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I walked into a photgraphy classroom three years ago with a cheap Canon SLR and no idea what I was doing. The first time an image that I had photographed appeared when I submerged the photo paper in the developer, I said, "Ooh. Magic" out loud and meant it. My professor said, "Yeah. That's how it hooks you."
It totally did, as my family and friends and my overworked credit card will attest.
Today I know a lot more, but still not enough, about the technical aspects of photography. I haven't shot film or been in the darkroom for a while, but I do shoot digitally just about every day. And even though I don't consider myself even a quasi-expert, and even though I still believe that the better part of photography is the part that I still consider magic, it's true: knowing the basic functions of strange-sounding things like aperture, shutter speed and ISO has made me a lot happier with my results, if not more entertaining at parties. (Note: Just assume that most links in this post are to how-to pages that describe things in plainer English than perhaps I can.)
Don't get me wrong - I don't set my camera up for every shot, and in fact far from that. I just bought another digital SLR to replace the sadly stolen one, and it's really easy to use. Most of the time (although I hate to admit it) I leave the sucker on "A" for "Automatic" and snap. But what I'll also admit is that because it's new and I'm not used to it yet, I don't know what I'm doing with all of its controls and menus yet, and I hate not knowing what I'm doing. My Canon Digital Rebel XSi offers "faithful" as a picture style in manual. I have no idea what this means and have I bothered to find out yet? No. So "A", in this case, stands for easy, and is also brought to you by the letter "L" for "lazy" and too many letters to list for "What? Instruction manual? Where?" and "Oh, wait, another piece of pizza and episode of Bones so i don't meet my photography learning goals? Bring it on."
Learning takes time, unfortunately, which is a terrible thing to have to remind oneself when one is actually a teacher, but what can I say? I'm a fan of immediate gratification. Out of the box, charge the battery up and out the door I go. And because I was in such a hurry to put this camera to work, I haven't taken the time to become friends with it yet. This also makes me a hypocrite because when I teach outdoor photo classes for women, I make them bring their manuals. I make them turn their cameras to settings other than "A" and then we hit the dusty trail, where part of the way through I have them lying on the ground shooting tree bark up close and whatnot.
I've been surprised to learn that beyond being lazy like me, a lot of the women I work with in these classes are nervous about the technology. Cameras are getting more complicated, at the same time that they're making amazing digital photography (10 mega-pixels for a point-and-shoot is pretty good, have to say.) accessible to the average consumer. They want to use the cool features on their cameras, but they have no idea how and so they switch it to "fireworks" on the 4th of July and leave it alone for the rest of the year.
I work with a motto of "You will not break the camera by touching new and different buttons" in my classes, and I'll go with that here too. I'm offering just a few tips for getting started if you're the owner of a camera that you can't quite figure out, or you've had one for awhile and just haven't bothered.
This is a great time of year to shoot. The summer vacation photos are hopefully tagged and uploaded (Right? Right? Right.) and we're moving quickly into a season of school fun and games for all ages, holidays for every faith and leaves. Yes, the leaves, the foliage, if you will. The light where I live is fabulous. Fall is nothing if not photogenic in many climates, and if you're somewhere where it's not fall, there's undoubtedly something cool going on where you are too. So dive in - fiddle
