DSLR For Beginners: What I Learned My First Month With A Camera
11:15 PM
First step: find a camera that you like and buy it. I went to various big box electronics stores to put my hands on different cameras. I knew I wanted either Canon and Nikon, so I just put different versions in my hands and I decided that I liked the Canon interface better. The T1i was the cheapest Canon DSLR that I could find, and I happened to find one on craigslist with the kit lens and an extra battery.
I was ready to go. I had about 2 weeks to practice with the camera before embarking on my trip. Here’s what I learned.
Photography was harder than I thought
I didn’t understand composition, aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, white balance… the list goes on! All these concepts were foreign to me. However, being an audio engineer, I did have an innate grasp on ISO. It’s just like audio gain; gain makes your mic more sensitive to sound, and ISO makes your sensor more sensitive to light. Turn it up to 11!
However, photography really wasn’t coming naturally to me. It wasn’t clicking how to make three seemingly simple settings work together to create a properly exposed image, and I was feeling defeated. So rather than continuing to teach myself, I turned to where I just happen to work – CreativeLive. I had, at that point, previously worked onJohn Greengo’s Fundamentals of Photography workshop so I knew I could trust his knowledge, teaching style, and thoroughness to set me up with my camera. This workshop is still one of my favorite CreativeLive courses. I can’t recommend it highly enough to any budding photographers. It took the shock out of taking the plunge into DLSR Lake!
The Importance of Fundamentals
For two weeks, I practiced with depth of field and struggled with shutter speed. I took a lot of boring and blurry photos. I didn’t have a point of reference for how fast a shutter closed. It seems like 1/1000th of a second is really fast. And it also seems like 1/100th of a second is really fast. I mean, really, it seems like 1/15th of a second is really fast. I can’t do anything in 1/15th of a second!
How do you figure out how fast the shutter speed has to be to freeze action? I found the answer in Fundamentals of Photography and especially in the bonus materials! I found a stellar breakdown that provided me nine points of reference for shutter speeds. After studying the breakdown, I decided that I would make sure my shutter speed was always above 1/125th of a second to get sharp images. It wasn’t science, but it was a starting place.
Something else that was really important to my learning process was going through every menu and setting on my camera, trying to understand every function. The more I understand my tools, the more I can focus on the art or moment or adventure. Learning the fundamentals is so important because it lets you focus on your goal, rather than your tool.
Mistakes happen 
It was time to embark on my journey. Peru, here I come! I was flying from San Francisco so I had a lot of time in the air and what better way to spend it than playing with my camera? The camera still felt so foreign in my hands. I was overwhelmed by the amount of things I didn’t know.
So, I continued going through every setting. Trying to learn every button. I adjusted picture profiles. I adjusted white balance (which is something I still struggle with. Auto White Balance is good enough for me; I shoot RAW anyways.) I adjusted the diopter. Whoops. I shouldn’t have done that!
I’m actually not sure if I intentionally adjusted the dial that sets the viewfinder’s relative focus or if I nudged it at some point, but I am sure that I didn’t realize what I had done until I got back to the states and I realized why while I was shooting everything just seemed – a bit off. A bit soft. Or out of focus. I’m not really sure if I had the photographical dialect to explain what was going on. I figured I was probably just a really bad photographer. It turns out, I just needed more practice with my tool! Once I fixed my diopter blunder, photography got a lot more fun. Everything started to click.
The easiest way to learn is to just shoot away!
I had my camera in my hands and held up to my face the entire trip. I didn’t go anywhere without it. I took a lot of bad photos, like, a lot. I also took a lot of photos that I’m proud of and so happy to have to remember the things I saw and people I met.
Who cares if everything is blurry, out of focus, too dark, too bright? That’s literally the worst-case outcome from pressing the shutter. I haven’t regretted a single picture I’ve taken.
Whether you’ve got a big vacation coming up that you want keepsakes from, your kids are going through their awkward phase and you want blackmail material, or you just need a new challenge and creative outlet, I can’t recommend DSLR photography highly enough. And if you’re nervous about the high learning curve, check out John Greengo’s Fundamentals of Photography workshop.
Source: http://blog.creativelive.com/
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