Be prepared to spend money to take advantage of hacks
Weaknesses: A surprisingly large percentage of the hacks require you to spend money on devices or software. To take best advantage of this book you should own an SLR camera, Photoshop, and a camera phone. Some of the advice, such as fill flash, is drawn from standard photographic techniques that you could get from any book.
Strengths: Here and there one can find useful techniques. For example, he has good ideas on eliminating red eye. Some of the recommended items are inexpensive and worth looking into. The book also does a good job of telling the advantages and disadvantages of the devices and software he recommends.
Excellent Book, Very Clever Ideas
I was very pleasantly surprised to finally get a book on digital photography that was page after page, completely full of all new ideas! The title says it all. In this book you will find various work arounds, short cuts and generally smarter way of doing things. Lots of insiders tips that the pros know, but the rest of us plebs don't.
This is one book you will come back to again and again. Extremely useful!
Enjoy
Useful Hacks for you digital camera
Digital Photography Hacks is a part of O'reilly's hacks series, which provide tricks and solutions for different fields. This book gives you tips and tricks when dealing with your digital camera.
I read this book after reading Digital Photography Guide for the same writer, Direck. So, I found myself comparing between the two books and found the Digital Photography Hacks is an extension for the Digital Photography Guide. These tips and tricks complete your knowledge with some useful methods to create professional photos using tools and things around you.
If you know your camera well, you will find this book very useful and open your mind for new tricks to produce professional photos. However, if you were a beginner in digital photography I would prefer to start with Direck's Digital Photography Guide.
Useful Tips, But Lots of Tips are Neither Hacks nor Industrial-Strength
I am an amateur photographer and I did learn a number of useful things from this book. However, I am rating it a 3, primarily because it contains few information on what I really bought this book for: to take better photos using my digital camera. I got the Digital Photography Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition by the same author at the same time as this book, and that one taught me more about how to take better digital photos.
There are really cool and useful stuff written in this book like eliminating bars from animal cages and using pantyhose to get some special effects; good suggestions on using tripods and flashes. These are what makes this book worthwhile.
But then, this book also contains lots of "tips" that I do not find very useful. Perhaps it is because it lacks focus and it doesn't consider what most readers already have. Whether this book is geared towards the novice photographer or someone who has a point-and-shoot or an SLR is unclear. Most "hacks" suggested by computer books will assume you only have the main software and may suggest you download few additional ones that are mostly free. This book has a number of tips that need additional equipment costing more than $100. I wanted to try out taking portraits using two external flashes as this book suggested, only to find out that the two external flashes can cost me $500!
Furthermore, there are a few suggestions that although useful, I find to be inappropriately labeled as an industrial-strength hack. Yes, an iPod can be used to store your photos. Even if there may be iPod owners who may have missed that, I don't own an iPod and I surely know it can store photos already even before this book told me so. It is cool that you can take photos and use your camera phone to communicate in a foreign country, but again, this info did nothing to make me a better photographer
Neat Little Photo Book
Be prepared, this book has no real theme. It is a hodgepodge of interesting stuff. The photoshop section is very good, which is surprising, as that is not the focus of the book. However, I learned a good deal from that section. Some of this stuff most people will never use, but it definately gets you thinking. My favorite was using the camera as a scanner, when you don't have one handy.
(23 reviews)
