There are some amazing photography books out there, ones where I sit reading through the ideas, smack my head and think, “how did I not realize that?” Two of the life altering ones that I’ve read this year are Joe McNally’s The Hot Shoe Diaries and the Photoshop Lightroom 2 by Scott Kelby.
The Hot Shoe Diaries is the type of book that I’ve gone back to again and again…not because it’s much of a how to guide with steps, but because it provides this framework for inspiration. Joe McNally has about a billion speedlights, and he uses the portable light sources in some pretty unbelievable ways–imagine the small light source of a flash and then picture a giant airplane. McNally uses his small speedlights and lights the giant airplane. Ordinary photographers wouldn’t venture this in a billion years–they would pull in huge, heavy, power sucking studio lights and even with all this juice, wouldn’t come close to getting the brilliant shots that McNally gets. Also, if for nothing else, this book was worth the cost just to see his flashes being used in turkeys…that right, a flash in a turkey…the man is crazy, but in a genius sort of way.
A sampling of the book from the publisher is available here.
So with Lightroom 3 around the corner like I mentioned in a previous post, a new book is likely to be coming out around the corner too…but for Lightroom 2, you can’t do better than this book.
When I first started using Lightroom, I viewed it with strong suspicion and kept comparing its capabilities with those of Photoshop…as in, “why doesn’t Lightroom offer x feature, they have it in photoshop!” but soon realized that I was looking at it all wrong. Lightroom is meant to help photographers with a heavy workflow, not to substitute Photoshop….this book not only whizzes through Lightroom’s many capabilities, but provides insight into how Kelby actually uses Lighroom after a shoot. From this book, the single most useful thing that I learned about Lightroom is that you can copy/paste develop settings. For example, if you have a series of photographs taken in the same location and under similar lighting circumstances, you will likely have to adjust the white balance/exposure/color in the same way. In lightroom, all you have to do is adjust the first photo in the series, and then you can copy/past these same adjustments to all the other photographs in the series. Usually this won’t be enough to make every photograph in the series perfect, but it is definitely a huge time saver when you’re swimming through hundreds of photos.
