Eric Warmenhoven

A few weeks ago, Lisa and I were in Barnes&Noble, and I decided to buy a few photography books:

The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby: This book is, as advertised, not a book about concepts and theories but rather about practical advice and tips. If you already know some of the theory, it’s pretty easy to see how it plays out in practice in this book.

Composition Photo Workshop by Blue Fier: I love the name “Blue Fier”, even though I’m probably pronouncing “Fier” wrong (”Fire”). Anyway, this book started off a little slow for me because he covers things like aperture and depth of field and focus, and shutter speed and ISO and other things I’m already fairly familiar with. When he started getting into framing and rule-of-thirds type stuff it got more interesting. He also covered several different styles of photography (landscape, macro, portrait, etc.) and so it was a pretty good introductory book.

Digital Portrait Photography and Lighting by Catherine Jamieson and Sean McCormick: I’m only half way through this book so far, and already it’s prompted me to spend hundreds of dollars on a new flash, and gotten me thinking about getting lights and umbrellas and reflectors and setting up my own miniature studio. I’ve spent the past few days trying to take portraits of Pixel and Lisa and myself, and haven’t had much success, mainly due to poor lighting (hence the flash and the dreams of better lighting equipment). When taking self portraits I’ve had such trouble getting the camera placement and focus and lighting right that I haven’t even gotten to really working on posing much. Which is fine, since I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet anyway.

There’s a portrait workshop being held in Los Gatos at the end of September that I think I’m going to enroll in, but I’m worried based on the description that I’ll have already heard most of it from the portrait book I bought. In the spring I may enroll for a photography class at the local community college as well.