By: Erik Vlietinck
Thu, April 12, 2007 - 3:14:00
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O’Reilly published the 2nd edition of the book written by Ken Milburn on digital photography techniques. The book is a sort of personal coach for digital photographers who don’t yet know how digital photography differs from analogue.

Ken Milburn is a digital artist and an award-winning photographer who has been shotting for nearly five decades. If someone knows about digital photography, he should be the one. But digital photography is not a science; it’s an art as much as anything else. One example of this is the advise Milburn gives with respect to setting an ISO value on the camera.

Unless I read that wrong, he tells you to set the camera to ISO 200. This is already quite a high figure and on some cameras you will get noise at those levels. A Sinar large-format camera with a Sinar 75 digital back starts at ISO 50, and turning the value higher will result in noisier pictures. Of course the Sinar is used mainly in studio work where other rules apply to the workflow, but from the Sinar experience, I learned that turning down the ISO knob to the lowest possible value is a good thing.

Anyway, Ken Milburn offers other advise as well. He will teach you when to use Programmed, Manual, Aperture or Shutter Priority modes on your camera. He dedicates a large chapter to Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW. I would have liked an extra chapter on other RAW converters, but Milburn clearly wants to give a good overview rather than an in-depth discussion of digital photography.

He discusses non-destructive processing in Photoshop and a lot more advise on working with Photoshop, and finally he dedicates a whole chapter on selling photos.

If you’re new to digital photography or you are stepping up from a small, compact to a dSLR, this book is for you.