You may be passionate about photography, and own a digital SLR with perhaps more advanced equipment as well. But do the photographs you take with this powerful equipment come out as well as you'd like? With this fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, you learn how to apply the techniques and principles of classic photography so you can make great images with today's digital equipment. Harold Davis, author and renowned fine art photographer, puts the focus in Practical Artistry on light and exposure, two crucial concepts you need to understand and master if you are to truly capture the images you see. Davis presents a generous number of his own images in each chapter, complete with technical information and an explanation of what he was trying to achieve. These striking photographs not only illustrate the lesson at hand, but also serve as inspiration for your own efforts. Browsing the photographs alone will tell you a lot. Topics covered in this book include:

• Camera, lenses, and equipment

• Understanding exposure and measuring light

• Relationship of aperture to shutter speed and ISO

• Working with depth of field

• Natural lighting, studio lighting, and the use of flash

• Light and color temperature

• Working with white balance

• Photographing at dawn or dusk

• Photography at night

• Capturing motion

• Telling a story with your image

• Capturing people, places, and things

• Setting up a digital workflow

• RAW processing and double RAW processing

• Adjusting exposure and reducing noise

• Black & white photography

• And much more

Concise and to the point, Practical Artistry clearly demonstrates that photography, essentially, is writing with light, and that the type of images you produce depend on the many choices you have for using that skill. Harold Davis gives you an array of choices in full living color.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 18 Ratings

Disappointing - 2009-11-12
Reviewer Rating:
I must admit that I approached this book with some misgivings. Hundreds, if not thousands of books have been written on the subject of light and exposure. Some of them are excellent (the Time-Life series of photography books come to mind). This raised the question `Why do we need another such book?' My hope for this book lay in the end of the title `for Digital Photographers' and the fact that it is published by O'Reilly (the publisher of some of today's great technical texts). This book would be worth reading, I thought, if it covered the digital aspects of photography to a useful depth.

Before I get to the review, let me say the following about myself. I am an avid amateur photographer. I am faculty at a US college of medicine where I am a medical researcher and I teach microscopy and digital imaging.

1) This book is written by an amateur for less advanced amateurs. It has little to offer middle or advanced photographers.

2) I was very intrigued by the authors idea that "... this book is rich in pragmatic details. For example, you can find the exact lens and exposure settings I used for every photo in this book.... It's very reasonable to start with this book by finding a few photos that interest you, and discovering how they were made." I thought this was a wonderful idea. It is unfortunate that the book can't be used this way. Many of the pictures have obviously been extensively post-processed and no mention of this processing is made in most of the picture captions. Thus, the information presented will not permit replication of the results shown.

3) The book needs better editing. There are multiple examples of wrong page numbers or images being cited out of order.

4) In a book for beginners, I would have liked to see more side-by-side examples. For example, showing a lovely picture is fine, but if one is discussing depth-of-field it would be useful and informative to show the same composition with several depth-of-field examples. The same can be said for several shutter speeds to show the effect on the final image.

5) Many issues are treated so sparsely (i.e. the entire topic of Layers, Blending Modes and masking is covered in a small box on one page) that they are not useful. I would recommend either concentrating the book on fewer things at a greater depth or writing a longer book.
Lastly, the book contains many technical errors. This is particularly distressing since the book comes from O'Reilly. These errors will lead to confusion for the beginner since they do not know enough to ignore the obvious errors.

Taken together, I can't recommend this book.

Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers by Harold Davis - 2009-07-09
Reviewer Rating:
Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers
by Harold Davis Published by O'Reilly 2008

A Review by Barbara Hansen, Golden Gate Computer Society

Digital photography is sometimes described as painting with light. This beautifully illustrated book explains how to use a digital camera to do just that.

The first few chapters go in a detail explanation of the importance of correct exposure. The relationship of aperture, shutter speed, ISO (light sensitivity) and white balance are all discussed in great detail to explain exposure.

Harold says that: " The most fun in digital photography begins after you take the photo," but that is no excuse for taking badly exposed pictures.

Each chapter is illustrated with photographs taken by the author with all the meta data recorded and personal comments on what he was trying to do and how. It is fun just to flip thru this book viewing the beautiful shots and reading just how they were done. Since the author lives in Berkeley, most of the photographs were taken in the Bay Area and particularly in Marin, which is instructive for local photographers.

The last chapter of the book is called the Digital Darkroom and it really gets down to the nitty gritty of editing photographs in Raw. It has one of the best explanations of combining different layers of a photo using masks and blending modes. And his definition of the blending
modes such as: Color, Luminosity, Multiply, Screen and Soft light make more sense to me than anything else I have read. His discussion of Cross Processing and transforming color photos to Black and White have me eager to try out some of his techniques.

This is a beautiful book with lots of technical goodies for the avid photographer and I would recommend it for your library. Harold Davis also writes a popular Photoblog 2.0 at [..] as well as other books on photography.

5 Stars

Excellent Book to Understand Exposure - 2008-10-22
Reviewer Rating:
I am new to photogrpahy and ended up buying so many books. But this one is really amazing, the way author has explained the exposure and its three components is very helpful.No other photographer is so comfortable/open to discuss in detail how they took those pictures. I also read his blog and the way author describes how to take pictures with creative exposure and enhance those pictures in Photoshop is also examplary... no one else tells the whole story.Though I am a starter, I am sure even the pros would find those things very helpful.
His knowledge of nature and science is also wonderful and he relates it to photography really well.
I wish i had bought this book earlier, and also that those camera companies contact him to write their extended user manuals.

Beautiful Providing a Decent Introduction to Digital Photography - 2010-02-04
Reviewer Rating:
Perhaps one of the best statements of the book is found in the author's introduction: "In recent years, the art and craft of photography has changed beyond recognition. Today's photographer is one part digital artist and one part photographer."

Most budding photographers are looking for quick answers to creating stunning photos with their newly purchased dSLR. Davis does a decent job covering the basic topics you will see in many books targeting the beginning photographer. Light an exposure is photography at its core. The writing style provides easy to understand explanations of the topics, complimented with beautiful example photos that an beginning photographer would be both impressed by yet also feel like they could recreate.

The book as a whole succeeds in providing an approachable overview on a lot of topics, and for that I give it decent marks. I did feel the writing was lacking it keeping me hooked into the flow of the book. My tendency was to look at the photos and skim the written material if the headline caught my eye.

Practical Artistry: Light and Exposure for Digital Photographers - 2009-10-15
Reviewer Rating:
A great book, especially for the beginner. It gives a good set of examples of situations and solutions. It is a lot of help and well written.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Desktop Publishing
Graphics

Sub-Categories:
Desktop Publishing > Print Production
Graphics > Digital Photography
Graphics > Desktop Image Processing