Photography

I have enrolled on a photography course! I have a digital SLR camera and I have absolutely no idea how to use it! So, last Thursday at 5.30pm I attended my first of 5 sessions. Last week we learnt about shutter speeds - what they do and why, apeture settings, what they do and why and how apeture and shutter speeds work together. We also learnt about ISO/ASA settings and we did a bit on exposure. It was really interesting and a lot of it made sense when you look at the different aspects in isolation. When you have to put them all together, it becomes a bit more confusing! At 7.30pm, I left with some serious brain ache!
I decided to take my new found knowledge and practice at the cricket, I didn't last very long in manual mode! I got what I needed to do, just didn't do it very well! Automatic was much easier to make sure I caught the action shots that I wanted.
Last night I attended week two! We had a quick re-cap from last week and then spent the 2 hours looking at metering. Apparently my camera has 3 different settings for metering which made sense to me, it also made sense to me that the camera works out the exposure on a grey scale but when putting it together and trying to work out when I come to take a photo: what kind of photo I want to achieve, what part of the scene do I want the camera to use to metre from, are there any strong areas of black or white which I will need to compenste for? What is the lighting like and therefore what ISO setting do I need to use? what depth of field am I trying to get in the shot and therefore what apeture setting do I use and finally what shutter speed do I need after all of that to achieve the correct exposure, is not so easy to get. To add to that, the order in which these things are thought about can be swapped around depending on what kind of photo i'm trying to achieve.
Again, I left with serious brain ache! Practice will make perfect though and I'm sure I will get to the point where I can think about all of the above in about 5 seconds rather than 5 hours!