Digital
AdviceEditor Robert Keeley looks at a new DVD that offers general advice on improving your photography.
One of the many challenges of the Digital imaging age is that increasingly there is a wide range of adherents spread out over a very long learning curve.
On the video front, Click Techniques DVD is an interesting entry. Ray and Lystra Bisschop work and run a photography business, Mondo Images, and shoot a wide range of subjects. They have combined with Rod Coates, a video producer from New Media Digital, to create the Click Techniques DVD, which aims to assist photography enthusiasts in improving their image-making. The video runs for 74 minutes and is divided into a series of chapters, covering a wide range of shooting scenarios. The Bisschops say their production is unique because it starts each section with a certain style of image and then "works backwards" to explain the range of techniques employed to create that image. These "In the Field" chapters cover action, wildlife, shooting in the wet, macro, "misty waves", people, polarizing filters, sunrises and sunsets, waterfalls, and wedding photography. At the end of each section the photographers briefly recap the main points.
As well, there are six more chapters on more technical issues, including exposure control, the digital darkroom, equipment, composition, depth of field, and metering.
Two other extras in the package are a click gallery with some of the hosts images shown, and a useful wedding photography checklist that can be printed out as a PDF.
It's a competently produced video, and it contains a lot of valuable information. Some technical issues are raised during the "in the field" discussions sometimes without total explanation, but they're more fully discussed in the chapters covering technical subjects and the visual presentation of some aspects is really valuable. Most of the information on this instructional video is useful, though some of it will be more obvious to experienced shooters. It's always one of the difficulties of both instructional books and videos that they have to take some starting point and that will always include or exclude some categories of shooters. Nonetheless this is a well-produced effort with a lot of useful techniques and advice.