Bizarre Book Cafe

It is amazing what technology can do to products, bringing in entirely new dimensions of handling and usage. Talking of digital photography, besides ushering in pathbreaking product lines in the photography industry, it has made taking pictures an add-on value for completely unrelated merchandise (read cellphones). The way it is going I won’t be surprised if soon my six year old insists on buying a toothbrush with a built-in camera.

It’s quiet amazing that the first attempt at describing how to create still images in digitized format was made at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to help astronauts safely approach and land on other planets. I still await that news, but digital photography has come a long way from the first documented prototype at Eastman Kodak in 1975 to the introduction of true digital cameras by Fuji in 1988.

The thing that intrigues me about modern digital cameras is that there are too many buttons to push. Gone are the days when you could just press the shutter and find a million things under the sun to blame the results on. Now you can control virtually everything about the snaps you click. I won’t bore you with digital photography tips (about which I know about as much as I know about the backside of Pluto). However, here are two books from one of the masters of digital photography techniques – Scott Kelby. In these books Scott demystifies the plethora of buttons and settings on digital cameras and unlocks hundreds of closely guarded secrets of professional photographers. These books are not about didactic sermons or technical jargon…these are practical hands-on tips and tools to make you click those WOW pics. You think you would like to take a look? Go here! The Digital Photography Book 1 The Digital Photography Book 2

Here are some other resources you may find useful. Check them out.