Beginner s Digital SLR Crash Course Complete guide to mastering digital photography basics, understanding exposure, and taking better pictures TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One Camera Settings Image size and quality, JPG vs RAW, a word about memory cards, and color space. Chapter Two Elements of Exposure Detailed look at the exposure triangle, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO speed, digital noise. Chapter Three Histograms Like most people, I had no idea how to use these strange graphs. Once I show you how, your photos will really pop. Chapter Four White Balance A word about the different colors of light, why your photos might look a little off, and how to set a custom white balance. Chapter Five Camera Modes We ll look at aperture value mode, time value mode, and manual mode, with a discussion of blurring a background, freezing action, depth of focus, and a money saving tripod substitute.
Chapter Six Composition Tips Instantly improve your photos with tips including the golden rule of thirds, overfilling the frame, changing the angle, and breaking all the rules. Chapter Seven Photo Storage Invaluable advice for storing your works of art both online and offline, including backup strategies. Chapter Eight Big Kid Toys What good is a hobby without toys? I ll show you some of the most valuable tools you can start to add to your photography collection toreally start getting the beautiful shots. Chapter Nine Final Thoughts Introduction Today even the most amateur photographer can access professional equipment without taking out a second mortgage. The problem I usually see in my beginner photography workshops is people actually having too muchtechnology and not knowing how to use it properly. I cringe when I see somebody out shooting with a DSLR in Auto mode - what a waste! It s kind of like having a MacBook Pro and only using it for Facebook. You might look cool using it, but you re simply not taking advantage of all the amazing features of the technology. Of course you can get some great shots in Auto mode, but they are usually a complete accident. At first, I wasn t sure whether people were lazy or just didn t know any better. Turns out that people really want to take maximum advantage of their camera s features, but just don t know how. It s actually surprisingly easy to do once you know the basics of your camera, which is why I decided to write this guide. This ebook was born out of the photography workshops that I ran in my hometown for years. I would spend a few hours working with small groups of photographers,
teaching them everything we will cover in this guide - but I was charging $75 per hour. I created the first version of this ebook as a sort of refresher for my students, but after a while I started getting emails asking where to buy this guide. That s when I decided to stop running workshops, work full time on the ebook, and help thousands of photographers capture better images instead of just a few per week. Throughout this ebook, we re going to look at the basic functions in your camera and how you can best use them to your advantage. We ll start with very basic, boring skills and move up to the more advanced concepts. Whether you ve never taken a photo in your life, or you ve been using your digital SLR camera for a while now, I guarantee you ll learn a thing or two. By the time you re done reading, you ll be able to take beautiful images that you can be proud to show off to your friends and family. If you re tired of getting lackluster results from your photography, and you re feeling a bit disappointed in the $1,000 (or more) you spent on your camera, you need to read this guide. Sure, you could do what I did and make a million mistakes over 3 years until you ve really understood the equipment. Or - if that doesn t appeal to you - you can invest a few dollars in this guide that will have you taking better photos by the end of the day. Whaddya say? Let s get started. Chapter One Camera Settings As I settled down into my airplane seat, I started making small talk with the young lady beside me named Sarah. It turned out that she was just returning from a backpacking trip to Africa, and she couldn t contain her excitement for the amazing images she had captured during her trip. She grabbed her Canon Rebel camera from the overhead compartment, and began to show off the beautiful pictures. There were
some amazing shots of lions, sunsets, and some of the most beautiful portraits I had seen. She couldn t wait to have a few printed to mount in her apartment as show pieces. Fast forward two weeks, and I get an email from Sarah. I could almost hear her crying by the tone in the email - she wasn t able to print any of the photos from her trip. Not one. I had mentioned that I taught a photography course, so she was hoping to get an answer from me. Unfortunately, she made a terrible mistake on the second day of her trip that couldn t be undone. Not knowing the basics of her camera, she noticed that if she changed her image size down to small, she could gethundredsof more photos per memory card! What she didn t realize was that one simple change would make it impossible to use the photos how she had intended. Now she has thousands of beautiful photographs that can t be printed bigger than 4x6. This simple anecdote broke my photographer heart, because she could have easily avoided the problem with a bit of knowledge ahead of time (and this book, for a self promotion). She had beautiful photos from her trip, but she couldn t do anything with them. I want to make sure that doesn t happen to you. Image Size and Quality From the menu on your camera, you should find a setting called something like Quality,which is actually a combination of the image size and image quality.these are two different, but related settings that can easily be overlooked, but are extremely important to set up correctly from the beginning to avoid Sarah s fate. If you ever decide you want to print your photos, enlarge them, crop them, or do pretty much anything other than keep them on your camera s 2 screen, you will want to choose the best quality, largest format for your pictures. Under Image Quality, you will notice that there are two basic options to choose from:jpegorraw. I know those two words scare away 99% of amateur photographers, but it s nothing to be afraid of.
The main difference is that with RAW images, you can change certain decisions like white balance in Photoshop after the fact, whereas you don t have that freedom with JPEG. You may also need special software to edit RAW photos on your computer, which is definitely outside the scope of this beginner crash course. Once you get a bit more advanced with your photography, I would encourage you to play around with RAW, but for now I recommend shooting in JPEG until you get a good handle on your photos. If you decide you want to shoot in JPEG, you will want to choose the setting called JPEG Large Fine, which looks like this in your camera: End of this sample Kindle book. Click Here For Full Version