Review: Sammon’s Guide to Digital Photography

Rick Sammon's Guide to Digital Photography

The complete title here is actually Rick Sammon’s Complete Guide to Digital Photography: 107 Lessons on Taking, Making, Editing, Storing, Printing, and Sharing Better Digital Images, and the book pretty much delivers on that. It covers an impressive breadth of material related to digital photography –everything from buying a camera and other equipment to composition and lighting to editing and touching up in the digital darkroom.

What I like about Sammon’s writing is that it’s very approachable, easy to read, and occasionally entertaining. Each of the 107 chapters is only a few pages long at most, so they’re easy to breeze through and skim if you’re using the book later as a reference. I also like that the work is replete with –who’d have thought?– photographs. Just about every single point Sammon makes about photography or digital image editing is accompanied by one or more photographs or screenshots. This is good, because for photography it’s as important to show as it is to tell.

What I didn’t like was that while the book has impressive breadth, it lacks depth in some areas where I’d like it and spends too much time on areas of no use to me. I’d really have appreciated more nuts and bolts chapters on creative composition, lighting, or tricky situations like shooting in high contrast scenes or in low light. Other chapters are pretty much worthless to me. I don’t need, for example, a discussion about choosing a Mac or PC or how to select a printer. Those are foregone conclusions for me and probably most readers. A lot of the other chapters also felt like filler to me –they barely introduced a topic before ending, having only covered the bare basics.

Where I did get great value was the section on using Photoshop to enhance and alter pictures. Sammon covers simple topics like cropping, but also goes into more advanced stuff like adjustment layers, curves, filters, plug-ins, and layers. Just learning about how to use the dodge and burn tools to lighten or darken parts of the photograph selectively was great, but I also learned to do things like change the saturation, brightness, or contrast of an entire photo or better yet just part of it.

Take this picture of my Mom and Sammy, for example. In the original, my Mom’s orange sweater was really bright to the point of being distracting. But thanks to what I learned in this book, I desaturated her sweater without losing any of the vibrancy of the blue sofa cover behind her. I used a similar technique here to brighten the cash register in the foreground without washing out the rest of the photo. I also used Sammon’s chapter on getting a better conversion to black and white to create this photo, which would have looked flat and less interesting had I created the black and white using the methods I was used to.

So overall, I think this is a pretty good book for beginner to intermediate photographers to have lying around. It’s got some solid, if brief, advice on the basics, and the digital darkroom stuff is really indispensable if you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

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