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Book Recommendation for Digital SLR Cameras

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Note: This post was originally published in 2011, when digital SLRs were still relatively new for most amateur photographers and the question of how to learn them was genuinely fresh. The book recommendation below dates from that era. The post is preserved here as a record of a small, lovely coincidence — two friends asking the same question in the same week.

A close-up photograph of a male mallard duck, showing the bright iridescent green head feathers that gave the photographer her first sense of what a digital SLR could capture. Photo by Chantal Manseau, 2011.
Mallard duck. Photo by Chantal Manseau, taken at her local lake with her new digital SLR.

An interesting coincidence happened this weekend: two friends had recently upgraded to digital SLR cameras, and both asked me — within days of each other — for recommendations on books or resources for learning how to use the features on their new cameras.

Chantal's Email

My friend Chantal emailed me first:

I wanted to ask you about photography... How did you learn? Do you have a good book to recommend? I'm reading through the camera's manual and while it tells me how to use the camera, I need to learn about all the technical terms and how to actually make the best use of my camera. I went to the lake by my house last weekend and took amazing pictures using the portrait, macro, landscape, etc. pre-settings, but didn't adjust anything manually. Check out the green on the duck picture I've attached!

Let me know... thanks! Chantal

The duck picture, of course, is the one at the top of this post. That iridescent green on the male mallard's head is exactly the kind of detail that makes a new photographer realise their camera is capable of more than their phone — and that makes them want to learn how to coax it out deliberately, rather than by happy accident with the preset modes.

Karen, and the Online Course Problem

The week before Chantal's email, my friend Karen and I had been talking about exactly the same question. We'd looked at online photography courses together — there are plenty out there — but the good ones tend to be expensive, and the affordable ones tend to be uneven in quality. Karen was hesitant, understandably, to commit several hundred dollars to a course she might not finish.

So when Chantal's email landed, with the same question framed slightly differently, it pushed me to think about how I actually learned. And the honest answer was: not from online courses or YouTube tutorials (which barely existed back then anyway), but from one particular book that broke things down in a way that finally made manual settings click for me.

The Book That Worked for Me

The book is The BetterPhoto Guide to Digital Photography by Jim Miotke. Of the various books I'd read on digital SLR photography up to that point, this was the one that taught me the most about actually using the manual settings: aperture, shutter speed, ISO, depth of field, exposure compensation, composition, and how to work with available light. It was practical without being condescending, and it assumed you wanted to understand why a setting did what it did, not just which button to press.

The book was published in 2005, which was relatively current in 2011 when I wrote this post. It's now quite dated — and digital camera technology, particularly autofocus systems and ISO performance, has moved on significantly since then. The fundamental concepts (aperture, shutter speed, ISO, composition) are unchanged, though, and a reader picking it up today would still come away understanding the core craft. There are newer books out there I haven't tried; if you'd like a current recommendation as well, that's worth a separate post.

To Karen and Chantal

Good luck to both of you. And be warned: photography can be a wonderfully consuming hobby, the kind that has you up at 5am chasing the light, hiking somewhere uncomfortable in pursuit of a single shot, and saying "just one more frame" to patient friends and family at the end of long afternoons. You may not be entirely the same person on the other side of it. Most of us think that's a good thing.

Disclosure: The link to the book on Amazon above is an affiliate link. If you purchase through it, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

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