A Short Course Book
Hot Topics & About ShortCourses

About ShortCourses & The Publisher

Hi, I'm Dennis Curtin. For the past three decades I have been an editor,author, and publisher in the fields of photography and computers. On the publishing side, I was editor-in-chief of one of Little Brown's divisions and also held the same position in Prentice-Hall's technology and engineering program and Prentice-Hall International. In my role as an editor, I worked with Ansel Adams and was partly responsible for his shifting his book legacy to Little Brown. (This story is on another page on this site "Ansel Adams and Me"). Tiring of the travel, I switched to the other side of the industry, becoming first a publisher of photography and computer books (Curtin & London) and then an author in these same fields. In my roles as both editor and author I have been fortunate to publish or write many best-selling books in photography and computing.

Here I am on a Audubon observation platform with my granddaughter Emily.

Among the books I have edited are the leading textbooks in photography and photojournalism:

  • Photography by Upton & Upton was drawn from the Life Library of Photography and dominated the introductory college course in photography until the publication of my own "The Textbook of Digital Photography".
  • Photojournalism by Ken Kobre has been the leading college textbook in photojournalism ever since its publication.

    As an author, my most popular photography books have been:

  • The Darkroom Handbook (with Joe DeMaio) has been in print for over 20 years and was recently revised by Focal Press.
  • Into Your Darkroom: Step-by-Step is an introduction to black and white film processing and print making. Like The Darkroom Handbook, this title has been in print over 20 years and is published by Amherst Media.
The emergence of the Web has made self-publishing possible. Anyone with the time and energy can say what they want, to anyone who wants to listen. After publishing ninety or so books with publishers such as Prentice-Hall, McGraw-Hill, Focal Press, and others, I needed a break. So, after a decade spent writing college textbooks on computers, I decided to combine the two fields I know best, and love most—computing and photography. This marriage was only made possible by the convergence of these two historically separated fields into the new field of digital imaging. I started writing the first "book" on this site ("A Short Course in Using Your Digital Camera") in the traditional way, using a word processing program. A few weeks into the project, I switched the documents to html format and started posting them to a web site. Without any publicity or promotion, I started getting feedback from readers, an experience that was startling at first. I found myself writing in a virtual storefront window, with people stopping by to chat and offer suggestions. The traditionally lonely art of writing became a community experience. I dropped my original plan to have the book published in what Phillip Greenspun calls a "dead tree format" and decided to finish it on-line. Even before it was finished, I started a second book and have gone on to develop this complete on-line library for digital photographers.

This site started in 1997 as an experiment and remains one to this day. What's made it enjoyable is people like you finding the site in the endless, uncharted wilderness of the Web, learning from it, and then sharing your experiences and suggestions with me.

If you've read this far, you may be interested in following this experiment. You can do so by visiting periodically to see what changes have occurred. Betteryet, you can write to me and let me know what you think. My e-mail address is denny@shortcourses.com. Just click my name here, or at the bottom of any page on this site to send me a message. I can't answer all of the e-mail I get (that would be a full-time job), but you can be assured that I do read them and respond when I'm not in the middle of a project.


Home  |  Shortcourses™ Bookstore  |  Curtin's Guide to Digital Cameras and Other Photographic Equipment  |  Using Your Digital Camera  |  Displaying & Sharing Your Digital Photos  |  Digital Photography Workflow  |  Image Sensors, Pixels and Image Sizes   |  Digital Desktop Lighting   |  
Hot Topics/ About Us


Site designed by Steve Webster and created by i-Bizware solutions, freelance web development, Anil Dada Warbhe, Website development iBizware Solutions, India.iBizware Solutions, India.