Special Announcement
I’ve added a Photography Basics/Introduction To Photography class starting on Saturdays for the April series of classes.
Special Announcement
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When we buy a more complex camera, like a DSLR or mirrorless camera, which are the ones photographers use during my Photography Basics/Introduction To Photography class, we immediately get an upgrade in image quality and image
size.
On the other hand, we get overwhelmed by the camera's ergonomics.
Because with our upgrade to a more complex camera, we get all the menus, settings, buttons, and dials that confuse and overwhelm us.
All we wanna do is make better photographs, and now we feel like we’re in over our heads.
If we don’t understand what we’re doing with the camera, we’ll just put it on automatic exposure mode and let it do the work for us.
And while we’ll get a better picture in terms of image quality and size, just because we’ve got a better camera doesn’t make us better photographers.
If we wanna be better photographers, we’ll need to learn to work the camera efficiently and effectively to get the pictures we want.
Fully automatic exposure mode won’t cut it.
If we’re gonna work in an automatic exposure mode, in terms of creativity, we might as well keep using the cameras on our phones
Working in priority exposure modes, like aperture and shutter priority, is a step up, but even those
modes aren’t reliable; it still requires us to let the camera do some of our work for us.
If we want complete control over composition and the ability to communicate what we want through our photography, we’ve gotta learn to work in manual
exposure mode.
In other words, we’ve gotta make the picture ourselves.
That means working in manual
exposure mode, where we pick the apertures, shutter speeds, and ISO‘s that we feel produce a picture that best communicates what we wanna say.
This means we’ve got to learn the camera's ergonomics so we understand how to use it effectively and efficiently (camera operation).
Anyone who enrolls in any of my group classes or private lessons not only learns how to operate their camera effectively and efficiently, but also how camera operation influences our composition and how our observation and description of the light we see drives our camera operation and compositional decisions.
The bottom line is we either make the best pictures we can in manual exposure mode or take whatever picture the camera gives us in automatic exposure modes.
If doing it ourselves and getting the best picture we can that communicates what we wanna say gives us more joy than having the camera do the work for us and getting a picture that’s just OK, then by all means we should learn to do it ourselves.
The next round of Photography Basics/Introduction To Photography classes starts on Sunday, March 29. If none of the schedules work for you, you could learn the same stuff through a series of private lessons.
No matter how you study and practice with me, I’ll help you be a better photographer.
Ways to learn photography with me are listed below.