacks, but a majority of them sound like fun to try and a bunch more are things it's good to know exist in case I'm ever in a situation to need them (like the existence of a camera mount that clamps to a partially rolled-down car window, or how to take my own passport pictures) so I will be buying a copy of this to add to my multitude of O'Reilly titles.