Thinking about Kindle (as I was at the end of my piece on ‘Magnum Magnum‘) reminds me that there are already some very useful eBooks available for photographers that you can read on your computer screens – and if you haven’t got a decent screen on your computer, you need one as a photographer.
I’ve got most of my camera manuals in Adobe PDF format – they either come that way on a CD with the camera or I’ve downloaded them from the web site. They take up very little space on a hard disk, and generally they are a lot easier to find there than the paper copies (and when I’m away from base for more than a day, I’m likely to have my notebook with me so I can read them.)
I’ve also got a commercial electronic book (PDF) that tells me all the things about my D200, including some that don’t really get mentioned (and certainly not explained) in the manual. Again it sits on my notebook and I can consult it when I’m away from home. One big advantage of the having the information in electronic format is that it becomes searchable, while in the printed manual you either have to try the contents or index, both of which usually seem to miss out what I’m looking for. It saves an awful lot of frustrated thumbing through pages.
If I worked in the USA, there is another eBook I’d buy today, which is the Photographer’s Legal Guide
by Carolyn E. Wright, Esq, the author of the PhotoAttorney blog I’ve mentioned before. At a download price of $9.95, it seems a snip – that would only pay for a few seconds of the average lawyer’s time (you can consult her at $250 an hour.)
If, like me, you are based in the UK, you may find it worth downloading the free UK Photographers Rights PDF, a short document written by written by Linda Macpherson, a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, and inspired by Bert P Krage’s The Photographers’ Right for the US, a document I first recommended rather a long time ago. His web page also lists a similar document for Australia. These are handy documents, 2 sides of A4, and despite the differences between US and UK law, Krage’s document contains much sensible advice that applies anywhere, and I carried it for some years in my camera bag.
UK photographers can also find useful advice on other web sites, including that of the Association of Photographers, and their book Beyond The Lens, which is rather surprisingly considerably more expensive to download as a PDF than to buy as a printed copy. You can however simply download single chapters and the appendix with some useful forms is available free.