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To learn the basics, I'd go back to these classics (although they're based on film photography, they are still highly useful and there's little that won't apply):
There are three books from Ansel Adams: (The Camera, The Negative and The Print). Those get into all the basic concepts of photography.
And there are two books from Joe McNally who is a great commercial photographer. In these, he demonstrates particular digitally shot photos and describes how they were made:
The Moment It Clicks
The Hot-Shoe Diaries (obviously about flash photography).
If you don't want to purchase these books, McNally also has a great website.
Go to a local museum or gallery when they have photography exhibits, especially if it contains classic photography. Sometimes you'll see garbage and wonder why it's even being shown and other times you'll see remarkable images. It will also show you how important the print is. There's nothing like seeing an original silver gelatin or chromogenic print. And seeing great work will give you some inspiration.
Aside from the technical aspects of photography, you have to develop an "eye". I live in New York City and when I walk around with my camera, I don't always find much I want to shoot. But that's because I'm here every day and I'm "blinded" to what's special because everything seems ordinary to me. There's a photographer who posts on another site by the name of "Dez" and what I find ordinary, he finds a way to make extraordinary because his eye sees what my eye doesn't. So he shoots something that happens to be down the block from my office and I think to myself, "how come I never looked at that from that perspective before." That's what makes great photography.
You can't expect great results directly out of the camera. Just as printing in the darkroom was an art, so is post-processing of photographs. A few years ago, I went to the museum to see an Annie Leibowitz exhibition. One part of the exhibition featured a wall of marked-up contact sheets. When you looked at the contact sheets, nothing seemed all that special. But when you saw the same shots professionally printed, it made all the difference in the world.
And for those who would like a great book about all printed media processes, there's a book that was published in conjunction with a Museum of Modern Art exhibition: The Printed Picture by Richard Benson, which provides an exciting history and examples of all printing processes - photography, lithography, screen printing, etc. Here's part of the Amazon description:
The Printed Picture traces the changing technology of picture-making from the Renaissance to the present, focusing on the vital role of images in multiple copies. The book surveys printing techniques before the invention of photography; the photographic processes that began to appear in the early nineteenth century; the marriage of printing and photography; and the rapidly evolving digital inventions of our time. From woodblocks to chromolithographs, from engravings to bar codes, from daguerreotypes to contemporary color photographs, the book succinctly examines the full range of pictorial processes. Exploring how pictures look by describing how they are made, author Richard Benson reaches fascinating and original conclusions about what pictures can mean.
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