I’ve spent the past few weeks since arriving here in Germany playing with my new favorite toy – my Nikon D40 DSLR camera. It’s been almost ten years since I played with a camera with more than a push-button point-and-shoot mode. The advent of cheap consumer level cameras with the types of advance features and quality optics previously seen only in professional cameras has made it a *much* more accessible hobby. I picked up my camera, a decent 18-55mm kit lens, and flash card for under $500 and there’s been no turning back. I spent the first week or so just getting used to the controls of the camera, occassionally dabbling in some of the program modes, but mainly shooting in Auto mode. Boy was I selling that camera short.
After doing some reading on Ken Rockwell’s excellent website, I was able to start to explore more of the controls on the camera getting it set up to take more vivid photos right out of the box, turning off some of the more worthless features (who wants a camera that BEEPS?) and developing a workflow for transfering and editing the images. Taking it a step farther, I took the advice from a few folks I’d talked to and bought Bryon Peterson’s excellent book, Understanding Exposure (amazon.com). To say that the book is an eye opener would be a huge understatement. From the time I’ve spent working with my friend Mike Clevenger at the Kentucky Derby for the past few years, I’ve always been amazed at his ability to see the shot in the midst of all the mayhem and crowds – a group of women at a betting window, a violin player on the curb outside the gates, or a litte girl leaning over the paddock rail for a closer look – to pick those shots in the midst of all that and frame them, focus them, and set the depth of field to that you get the whole story while isolating that moment, that person. It’s what seperates ‘making snapshots’ from ‘taking photographs’.
So I’ve been working at it, and making slooow progress towards figuring it all out. It’s tempting at times to blame the equipment and say that I could take really great shots if only I had one of those $1800 zoom lenses or a camera that shot just a few more frames per second, but that’s a cop out. Some of the most interesting shots I’ve looked at have been made with equipment no more fancy (and in many cases, much more meager) than mine. So I learn to zoom with my feet, to used depth of field to isolate my subject, to apply composition guidelines to put the subject in portions of the shot that suggest motion. I’m trying at least. My ‘keeper’ ratio has dropped dramatically during this time. One Sunday afternoon at the DTM Expo, I shot over 450 images and only stopped because the battery in my camera went dead. I only really like less than a dozen of those shots, despite the fact that I still uploaded 50 or so to my gallery. I’m finally starting to get a better grasp of getting the color I want out of shots, but still need to get a better grasp on metering and exposure.
Hopefully I’ll soon have a much cheaper, but hopefully just as useful version of the $1800 lense above – the bargain priced 55-200mm VR lense from Nikon. The Vibration Reduction (VR) feature should help out quite a bit with low light hand-held situations (like the inside of the Köln Cathedral). The extra zoom of the at the far end of the lense should pay off quite a bit when we head to the German Grand Prix F1in July – though I might rent a pro lense for that day just to for the faster focusing.
Anywho, if you have any interest in getting into photography, quit waiting for the next latest and greatest camera to come out, just buy one of the incredibly capable budget DSLR’s from Canon (Xti) or Nikon (D40 or D40x) and get out there and start shooting. Take it out of Auto mode. And quit learning Photoshop when you ought to be learning you camera.
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