David Busch's Compact Field Guide for the Canon EOS 60D (David Busch's Digital Photography Guides)

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David Busch's Compact Field Guide for the Canon EOS 60D (David Busch's Digital Photography Guides) Details

From the Author Just the essentials for your EOS 60DWhen a command card doesn't provide enough information, and a small camera guide has too much padding, pull this Compact Field Guide for your Canon 60D out of your camera bag and get the advice and recommendations you need quickly.I don't believe you can have too much of a good thing, but readers who have been using my 400-page in-depth guide to master their Canon 60D have asked me to distill the most essential information into a portable field guide for on-the-go reference.  In the approximately 150 pages of this lay-flat, spiral-bound book, you'll find in-depth descriptions of every control, menu option, and capability of the Canon 60D.  Each choice is accompanied by my recommendations and a description of when you should or should not use a particular setting.  There are seven no-nonsense chapters:Quick Setup Guide.  You -- or someone you loan your 60D to -- can set up the key exposure, autofocus, and other settings in minutes with the step-by-step instructions in this chapter.Streetsmart Canon 60D Roadmap.  Can't recall what a particular button or dial does, or don't remember how to access bracketing or another feature you seldom use?  This chapter has photos of every control and a description of how to use it.Shooting and Playback Menu Settings. Command cards and cheat sheets provide a menu listing and a recap of the Shooting and Playback options.  This chapter explains how to use them, too.Setup and My Menu Settings. You may not use these menus quite as often, which is all the more reason to carry along my instructions on how to use them.Using Flash. Reference guide to working with the 60D's internal flash, and Canon's external units.Shooting Movies.  I've managed to squeeze in instructions on using the 60D's movie-making capabilities, along with tips on shooting better movies in the field.Shooting Tips. Pages and pages of tables listing Shooting Menu and Custom Setting Menu recommendations for a variety of situations, such as stage performances, long exposures, landscapes, and portraits.I know many Canon 60D owners are buying both my "big book" and this Compact Field Guide, so they're equipped with the information they need whether at home or on-the-go. Read more About the Author With more than a million books in print, David D. Busch is the world's #1 selling digital camera guide author, and the originator of popular digital photography series like David Busch's Pro Secrets and David Busch's Quick Snap Guides. He has written more than a dozen hugely successful guidebooks for Canon and Canon digital SLR models, as well as many popular books devoted to dSLRs, including Mastering Digital SLR Photography, Second Edition, and Digital SLR Pro Secrets. As a roving photojournalist for more than twenty years, he illustrated his books, magazine articles, and newspaper reports with award-winning images. He's operated his own commercial studio, suffocated in formal dress while shooting weddings-for-hire, and shot sports for a daily newspaper and upstate New York college. His photos and articles have appeared in Popular Photography & Imaging, The Rangefinder, The Professional Photographer, and hundreds of other publications. He has also reviewed dozens of digital cameras for CNet and Computer Shopper, and his advice has been featured in National Public Radio's "All Tech Considered." When About.com named its top five books on Beginning Digital Photography, debuting at the #1 and #2 slots were Busch's Digital Photography All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies and Mastering Digital Photography. During the past year, he's had as many as five of his books listed in the Top 20 of Amazon.com's Digital Photography Bestseller list--simultaneously! Busch's 120-plus other books published since 1983 include bestsellers like David Busch's Quick Snap Guide to Digital SLR Lenses. Visit his website at http://www.dslrguides.com. Read more

Reviews

I bought this field guide not being sure what I was going to get. Now having done a comparison of this book with the Canon 60d manual that came with the camera, I can report that it is a very useful companion to the manual.If you are setting up a new 60d, my recommendation is to use both the manual and the field guide together. Generally speaking, the manual does a better job of presenting the basics because it uses both illustrations and text while the field guide uses mostly text, but the field guide nicely complements the manual by often giving more information than the manual which helps you decide what to choose between the alternatives for each setting. The material is presented in a concise manner so you don't have to wade through a lot of superfluous stuff to find the meat you are looking for.Because the manual and the field guide are organized differently and do not match page for page, my suggestion when setting up the camera is to use chapters 3 and 4 as the starting point then check in the index of the manual for the material it has on the setting you are focused on before you make your decision. My first thought it was better to do the reverse, but when going through the process of setting up my new 60d I found it worked better to follow the order of the field guideIf I could only have one or the other, I would probably take the Canon 60d manual, but using both together is much better than relying on either one alone. And the field guide may be a better choice to carry in your camera bag if you just want a quick reminder of what button(s) you should press or dials you should turn to achieve your purpose in the field. Although you may find that the nifty little pocket guide that comes with the camera (in addition to the complete manual) may be enough.I found Chapter 7, Shooting Tips, very helpful. Here the author indicates how he recommends that the camera be set up for all purpose, sports indoors and sports outdoors, stage performance, long exposure, portrait, HDR, landscape, macro travel. For someone new to Canon SLR cameras, this list of settings compared with the list of default settings that is also included in the book, would be of big help in setting up the camera. It is also useful for someone upgrading from another camera, such as the T2i like I am, and are now asked to decide on some settings that you didn't have experience with in the previous camera. Reading over the list, I found several recommended settings that I questioned for my camera based on my previous experience and use of my T2i, but seeing the author's recommendations motivated me to do some research both in the field guide and on the internet before making a final decision as to what I thought was best for me.If you are wondering how this field guide compares with the full-sized "David Bush's Canon EOS 60D Guide to Digital SLR Photography", the author makes clear in the introduction to the field guide that it is a condensation and he hopes you will buy both. For myself, I found this field guide guide sufficient.The field guide is well worth the little that Amazon is charging. I am very glad that I purchased it. It is a valuable complement to the manual when setting up the new camera, and it continues to be useful as you get more experience and start shooting in new situations.

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