I recently bought and read Scott Kelby's "The Digital Photography Book" volumes 1 and 2 on the recommendation of a friend. This post is intended to be a bit of a review of the books and some of my thoughts on them.

Scott Kelby takes a unique approach with the writing style used in these books which seems to make them fairly popular and easy to read. His approach aims to give you the low down on how to achieve certain things in photography without going into all of the technical detail and reasons why. This approach makes the book good for beginners and is fairly engaging for the reader. With one of the books I found myself being unable to put it down. Wanting to continue reading to see what happens next. Rather unusual for a non-fiction book.

The down side of the book's style is that there are numerous sections that are clogged up with nonsensical "humor" which really doesn't add much to the content of the book. I'd suggest skipping the introduction to each chapter unless you have time to waste. Otherwise you will get to the end of the introductions and wonder ":WHY>".

My gripe about the needless padding in the books aside, both books cover some excellent topics for various areas of photography and even if you aren't interested in those particular areas (for example wedding photography) I still feel that anyone can read them and take something away that will help in other aspects of photography. For example the wedding chapters (there's one in each book) both have some great suggestions for lighting and group photos.

I picked up volume 2 at the shops before volume 1 so I read them in reverse order. This didn't matter immensely although the second book is intended to follow on from the first. Ultimately I don't think a second book was really needed as a lot of the content seems to be repeated in both books. Perhaps instead of padding the books with humor, Scott could've condensed them into a single book.

All in all I did enjoy reading both books and would recommend picking at least one of them up if you are beginner to moderately experienced as a photographer and want to learn a few nifty tricks.

Also, if you've read either of these books I'd love to hear what you think about them.