This book is aimed at serious amateur photographers. You need a digital SLR or a very high-end point and shoot to gain much benefit from the ideas and techniques in the book, and you need a fair amount of background knowledge of the fundamentals of photography. So, since I'm not a serious photographer, don't own high-end equipment, and am not aiming for professional results, this was not really the book for me. I'm definitely not able to assess the technical merits of the book.
It is interesting to see how much difference there can be between photos with 'equivalent exposures' but different aperture, shutter, and ISO settings. The author devotes a chapter apiece to shutter-priority and aperture-priority settings, showing motion-capture and depth of field issues respectively. This was probably the most useful section of the book for me.
The section on color temperature was also interesting, and possibly useful, though I was left a little uncertain how to actually measure or estimate color temperature in a practical way, and am still completely unsure how to adjust for color temperature with my camera. That's not a fault of the book - he does say that the methods vary considerably from camera to camera.
There were a few obvious problems with the book. Often the text and corresponding illustration were on overleaf pages; that's just unacceptable given the subject matter. The otherwise useful discussion of light-level histograms should have been augmented by showing histogram and photo side-by-side for over-, under-, and correctly exposed scenes.
Overall, though, this seems like a useful book, for its target audience. Maybe someday I'll be good enough (and motivated enough) to benefit from it.
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