Lights, Camera, Capture!
If you are interested in photography - or interested in the future of publishing - you might be interested in Lights, Camera, Capture! at the iTunes Store. This is a book/DVD combo that you can buy from Amazon for $29. But you can also get the content for $9.99 by purchasing it as an app for your iPad.
This title is a very nice, basic introduction to lighting for photography (useful for filmmaking as well) and the nature of the app medium is that it combines the text and DVD video into one package. I actually think its much better than the book/DVD combo and a good example of how this type of publication is better than the traditional media it replaces. More often than not, I prefer to read the physical hard-copy of a text. But in this case, I prefer the app since it conveniently places the relevant video content immediately within the context of the text itself. That means I actually access it - when I have DVD content associated with a text, I rarely access it. After all, that would require me to:
1. Find said disc
2. Goto computer
3. Wait for optical media to load (uugh.)
4. Try to remember what I was wanting to watch and why
Its too much of a cognitive break - and its the reason why combined media have never been effective (aside from marketing purposes). Another nice thing about it is its portability. If I’m shooting in the field, I’m not going to want to take several books, a laptop, and the corresponding media. I can just take my camera and iPad.
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