Understanding Exposure, Fourth Edition: How to Shoot Great Photographs with Any Camera

This book is very understandable on how to work on your camera, and it's great if you're taking a photography class in school.

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The bible for photographers. I’ve had all the editions. Buy this if you are thinking about picking up a DSLR or are an experienced photographer trying to improve.

Bryan Peterson's "Understanding Exposure" has definitely made me a better photographer. I also bought the two previous versions of this book and I appreciate the updated information and photos in this 4th Edition. Over the years, his books increased my ability to make better pictures and to limit my use of the automatic mode. The photo examples in this edition and previous editions are stunning and inspiring.The author does a great job of explaining "the photographic triangle": aperture, shutter speed and ISO in an interesting style with illustrations that are well- described.But there are two reasons I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5. First, for this 4th Edition of "Understanding Exposure", unlike his previous books, Bryan more prominently discusses the Nikon equipment he uses and rarely mentions other brands. I can only speculate as to why. That's unfortunate since I use Canon equipment and in his previous editions Bryan did not highlight a particular brand.Secondly, the author's examples often assume that the photographer will use a tripod or will have a lot of time to take a shot. Bryan is not unique in that regard. Most of these photo book authors are professionals and so their lessons are a bit removed from everyday amateur photographers like myself who take my camera (primarily Canon 5D Mark IV or Canon 80D) to kids' events, family trips, or to take candid shots at home, and rarely have the luxury of setting up a tripod or making many adjustments. More examples and tips for quick candid or "on the go" shots would be helpful as well as more day to day explanations for why the photos did not come out the way one hoped.I also bought Bryan's book, "Exposure Solutions", that attempts to solve common photography problems. That book is helpful but, again, with examples like "With my camera and lens on a tripod, and turning off autofocus, I manually prefocused the lens one-third of the way into the scene. With my exposure set to f/32, and while framing the scene you see here, I adjusted my shutter speed until 1/15 sec. indicated a correct exposure...." the book suffers from the same limitations as in "Understanding Exposure." . Great example if you are on a photo shoot by yourself or with other photographers, but not a likely scenario when accompanied by family members or friends on a tight schedule.Another different, but practical book, is Charlotte K. Lowrie's Canon EOS 60 D Digital Field Guide. Even if I rarely use my 60D anymore, I use Charlotte's book as a handy reference since much of the information provided is applicable to most Canon DSLRs with helpful tips on flash, lens choices, event and action photography, nature and landscape photography, and portrait photography.Even with its limitations, I highly recommend "Understanding Exposure". In fact, if I am asked to recommend a book for a beginning photographer or someone interested in becoming a better photographer, "Understanding Exposure" would probably be the first book I would recommend.

I purchased this book as I've always been particularly interested with low-light level photography and astrophotography. I noticed almost immediately I could take better photographs or images by bumping down an ISO level with my newly purchased Nikon D5600. I then realized I needed to learn how to use manual mode for manually choosing aperture and shutter speed for optimizing my skills, and shortly later I purchased this recently written book.PROS1) Includes at least one really good photo, if not two or three good photos at times, depicting each photo taking scenario described.2) Many photography taking scenarios described, targeting mainly using Manual mode, as the book's main theme is about using Manual mode instead of Program (Automatic) mode.3) I enjoy hearing those with experience, describing their personal recommendations based on sound reasoning. (eg. Author prefers using Center-weighted light metering, as it's a technique that has yet failed and has almost always worked. I, myself, was mainly using spot metering up until this recommendation within the book, but I still have a strong preference for spot metering due to my subjects usually causing difficult positions.)4) Author uses one or two good digital cameras (eg. Mostly Nikon D800E images with a few Nikon D3X images.), and he does thoroughly explain each scenario within generic camera terminology.CONS1) First chapter is extremely wordy! In other words, the author tends to go significantly astray, whether intending humor or reflecting needlessly upon a scenario. I do not mind one or two astray comments (or jokes) within the introduction or first chapter, or even throughout the book, but the first chapter was extremely taxing upon my free time for reading! Halfway through the book now and thankfully the (excessive) comments were kept to the first chapter!2) Does not describe how the digital camera performs light metering, until halfway through the book. Light metering becomes extremely critical when taking any photos or images of black or dark colored subjects, such as the book describes black cats. (I just happen to have a black cat, and was using him for photography imaging practice alongside the book! Other less knowledgeable people might have significant issues if they're unaware of this while reading the beginning half of the book.)3) The EBook version seems to be an EPUB file format with a size of ~10MB. Clearly after seeing the file size not disclosed by either the book publisher or the referred book vendor sites, the EPUB book format's included photo images are of very low resolution! Maybe this is because I purchased the book from Google Play, but I'm presuming all the EBook formats for this book are going to contain similar image resolution for all the formats, since the publisher is referring EBook purchases directly to the Amazon, IPad, Android specific book vendors. As I stated within this review, would be nice to have a PDF format containing much higher resolution images! (Added this #3 con and purchased the EPUB version on 2017.08.07.)TIP: As with all books containing color photographs, best to buy the book instead of an EBook version. As of yet, I do not think there is an EBook or PDF version for this book, and would only buy the PDF version if the PDF version contained all the color photographs within the print copy. Else, and somewhat self explanatory, the EBook version would be useless without any of the color photographs! On the flip, a college/university level book could likely describe all the photographs within the book, if a well explained description for each photograph were provided. It's how us older folks learned long ago, when photographs were rarely used within books or were too costly to publish!