Review: Pretty good
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 16, 2013
I received this book free during a promotion. I don't let how this determine the tone of my review.Dan has written a book that beginners can use. Being an advanced amateur, the information included is useful as reminders but not a lot more than that.Some things aren't entirely accurate, such as Dan's assertion that aperture is controlled via a ring on the lens. If you are shooting anything from the major manufacturers, most likely you aren't using a ring on the lens to control aperture. That's the beauty of electronic control, as this is now mainly done using a dial on the camera, meaning you won't screw up the aperture while focusing. There are certainly third party lenses that use a ring for aperture, but even most of the big third parties (Sigma, Tamron, etc) use electronic over physical aperture changes. For a beginner this might be confusing in it's depiction in the book.I'm also a little flabbergasted that Dan is recommending colored filters to fix lighting issues. You can tell Dan comes from film days, as now you are better off shooting RAW. Yes, choose the proper white balance before you shoot to avoid as much as possible in post processing, but if you shoot RAW and choose the wrong white balance, Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop and just about any photo editing software will allow you to correct the white balance. You can still adjust WB if you shoot JPEG, it just isn't as simple as it can be with RAW. And of course, RAW shooting will create large files, and this also supposes you are shooting with a camera capable of RAW. If you're camera can't shoot RAW, you can still correct in post with a little extra effort.One thing I do not like, at all, are links to Dan's other efforts. In practice, that isn't bad, but the way in which it is handled is. If you are reading on a Kindle or on the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader, you can click through the links, which is great. The problem is, the website Dan sends you to looks very, very suspicious. It doesn't look professional at all and you have to give away personal information to receive the "freebie." There is no indication as to what is done with your information and no indication about a privacy policy. How do I know I'm signing up for something legit, or just someone selling my information to a third party to pay for the "freebie?" No thank you Dan.Information isn't bad and it's not a long read but has plenty of information to share. At the MSRP $9 you could do a lot worse. Just avoid giving away your name and email address in exchange for a freebie if you are concerned about that when you see some of the links in the book.