You may be passionate about photography, and own a digital SLR with perhaps more advanced equipment as well. But do the photographs you take with this powerful equipment come out as well as you'd like? With this fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, you learn how to apply the techniques and principles of classic photography so you can make great images with today's digital equipment. Harold Davis, author and renowned fine art photographer, puts the focus in Practical Artistry on light and exposure, two crucial concepts you need to understand and master if you are to truly capture the images you see. Davis presents a generous number of his own images in each chapter, complete with technical information and an explanation of what he was trying to achieve. These striking photographs not only illustrate the lesson at hand, but also serve as inspiration for your own efforts.Browsing the photographs alone will tell you a lot. The topics covered in this book include: camera, lenses, and equipment; understanding exposure and measuring light; relationship of aperture to shutter speed and ISO; working with depth of field; natural lighting, studio lighting, and the use of flash; light and color temperature; working with white balance; photographing at dawn or dusk; photography at night; capturing motion; telling a story with your image; capturing people, places, and things; setting up a digital workflow; RAW processing and double RAW processing; adjusting exposure and reducing noise; Black & white photography; and much more. Concise and to the point, "Practical Artistry" clearly demonstrates that photography, essentially, is writing with light, and that the type of images you produce depend on the many choices you have for using that skill. Harold Davis gives you an array of choices in full living color.

Harold Davis is a photographer and author. His photographs have been widely published, exhibited, and collected. Many of his fine art photography posters are well known, including some recent alternatively processed digital flower images published by New York Graphic Society.The author of more than twenty books, Harold has written (and illustrated with his photographs) Digital Photography: Digital Field Guide (Wiley), The Photographer's Guide to Yosemite and the High Sierra (Countryman/W.W.Norton), 100 Views of the Golden Gate (Wilderness Press). He is the lead author of a new series of books about digital photography from O'Reilly Digital Media.Harold writes the popular Photoblog 2.0, www.photoblog2.com, which covers aesthetic, technical, and personal issues related to digital photography. He is the creator of the Digital Night website.