My raiding of the library's photography books continues apace. Here are the good ones from the more recent batch.

"Color Confidence: The Digital Photographer's Guide to Color Management" (Tim Grey)

The most helpful chapter in this book was chapter one on the "Foundations of Color". After that there were chapters on displays, printers, scanners, cameras and the ins and outs of color as related to those devices. In the chapter on displays there was a comparison of the various color calibration tools for monitors and so forth, which I found helpful. The book is very Photoshop oriented, which makes sense but is less useful to me since I don't have Photoshop. I'm sure that lots of the ideas will carry over, and at least I feel that I understand the basics of color management now.

"The Portrait Photographer's Guide to Posing" (Bill Hurter)

This book isn't that long, but I found it to be very useful. There were lots of little tips about things that make people look better when you photograph them. Many are kind of common sense if you think about them, but if you haven't spent much time photographing or critically watching people (which I haven't) it's nice to have all these things collected up in one place. I've read enough photography books to get nervous when I see sections on lenses or composition, because in lots of books those sections are recapitulations of stuff that has been done in many other books. However in this book, the treatment of both lenses and composition was done in way that kept to the theme of portraiture, and I found that practical application to be helpful. Since I don't know much, this book was really helpful. I have no idea how I'll feel about it once I've seen some other books (as always, book recommendations are welcome).

From the list of contributing photographers I discovered Zuga.net, which has some video clips of photographers in action. I spent some time watching some of the clips over the holidays. It was really useful to watch photographers in action, as opposed to just reading about it.