The Complete Guide to Night & Lowlight Digital Photography

A very technical introduction to DSLR low light photography, but don't let that discourage you. This book is less about the effects and more about the nuts and bolts of how your sensor behaves in poorly lit situations: where does the ISO noise come from, how do you recover those details in shadows, what is the premise behind HDR, etc. The author also spends a lot of time on the post-processing steps of your digital photos - from importing photos to evaluating noise reduction plugins to Photoshop. Having skipped the film photography step and gone directly to digital, this book made me appreciate all the tools and possibilities that are now available to every amateur. Highly recommended, especially if you really want to understand how your camera works from the inside.

Michael Freeman's approach to night and lowlight digital photography will offend, irritate or confuse those carrying over what they learned about photography with film. Freeman's emphasis seems to be on shoot first - and then correct later. In fact, the bulk of the book seems to be about post-processing in Photoshop or other image manipulation applications. The truth is that film photographers often overlook or forget all the post-processing techniques that went into producing the "perfect" shots of yesterday - or what defects were forgiven. Dodging, burning in, rubbing hard on spots in the print, all those wonderful darkroom tricks have been replaced by a new generation of tricks. Freeman provides a pretty good introduction to all these techniques, such as blending several exposures into one "perfect" shot. He also spends way too much time and space on equipment choice, but that is a quibble. Overall, this is a good overview of basic night and lowlight photography. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "treatise" on the subject. It absolutely is not for the film photographer. It introduces photographers ranging from beginner to advanced hobbyist to camera and post-processing techniques necessary for this specialized kind of photography. For what it is, it is good. Not truly "the complete guide", but a decent start. Jerry

This came to me in brand new condition. It took almost a week and a half to get to me, but still with in the time they predicted.

It's good for Michael Freeman that I decided a while ago that I would not hold it against a book if the content did not match the title. Otherwise this book would have to be called "The Complete Guide to Wide Apertures, Slow Shutter Speeds, and High ISO's". That's because rather than concentrating on the usual stuff like metering on the sky at dusk or setting up flash units, Freeman assumes that the reader understands exposure and most post-processing and instead concentrates on what can be done to mitigate the consequences of wide apertures, slow shutter speeds and high ISO's. After a general introduction dealing with the nature of sensors, noise and similar topics, he divides the book into two sections that at first appear idiosyncratic: hand held and locked down. Primarily he does this because he says the ways of correcting for the problems created using the two different methods are due to exposure setup. Hand held requires wide apertures and high ISOs while tripod shooting uses long exposures and these require different corrective measures in post processing. Each section first indicates methods of mitigation (steadying techniques, tripod management) and then discusses post processing, which is the meat of the book. For example, in discussing hand held shots, he points out that camera movement is a source of blur and that software tools can be used to correct for this. Freeman also has an extensive discussion of high dynamic range processing that is similar to his recent book on this topic, although the use of HDR for handheld photography is a subject not often encountered. I hesitate to describe a text as aimed at advanced photographers since the definition of an advanced photographer depends on the individual doing the defining, but I can certainly say that this is not a book for novices. Most of the post-processing techniques offered require a thorough knowledge of image processing software, the devotion of time to handcraft an image, and occasionally the use of software above and beyond Photoshop. Moreover, to apply Freeman's suggestions, I had to sit with the book in hand and follow his procedures step by step on my own images. But the techniques Freeman offered were certainly worth the investment of my time to study, and hopefully, to apply in a low light situation. (Freeman appeared to be using an older version of Adobe Camera Raw in some of his examples that did not include the new input sharpening facility which works in tandem with ACR's noise reduction and I wondered if there were some advantages in processing low-light images with the newer software. Hopefully he'll answer that in another book.) The more skilled one becomes as a photographer, the harder it is to find useful advice that one has never encountered. For many skilled photographers, this book may prove useful.

Great book for night and lowlight digital photography. Well set up and delivered. Highly recommended!