My #1 advive for a beginner is toNOT buying anything else beside the camera and its kit lensbeforehe/she understands exposure andthe camera.
My #1 advive for a beginner is toNOT buying anything else beside the camera and its kit lensbeforehe/she understands exposure andthe camera.
Originally Posted by Sinh Nhut Nguyen
Oops ...guess I should have asked this question earlier!
Oops ...guess I should have asked this question earlier!
Don't worry about it. There are still things I don't understand about exposure and the camera and I've been doing this seriously for years now and have a bundle of lenses.
You will never stop learning - if you think you know it all, well, you're not paying attention! []
I'm going to vary from the beaten path on this one...
Go shoot sports. Anything you can find will do, but high school baseball, softball and soccer make great starter sports. There are usually fewrestriction on access andtons of games on all nights of the week.
Shooting sports will force you to learn a lot about photography. The light will vary at each event forcing you to learn every facet of shutter speed, ISO and aperature. You'll have constant changes of composition and all kinds of interesting color and movement. You'll also learn to get images quickly and work in a noisy, crazy environment.
The upside is you can work on candid portraiture by shooting the band, drill team and cheerleaders as well.
I've always believed my wedding skills came from my sports work. If you can shoot a running back coming straight at you in crappy light with 3,000 kids clanging cow bells in the stands behind you, weddings will look tame in comparison.
I like this advice.
I like this advice.
I particularly like this line haha.
I'm pretty new (one year) to slr photography too, but I have learned a lot by reading books. I tried to just start shooting, but all I got was garbage. And confused by all the buttons. So...
1. Get a book on the T1i. I have a XS, and Ben Fong wrote a great book on it. It covers every single button and setting, and in English, not owners-manual-poorly-translated-engineer-speek. Without this book, I'd probably still be on auto.
2. "Lightroom 2 for Digital Photographers" by Scott Kelby. After downloading trial versions of the Adobe software, I decided LR2 was for me, and almost immediately got this book. It stays by my computer. Postproduction work can make your photos pretty bad if you don't know what you're doing.
3. "Digital Photography" by Scott Kelby. I borrowed this one, so I'm paraphrasing the title, but it is an awesome book. Now that I'm typing this out, I don't really remember what I learned from it, but I read it at least four times, and really enjoyed it. He has a pretty corny sense of humour, which works for me.
4. Take lots of photos! Move around when you shoot. Move your subject around (if you can). Never take just one photo.
5. Look at other photographers work.Decide what you like, and why, and try to figure out what they did to get that look.
Enjoy!
Lewis
Go shoot fires. Work with your local fire department (or find a website or scanner that'll let you follow them independently, but working WITH them will help grease the skids with the cops) and go shoot fire runs. At sporting events, you can get to the shoot as early as you want. At fires, you'd better have your bag/kit well laid out, memory cards loaded, settings preset, etc. If it's a house fire, you have at best 30 minutes of good shooting; after that, it's time for candids of the weary faces of the crews because your original subject no longer exists.
I used to manage a mini-website that tracked San Antonio FD's live dispatches (they now do most of what I was doing then at http://epay.sanantonio.gov/activefire/). I saw this apartment fire come in as I was getting ready to leave work. A ten-minute drive in evening rush hour (plus a few minutes of head-start for the FD) meant I wasn't as early as I wanted, but here's what I got: http://www.sanantoniofire.org/scene/...ec28/index.htm. Another night, I was leaving the bar at 0130, and saw friends of mine in a ladder truck heading the same direction I was going. Here's what I got: http://www.sanantoniofire.org/scene/fire_scene/2008_nov09/index.htm.
If you can shoot a fire in progress in crappy light (expect orange/red glow from the fire, red/blue glow from the warning lights, halogen scene lights, and lots of reflective striping to annoy your flash), sports will be easy.
We're a Canon/Profoto family: five cameras, sixteen lenses, fifteen Profoto lights, too many modifiers.
This is great advice, I have some crap that sits and collects dust because I thought that you had to have it to be a professional photographer.
Learn your camera, learn what kind of pictures you want to take, then figure out what toys you need to buy to make it happen.
+1
And take lots and lots of pictures, and rarely center the subject in the picture. Use the rule of thirds. [
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote