So you plonked down some semi-serious dough for that big old digital-SLR camera. Surely paying that much money means you can't fail producing some really great snapshots right? Hell yeah! Why do think I paid all that money in the first place… For that kind of money I expect it’s guaranteed that I’ll become a great photographer.

Then you actually try to use the infernal contraption.

You thought parting with several hundred dollars was hard... just wait until you see those first few hundred photos. After about the 500th waxy-milky-fuzzy image you have to make a decision: you are a crap photographer, or its a crap camera.

Here's a hint: its not the camera.

Your New Favourite Letter: “M”

If you want to make interesting photos you’ve got to use the interesting settings. Using your camera into a glorified "point-and-shoot” by leaving it on all automatic settings is a phenomenal waste of money! Get used to “manual” mode – you get so much more control over how your pictures look when you choose the settings, F-stop, ISO, shutter speed and the focus—oh yes, you’re even going to turn off the auto-focus so no machine is going to decide with IT thinks you’re pointing the camera at!

Flip open your cameral manual and find out how to turn off every automatic setting you can find… If you’re not quite ready to walk the tightrope without a net, your DSLR probably has several modes that let you turn off just one automatic feature at a time. Isolating your learning to one feature at a time is a great way for you to put the feature into terms that you understand instead of the mumbo-jumbo you might encounter in a poorly selected “how to” book.

Your New Favourite Word: Exposure

Learn it, live it, love it. Having a good camera is all about how you expose the sensor to light. Control over exposure means three basics: aperture, shutter and ISO. If you’ve tried out turning off at least one feature at a time, you’ve probably noticed how variable your results can be… and probably many of them are just too dark. It’s amazing how the wrong setting can make a bright summer afternoon look like the middle of the night through your camera.

Not to worry, that’s what this learning is all about. Here’s some of my amateur thoughts on the main controls:

F-Stop

F-stop controls how much light comes in to the camera at once—too much light rushing in can wash-out the picture, especially out-of-focus areas like turning your blue sky of fluffy clouds into a flat, greyish blank background. A little less F-stop and you can get nice soft backgrounds, handy for portraiture. Take it too far down and your images are faded, the colours can go kind of flat.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed also determines how much light reaches your camera sensor, but it’s how much light enters over time. Faster shutter speeds are going to make images darker because they’re not exposed to enough light to make a real impression. This could be exploited to make nice silhouettes. Slower shutter speeds are going to let light areas of your images “burn”. Stuff like clouds will seem to glow with an annoying coloured-fringe at the edges, but some of that depends on the quality of the camera’s sensor. Not so good sensors will probably have more fringe or more colourful fringe.

ISO

Considering the higher the ISO number, the grainier your images can appear (you know, globs of colour that run into each other instead of tiny points of colour), I like to keep the ISO low—200 or 400 if I’m outdoors. ISO 100 seems too hard to me and really takes the pop out of most scenery shots so 200 is often my minimum. Indoors, the sensitivity is going to have to go up to 800 or your images are going to be very dim.

A flash would let you lower your ISO below 800, but if you’re a snap-happy freak like me you’re better off avoiding using the flash as this is going to annoy your average party-goer or art-gallery/museum patron. For now trying to get the best photo without resorting to flash is my current challenge. I’ll either master it or I’ll learn how many flashes-per-minute will annoy the average person on the street then stay under that number.

Now That I've Told you It's All-Right to Fiddle-- Stop Fiddling

If you're ever going to enjoy that camera of yours, find your exposure setting quickly… only practice is going to help here. Once you have your settings right, you probably don't need to change them all that soon, especially if your outdoors since lighting depends more on time of day and weather and those don’t change all that quickly. So stay still and keep trying variations on your settings until you get it right (as in you like what you see coming out of the LCD screen on the back of your DSLR)  then forget about the exposure and start looking for things interesting to photograph.

Conclusion

If the above sound like a lot of work, save yourself some money: return the expensive DSLR and get a point-and-shoot camera instead. Resolutions on these are the same DSLR resolutions from cutting-edge cameras from two years ago and you’re going to enjoy the same automatic-mode settings as the DSLR but for less money.

Really the above should sound like inspiration or at the very least encouragement, the best part of getting a DSLR is the extra dials and switches. Experimentation is fun, now that there’s no film to waste and you can gauge experiment results instantly it should be more fun than ever. You can really amaze yourself with great pictures if you’re willing to not let the camera do all the work.

Tags: photography, dslr, imaging, colour