Professional photographer and teacher Derrick Story whose online tips and podcasts at The Digital Story have made him a popular photography blogger gives you plenty of examples of how to capture great shots of people places landscapes and more. He also provides a complete summary on camera features tips for printing sharing your images and an overview of photo management applications.

Connected Photographer's evaluation
When we were kids, we used to go hiking and always used to bring with us books called Field Companions, which helped us identify flowers and plants from the pictures in the book. This book is almost like a Field Companion, it's a helpful resource you can bring along with you. We quite like it.

The Digital Photography Companion by Derrick Story, published by O'Reilly, is 230 pages and has a retail price of $24.99. We give The Digital Photography Companion a rating of 4 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

Photoshop Elements 6 is perfect for scrapbooking making fancy photo collages and creating Web galleries. It has lots of new features such as Guided Edit for performing basic editing tasks an improved Photomerge feature a handy Quick Selection Tool and much more. But knowing what to do and when is tricky. Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual explains not only how the tools and commands work but when to use them.

Connected Photographer's evaluation
At 554 pages, this book will take you a long time to read, but Elements is a pretty big product. We heartily recommend both the book and Elements 6. As with all of the Missing Manual series, it's a very clear read.

Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage, published by Pogue Press, is 554 pages and has a retail price of $44.99. We give Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual a rating of 4 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.