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A
Short Course in
Using
Your Digital Camera
These
well written and illustrated guides pull together answers to the
questions you might have about getting better pictures with your
digital camera.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
For
the past three decades Dennis Curtin has been an editor, author,
and publisher in photography and computing. His latest books on
digital cameras and digital photography have been widely praised
for their quality and simplicity. On the publishing side, Dennis
was editor-in-chief of one of Little Brown's educational divisions
and also held similar positions in Prentice-Hall's technology and
engineering program and Prentice-Hall International. In those roles,
he has worked extensively with Ansel Adams and other leading photographers
of our generation. In his roles as publisher, editor, and author
Dennis has been fortunate to publish or write many best-selling
books in photography and computing.
THE
PROCESS
Publishing
is changing almost at the speed of light. Technology is now making
it possible to print books in small quantities. The Xerox DocuPrint
machine used to print these books prints up to 135 pages per minute
at a sharp 600 dots per inch. The quality is much higher than you
get from a desktop laser printer.
THE
BOOKS
The
Short Course books are not printed in color. They are printed in
black and white with a spiral binding that lets them lie flat. Why
is this?
Just
doing a single page in color would add $1.00 to the cost of each
copy and that would require an increase in the selling price of
the books. Printing technology has made some tremendous strides,
but color is still prohibitively expensive unless 10,000 or more
copies are printed at a time. This large-scale publishing is best
left to the large international publishing houses. But don't expect
many books on digital photography from them. The role of ShortCourses
is to bring you books these large firms can't afford to do either
because the market is too small for them, or because the field is
moving so fast they can't respond in a timely manner. For the foreseeable
future, all of the ShortCourses books will be in black & white
because Dennis Curtin feels that the information they contain is
valuable without the higher costs and higher prices that adding
color would cause. With many of the books CDs are optionally available
containing Adobe PDF files that you can read on your computer using
your Web Browser. These CDs will allow you to see the entire book
in color, and if you want, you can print out a color copy on your
local printer.
Click
Here to visit the Short Courses Bookstore
These
books are only available for sale on the Web. There are a number
of reasons for this:
- Timeliness.
Traditional publishers take 6 months to a year to publish a
book once the author has finished writing it. By the time you
find it in the bookstore, it’s already out of date. Using
the Web as the distribution vehicle lets us publish the book
the day it’s finished. By printing small quantities, we
are able to keep it up to date.
- Community. You
can visit the ShortCourses Community Center and use the mailing
lists and discussion forums to discuss the book and other aspects
of digital photography.
- Costs. There
is no question that the high cost of books imposes a serious
burden on many, if not most, readers. Publishers pad their books
out with useless screen grabs, large type, thick paper, and
lots of white space. The longer they can make it, the more they
can charge you.
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