World Photo Adventure - Guides and Instruction Books

Guides and Instruction Books

Guides and Instruction Books :

Sometimes I think everyone writing about digital photography is either a Klingon or an intimate of Stephen Hawkins. Whatever, none of them seem to have any idea of photographic terms. The usual thing is the beginner scours the bookshelves eager to grab anything which has a title beginning “An Idiot’s guide to…Blaa Blaa.” Beware! This is a publishers marketing ploy. Starting the title with the term “Idiot” will push the sales figures into the best sellers’ lists. There are millions of us out here, desperate to learn how to switch on our new computer, let alone how to get a print out of our digital camera. Reading

I know, I have a shelf full of these instruction books, all about 500 pages long and two inches thick, whole rain forests have been sacrificed in their production. When I embarked on my digital adventure I would look for the latest title. I wanted an “Idiots’ Guide for two year old mentally retarded brick walls”. I would find it, rush home, shout “Eureka!” as I rushed to the keyboard. Right, switch on, load a picture onto the screen… Yes my previous study had paid off, after six months I had learnt to switch the P.C. on, load Photoshop and find a file. O.K. not always the right file but what the heck. Risking a hernia I would lift the new wonder book onto the work desk and open it at the index. Right, first things first, the image need a bit of adjustment to the brightness and contrast. O.K. look in the index for brightness, chances are that “Brightness and Contrast” won’t appear. Paper could be saved omitting these so called indexes, they have almost a 100% ability to dream up new terms for those we older photographers grew up with. So you flip through hundreds of pages until you see a section marked “Image Adjustment” suddenly you feel lucky. Chapter, “Other Adjustment Tools” A rush of relief... “Crop and Resize the image to the destination size, then adjust the levels in the new layer after you have adjusted the curves and flatten the image ....” You really must remember to open the window before you throw the book out of it. It’s the same with Camera instructions. The Leica Digilux 2 is a very simple camera and yet its instruction book is 100 pages long, the Nikon D100 twice that. And all of them are written by people with PhDs in gobbledegook. Does anyone ever read these things? I start off with the best intentions in the world and usually reach for the camera or key board and start pressing buttons furiously after reading the first three lines, or fall asleep from terminal boredom.

But never fear; help really is at hand. I am at the moment preparing the really easy guide for idiots and those of a Ludite mentality. I absolutely guarantee that my instructions will reveal all, I promise.

et me assure you that if I can do it anyone can. Four years ago Annie and I gave up living on our boat and came ashore. We found a house and during the inspection Annie asked which room I wanted for the darkroom. This got me thinking, I had heard vaguely about people who were using a P.C. and doing it all that way, so I thought I might give it a try. When I suggested it to Annie she fell over, laughing like the proverbial drain. “You? You?” she gasped “You, work a computer? This morning you fell out with hole-in-the-wall cash dispenser”

Don’t fret. One purpose of this web site is to help people enjoy their photography at all levels. But, and I think this is important, we are photographers not technicians or computer geeks. Plain advice and help in plain language is what you will find here and if we can’t help we will do our uttermost to find somebody who can.

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