Photography Business Books



Photography Business Books


Photography
Business Books

What are the best books on the business of photography? What are some of the books you’ve used to help you get started and thrive in your photography business? Share your favorites, and see what others have found useful.

Find out what other people have suggested.

What are your favorite photography business books?

 

My Top Picks

Successful Self-Promotion cover

Successful Self-Promotion for Photographers: Expose Yourself Properly
Author: Elyse Weissberg
Publisher: Amphoto

FABULOUS book! One I refer to often for inspiration in my business. The author had a long career as a photographer’s representative, and knows what she’s talking about!

This book really made me get focused about exactly what I wanted by business to be about, and what image I wanted it to portray. It forced me to really think through my goals and my vision, and figure out my value proposition. The book has practical how-to tips about marketing yourself, including words on building a portfolio, and sending out marketing pieces.

I highly recommend this one!

 

Portfolios That Sell cover

Portfolios That Sell
Authors: Selina Oppenheim
Publisher: Amphoto

Another book that get s "fabulous" rating from me. I think it’s a must-have for any photographer thinking about putting together a portfolio (and that should be all of you!).

This is another book that made me think. Putting together a portfolio isn’t just collecting up your favorite images. The book gives you a really strategy to implement to select your photographs, and create new ones if you need to. It guides you through the process of positioning yourself, and lining up with what the market wants. It covers in great detail the steps for editing and arranging your images, and also includes a chapter on how to physically present your portfolio. The book wraps up with a discussion on how to actually use your portfolio as a marketing tool. Really good!!

 

 

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Next, you may want to check out other recommended photography books for inspiration.

Photo Editing Books



Photo Editing Books


What are the best photo editing books? Find out what our readers think are the best books on photography software like Photoshop, Lightroon, Aperture, NIK, GIMP etc. And feel free to share your favorite!

Find out what other people have suggested.

What photo edting books do you love?

 

My Top Picks

How to Wow cover

How to Wow: Photoshop for Photography
Authors: Jack Davis and Ben Willmore
Publisher: Peachpit Press

Note that there’s an updated version to this: "How to Wow: Photoshop CS3 for Photographers."

An oldie, but goodie, I love this book! It’s got a lot of useful techniques to punch up your images in Photoshop. Some are subtle effects, like correcting skin blemishes, or adding a little extra sharpness. Others are more "radical" ways to change your image with artistic effects. There are also some tips on creating digital frame effects for your images, and making collages.

I like the step-by-step format of the book, with illustrations at each stage of the process being described. It does help to have some prior Photoshop knowledge, as the book assumes you can navigate your way around the basic tools.

I’ve had this book for a number of years, and I still go back and refer to it.

 

 

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Those are our readers’ picks for best books on digital photography. Next, you may want to check out top picks for landscape photography books.

Best Books on Digital Photography?



Best Books on Digital Photography?


Best Books on
Digital Photography?

What are the best books on digital photography? There are so many out there that I thought it would be good to hear what you, dear reader, think! I’ll give you a couple of my picks, and then I invite you to share which digital photography books you like.

Find out what other people have suggested.

What do you think is the best digital photography book?

 

My Top Pick

The DAM Book cover

The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers
Author: Peter Krogh
Publisher: O’Reilly

How many of us have hard drives that are bursting at the seams because of all our digital image files? As photographers, we all love to make more images! The end result can be gigabytes of data and a clogged hard drive. If you want to get it all organized, this is the book for you. It walks you through a step-by-step process to get your digital chaos under control.

Krogh talks about applying metadata to your images to help you organize your images and (even better!) find them again later. He talks about physical storage media for your files, and backing up your data so you don’t have to suffer through the agony of losing your favorite images.

This book has helped me to put an effective system in place for managing my own images, and brought me peace of mind that I won’t lose any important data.

 

 

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Those are our readers’ picks for best books on digital photography. Next, you may want to check out top picks for landscape photography books.

What is a Pixel?

Learn a few digital camera basics. What is a pixel, anyway? What information does it store? How many megapixels do you need? Learn about RGB, CMYK, color depth and resolution.

