Photography Lessons

Hello All,

I have been working on a series of photography lessons aimed at beginnersand photographers transitioning to DSLR cameras. The goal is to take a complete novice and give him/her the tools to create great photos in any situation.

The first portion of the lessons is complete and I feel it is now time to share them with other photographers. Please let me know what you think. I hope these lessons are helpful.

Introduction

Lesson 1 -- Disillusionment is a Positive First Step

Lesson 2 -- Your Eyes are a Miracle, Your Camera is a Machine

Lesson 3 -- Understand Exposure One Pixel at a Time

Lesson 4 -- What is Aperture and Aperture Value

Lesson 5 -- Depth of Field

Lesson 6 -- How to Focus Your DSLR

Lesson 7 — What is ISO and a Deeper Look at Your Image Sensor

Lesson 8 — Setting Aperture, Shutter Speed, ISO, and Exposure Modes

Lesson 9 -- Exposure Compensation

Lesson 10 -- A Path Into the Woods

Here is a link to the entire series.

I am not done with the series. All the promises in the introduction haven't been delivered on yet. After the holidays I plan to continue writing lessons. Check back for more developments.

Dave

That's a very nice effort!

I read "the how to focus" section to learn about tricks to get the focus spot on for manual lenses but couldn't find much on that.

I am planning to shoot extensively w/ Carl Zeiss 50mm lens and would appreciate a few tips on manual focusing.

"At EV +1 the birds head starting flashing on my LCD. That’s the warning that I over exposed. I knew I had to have an exposure compensation less than EV +1"

you can get your lcd to flash? how can i do this?

dru8p wrote in post #11399477
"At EV +1 the birds head starting flashing on my LCD. That’s the warning that I over exposed. I knew I had to have an exposure compensation less than EV +1"

you can get your lcd to flash? how can i do this?

On some models, the LCD will flash to indicate clipping (severe overexposure). Only the overexpose parts will flash.

It all depends upon the settings you have, and it's covered in your manual. I'd tell you exactly where, but you have no gear listed.

sory i have the 40d, does the 40d have this option?

retour wrote in post #11399269
That's a very nice effort!

+1

.

dru8p wrote in post #11400767
sory i have the 40d, does the 40d have this option?

Yes. It's called Highlight Alert, and is mentioned under Shooting Information Display on page 117 of the 40D manual.

What it says is:

• About the Highlight Alert
When the [Highlight Alert] menu is set to [Enable], overexposed highlight areas will blink. To obtain more image detail in the overexposed areas, set the exposure compensation to a negative amount and shoot again.

Dave, very cool to see people in POTN put some real work into helping others -- bravo!

tonylong wrote in post #11402778
Dave, very cool to see people in POTN put some real work into helping others -- bravo!

agreed, nice job. sticky!?

Thanks guys! Glad you like it. Like I said in the original post, I plan on writing more lessons after the holidays. The next step is to cover photoshop RAW and basic image adjustments in Photoshop -- stuff like color correction and setting white point and black point.

My goal is to present digital photography in a straight forward manner. I want the reader to know how to visualize the finished photo before pressing the shutter button. That means we're going to have to delve into post processing.

Hopefully the first batch of lessons put down a strong fondation so we can move forward with some of the more advanced stuff.

So is that it? Any critiques? This series is a work in progress. I am planning on going back and editing most of the lessons at some point.

Writing something like this without any outside input is a challenge.

Thanks for posting and wanting to help, I'll give this a detailed read over when I have the chance (in a week or two) and see if I have any suggestions.

RbnDave wrote in post #11410867
Your camera’s ISO setting often is defined as how sensitive your image sensor is to light. An ISO of 100 is less sensitive than ISO 200. Each 100 points of ISO is equal to one stop of aperture or one stop of shutter speed. For example, let’s say you are shooting a football game on a cloudy day. You have a really expensive lens and you are shooting at f/2.8. Since it’s cloudy you notice that your shutter speed is only 1/60th second. Your photos aren’t coming out very crisp. The action on the field is just too fast for that slow shutter speed. Being a smart photographer you decide you want a faster shutter speed. Your lens is already dialed down to its fastest aperture. What else can you do? You turn up the ISO. Let’s say you dial up the ISO to 400. That’s three full stops faster than ISO 100. Now, with the same lighting you get camera settings f/2.8 and 1/500th. That’s plenty fast for this action!

Your info in this paragraph is incorrect. You are at shooting at ISO 100 and a SS of 1/60. ISO 400 is not three stops up, it's two, so your resulting shutter speed would be 1/250. Just thought I would point that out

Very helpful!