The Search For The Best Portable Hard Drive

By PopPhoto.com Staff
February 2009

Walk through the computer department at the local big box store, and you’ll be greeted with a veritable flood of little, USB-powered rectangles begging to be crammed full of your photos. Which ones deserve a spot on your bag? We took a look at some of the most popular options, filled them with some files and admired them from our desk chairs. In the end, it all comes down to personal preference.

Photography & The Art of Seeing

by Freeman Patterson
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“Art of Seeing is a great book to read if you have the time to slowly experiment with the numerous exercises. The text is written for the experienced photographer who goes beyond the ordinary vision. It is comprehensive and well-organized. The instructions of each chapter follow with a group of exercises to practice. My problem was my own developed means of alternate-seeing and found it annoying to follow the instructions. I was to avoid the regular seeing ways and my own expanded vision to experience his way. I basically settled for reading through the instructions and trying to adopt the new ideas but not getting involved in the exercises. All in all, this is a great book for a technically competent photographer seeking to express beyond the traditional. If one absorbs the exercises which take at least a few weeks to follow, the outcome will be a very individualized way of seeing as a photographer. I recommend it if you seek to experiment. “

40 Digital Photography Techniques, 3rd Edition (Photography Techniques)

by John Kim
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“Having read dozens, basic photography books hardly interest me anymore: The approach, the content and the ideas are too similar. A good basic how-to photography book includes the camera user manual, in a more understandable form, and hopefully supplements it with related and useful information. Since enough of these books succeed at both objectives, it is justified to purchase any indiscriminately and get the same results. The 40 Digital Techniques is in its 3rd edition for good reasons: Apart from doing an outstanding job of being a superb user manual for a digital camera, it has great chapters that actually teach photography at above intermediate level. The organization and the graduation of the materials make it an easy and effective book to read. The text is flooded with appropriate photographs and the hundreds of tips included are very easy to understand and apply. I fully recommend this book for general digital photography and also learning to take much better than average photographs.”

PCPhoto Digital SLR Handbook, Revised & Updated (A Lark Photography Book)

by Rob Sheppard
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“Digital SLR Handbook is a good basic to intermediate learn-by-yourself photography book and is worth the time to read. The majority of basic photography how-to books are very similar in organization and content. Boring is the word to describe about 95% of this level texts. Basically, if you read one, you have read half of all similar books and if you have used a SLR camera before, the first half of any text is a just a quick review anyway. The success of this text is partly due to Rob Sheppard’s breaking down each chapter into many small sub-topics and explaining them in good detail. The photos and the diagrams are appropriate and the text never goes beyond the basic-to-intermediate boundaries and achieves its goal. I recommend it only if this is your first digital SLR text to read.”