What is a Pixel?

What are pixels? The word “pixel” means a picture element. Every photograph, in digital form, is made up of pixels. They are the smallest unit of information that makes up a picture. Usually round or square, they are typically arranged in a 2-dimensional grid.

In the image below, one portion has been magnified many times over so that you can see its individual composition in pixels. As you can see, the pixels approximate the actual image. The more pixels you have, the more closely the image resembles the original.

What are pixels?
What is a Pixel?
© Julie Waterhouse Photography

Resolution

The number of pixels in an image is sometimes called the resolution, even though this is a bit of a misuse of the term. If we are using the term to describe pixel count, one convention is to express resolution as the width by the height, for example a monitor resolution of 1280×1024. This means there are 1280 pixels from one side to the other, and 1024 from top to bottom.

Another convention is to express the number of pixels as a single number, like a 5 megapixel camera (a megapixel is a million pixels). This means the pixels along the width multiplied by the pixels along the height of the image taken by the camera equals 5 million pixels. In the case of our 1280×1024 monitors, it could also be expressed as 1280 x 1024 = 1,310,720, or 1.31 megapixels.

So, How Many Pixels Do I Need?

Now that we’ve answered the question “What is a Pixel?” let’s examine how many of them you need in your image.

Image resolution describes the amount of detail that an image contains. The term can be applied to digital images, film images, and prints. The bottom line is that higher resolution means more image detail.

Camera manufacturers are always trying to sell you on the number of megapixels. The fact is, from a strictly megapixel point of view, most camera phones have “enough” for the average home user.

The answer to how many pixels are “enough” depends on what you want to do with the image, and how big you want to enlarge it. As you see from the image above, which is a fairly low resolution image, when I blow it up too much, I start to see the individual pixels. That effect is called “pixelation.

Tip

There is software available to help you increase the resolution of your images artificially. It uses an interpolation algorithm which essentially fills in extra pixels with a “best guess” at the right color. Genuine Fractals by onOne Software is an excellent example of such software.

For excellent quality prints, you’d ideally like a minimum of 240 pixels per inch in each dimension. This means for a 4″x6″ print, you need 240×4 pixels in the width, and 240 x 6 pixels in the height. That’s 960px wide x 1440px high. Multiplied together, that’s 1,382,400 pixels, or approximately 1.4 megapixels. By the same token, to make decent 8″x10″ print, you’d need a 4.6 megapixel camera.

Keep in mind that for a point and shoot camera, beyond a certain point (probably around 4 to 5 megapixels), more megapixels will not necessarily yield a better image. Other issues, like lack of overall image sharpness due to poor image or lens quality, or poor lighting, will limit the usefulness of more megapixels.

In a DSLR, however, more megapixels give you the flexibility to enlarge your images more, and also crop out sections of them, while retaining reasonable resolution for printing.

Make sure you’re maximizing your megapixels!

Digital cameras have a “quality” setting that changes how many pixels they actually record. Unless you have your quality setting on the highest level, you are not taking full advantage of your camera’s recording capabilities.

If you’re not sure where your camera’s setting is, look in your user manual. (Sorry! there are just too many cameras out there to provide instructions for each one here!). It will be called something like “quality” or “size” and will be expressed in pixels. For example:

  1. Large (3072 x 2304 pixels) — 7 megapixels
  2. Medium (2048 x 1536 pixels) — about 3 megapixels
  3. Small (640 x 480 pixels) — .3 megapixels — really low resolution!

 

Color Information

What is a pixel used for? Each pixel stores color information for your image. It will usually store it in either 3 components, known as RGB (Red, Green, Blue), or 4 components, known as CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK).

The number of distinct colors that can be represented by a pixel depends on the amount of information stored for each pixel. Information is stored as bits. the more bits per pixel (bpp) that are stored, the more colors a pixel can represent. For example, in the simplest case, if only a single bit of information is stored for a pixel, then it can be “on” or “off” — black or white. The actual number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel is known as color depth, or bit depth.

I hope you can now answer the question, “What is a pixel?”

Next, you may want to visit another digital camera basics page to learn about digital sensors.