MACRO & CLOSE-UP PHOTOGRAPHY HANDBOOK Stan Sholik & Ron Eggers Amherst Media ISBN #:1-58428-026-3 $29.95 US

• Selecting Equipment
• Bellows, Teleconverters, reversing rings, and close-up lenses
• Lens Selection
• Lighting Techniques
• Metering for the right exposure
• How to use filters
• Selecting camera support systems
• Calculating Magnification

After spending weeks fighting with my old AGFA ePhoto1280 I snapped. I'd broken three showpiece miniatures trying to get in close enough to get a good photo of them, as well as knocking over and utterly destroying my days of work on my Visions In Color diorama. Something had to change.

I repaired and rebuilt the diorama and will try my best to touch up the casualties left by the AGFA, but I have to get photos of my figures somehow and I'm not risking another series of accidents. So I finally went and bought my dream camera- the Nikon D1X, a professional digital SLR.

Ok, now what? I've got this brainiac super camera- how do I make it give me crisp pictures of my figures? It'll take me a week to digest everything in the manual, and I'm running against concepts I am unfamiliar with which slows down the learning process. I need better references- something to distill all this camera-geeking into the answer to my one question: How do I photograph my figures?

This book is the answer.

Once I got this book and spent a little time going over the chapters I found a cure for every problem I had been running into. It covers ideal lighting situations, when to choose detail over contrast, how to resolve depth of field issues (the most common problem to plague novice miniature photographers like myself), and what other hardware you'll need to get good results.

The camera store staff was very helpful and got me up and running in one purchase (plug: Severna Park Camera in Severna Park, Maryland), but polishing and refining my skills beyond "point and shoot" required books like this.

A few more days of solid practice and work and I'll be ready to replace the blurred images on this site with nice crisp ones.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. It has enough good tips that I even those without an SLR can benefit (especially the lighting and exposure tips.)