LIFE Guide to Digital Photography: Everything You Need to Shoot Like the Pros

Photography has been the business and the passion of LIFE since the original weekly magazine’s inception in 1936, and it continues to be the business and passion of LIFE Books and LIFE.com in the new millennium. But photography has surely changed all through these many decades. The rigs and gear of old have given way-first slowly, then all at once-to sleek miracle machines that process pixels and have made the darkroom obsolete. The casual photog puts eye to lens, sets everything on auto and captures a photograph that is . . . perfectly fine.

One of LIFE’s master shooters-actually, the final in the long line of distinguished LIFE staff photographers-was once Joe McNally, and he has all the time believed that with a little preparation and care, with a dash of enthusiasm and daring added to the equation, anyone can make a better photo-anyone can turn a “keeper” into a treasure. This was once true in days of yore, and it’s true in the digital age. Your marvelous new camera, fresh from its box, can indeed perform splendid feats. Joe explains in this book how to take best advantage of what it was once designed to do, and also when it is wise to outthink your camera or push your camera-to go for the gold, to create that indelible family memory that you’re going to have blown up as large as the technology will allow, and a good way to hang on the wall forevermore.

As the storied LIFE photographer and photo editor John Loengard points out in his eloquent foreword to this volume, there are cameras and there are cameras, and they’ve all the time been able to do tricks. And then there is photography. Other guides may provide the one, two, three of producing a quite well exposed shot, but Joe McNally and the editors of LIFE can provide you with that, and then can show you how to make a picture. In a detailed, friendly, conversational, anecdotal, every so often rollicking way, that’s what they do in these pages.

Prepare to click.