Great Book

[Skhilled]

I did not see a specific place to put info about books but since this is about tutorials and this books may help you, I figured this was a good a place as any. Please, feel free to move it, if needed.

I've seen this book highly recommended on several sites that have great tutorials, so I thought I'd share it here. You should be able to buy it at any books store and can buy it online. He also has a few other great books as well. I've actually sat at a local Border's and glanced over a few of which I'll be getting later.

Understanding Exposure: How To Shoot Great Photographs With Any Camera by Bryan Peterson

It will show you how to take good photos in almost any situation. For instance, for sunrises and sunsets, take your reading to the left or right of the sun then re-frame and take your shot. It also has photos of what is wrong and what is right.

Me? I still could not understand 2 things. First, the relationship of the shutter, aperture and ISO...mostly how to make adjustments to all of them if I needed to change settings to get the correct exposure I wanted. Second, when people talked about my camera telling to that you can see that it is, for example, 2/3 stops overexposed. I just couldn't figure out how it was telling me this let alone know what to exactly do about it. I knew that if I viewed a photo after I took the shot to turn on the details and then I could see that it was overexposed by seeing something, like the sky, blinking or viewing the histogram which I know a bit about from using Photoshop over the years. He does an excellent job explaining those.

The second issue I had was a result of my not understanding my camera's settings, mostly. On the LCD screen, I would see and understand what it was showing me except that on the right there is a meter and showed the actual ISO directly under it. This led me to believe that the meter was the ISO meter. I'm talking about in manual mode here.

That has always bothered me because there were more "notches" on the meter than the number of ISO settings available for my camera. But after reading the first chapter of this book, and seeing the accompanying photos, I started to realize that as I moved my camera to re-frame a shot that the level on the meter continuously changed. Only then did it dawn on me that was my exposure meter and the ISO setting directly beneath it was just that, the ISO setting that I had set.

Unfortunately, Canon does not have a good manual for this camera as there are inaccuracies in the manual and on their website.  Not sure about the others cameras they sell and can't vouch for them.

The book also talks about talking a "creatively correct exposure". This is how you want the shot to come out...depth of field-wise, action (stopping the motion or not), etc. He explains that there are 6 correct exposures and one creatively correct expose. In my mind and how I see things is more toward the creative part. Now I understand how to take correct exposures I can also try to implement my creative side into them as well...since I tend to see things differently than others. That is...if my "creative side" can actually be done with a camera.