"David Dyer-Bennet" wrote:

If you're serious about photography, I'd start with the Ansel Adams
Basic Photo series -- books called The Camera, The Negative, and The
Print particularly.

Truly excellent advice. Also get a few books of photos starting with
Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, which refers back to those.

Somebody needs to write a series of that quality to introduce people
to photography digitally; so far as I know, nobody has yet (and
digital has a lot of advantages particularly for teaching -- the
ability to see results quickly lets you really tie what you did to
what the result looked like in your head).

There's a brain-damagedly simple book that I recommend: The Confused
Photographer's Guide to On-Camera Spot Metering. He presents the whole
content of the book in one page, and then spends 150 pages banging it into
your head. Anyone who doesn't understand spotmeter needs to read this book.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan