Book recommendation?

I donno if you are still looking for advice on books. The S5XXX series is pretty good when it comes to learning manual controls before stepping into D-SLR photography.

1) You should check out “Understand Exposure” by Bryan Paterson its a great book on SLR photography but you can use a lot of stuff on a S5600.

2) I think Fujifilm does support RAW and if you have Photoshop CS2/CS3 you should check out “Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Digital Photographers” by Scott Kelby. This is a simple how-to book for many features of PS but you might need to convert the FujiRAW to PSD or TIFF before processing ( I am not sure if Camera RAW supports Fuji…or you could try Irfan View and convert it to TIFF and process further in CS2/3)

Cloud 9

Depends what you are looking for – the basic long-standing “rules” of photography, as covered by any number of “How to”-type photography books still apply to digital cameras. Composition, focus, depth of field are not really any different for digital than for old wet-film photography.

However, of course, the options in digital at the “processing” stage are far wider once you get the image into “Photoshop” or any other processing software.

Some of the books cover both aspects well, others address the former, and leave in-depth discussions on digi-processing to digital experts, whilst others seem to give only a cursory glance at the traditional “rules” and seem to suggest that digital processing can rectify any basic faults you make when taking the shot in the first place.

If you want to improve your image capturing/framing skills (i.e. at the point of “taking” the image), then pretty much any good photography book will do, and you might find a number of second hand bargains. My old copy of “The 35mm photographers Handbook” is still consulted for inspiration and tips, though of course the section on 35mm film types is now skipped.

For digital image processing I find some of the “how to” features in current Digi-photography magazines helpful, or maybe a book on how to get the best out of software like Photoshop would be better?

I’ve also got the book recommended above by Mantog, and think it’s a pretty good “all round” starter if you need to cover both aspects.

I’m not familiar with the Fuji model you’ve got, but my first digicam was their S5600 model for a couple of years and found it to be damn good camera. I then returned to Canon for a D-SLR simply becasuse it would accept my 35mm SLR lenses etc, otherwise I’d have probably moved “up” to another Fuji.

Happy shooting – good thing about digital is that if you get a photo wrong it doesn’t really cost anything to get out there and try again.

I bought a copy of a magazine special called ‘The ultimate guide to Digital Photography’ for someone, it’s something to do with Computer Shopper magazine.
It’s actually an excellent concise guide to all aspects of digital photography and I’d thoroughly reccomend it, can’t go wrong for about £8 . I got it from Borders.