Renewed Sympathy for the Beginner

We recently updated our car and for the first time in a long time I started buying car magazines again. It used to be quite a passion but had faded away, probably doing 50,000 miles a year for business. Then I even started getting interested in the RAC e-mails I was receiving.

What's this got to do with photography? Jargon, abbreviations, assumptions that we all know what we're talking about.....the car stuff is full of such things. I was so out of date that I didn't know what an SUV was. I guessed "Small Utility Vehicle" which is close, but wrong.

The beginner to photography needs our help, faced with a mass of mysterious concepts, abbreviations, assumptions and all sorts of jargon. Every field of activity loves its jargon.

So I'm thinking of those first steps into photography, where it was all unknown and when I asked questions of others, even those who should know in shops, they plainly didn't know. Even some veteran camera club members were a bit wooly on what it was all about. It's dazzling for the beginner, but we know that, eventually, it will all click into place. So hang in there if this is you!

I know what you mean John. It wasn't until I joined the Pentax user Forum that I first heard of 'bokeh.' Eventually I got to know what it meant.
David

My biggest bugbear is Aperture. So called experts talk about higher apertures. I don't have a clue what that means.

Yep, I'd agree with you too John.
When I moved to pentax I was purely an auto mode shooter, knew nothing about iso, exp times or fstops . I now shoot in manual mode all the time, and have a good knowledge of the exp triangle, but at the expense of metering, and a few other areas. I'll get there though.
It took me a while to get to grips with f22 being smaller than f2.8 and what it actually meant
It'll all make sense in the end 😁😁😁

Yes, as a lad I was familiar with 35mm camera settings and became adept with a light meter so I thought a dslr would be the same but with a sensor where the film was. How naive! Quite a steep learning curve followed, and still on it. And we had never heard of bokeh then, just out of focus.

i always say to a newcomer to photography "spend time taking photos using manual, and you will learn more about exposure in a day than you will in a year using auto"

What I want to know John is what car you got ?

Vauxhall Zafira Tourer, enough room for all the family when needed, plus luggage, plus camera kit.

I've been in the Motor Industry almost all of my working life and I too had become tired of cars, although not short of knowledge as I have to keep up to date with everything that's going on. In my latest job I don't have a Company Car and have to buy my own, over the years I've become tired of suffering constant depreciation, so I decided 18 months ago not to buy any more expensive (new-ish) cars and set myself the challenge of owning and running vehicles without losing any money on the car's value. I've since had 3 cars (still got two of them), a Mazda MX-5, a Saab 9-3 Aero and a Honda S2000. The Mazda I PX'd for the Honda, losing £500 in the 11 months / 10,000 miles I had it, the Saab is probably worth £800 more now than the price I paid and the Honda has gone up approx £650 in value since I bought it (un-modified Honda S2000's are becoming scarce and are appreciating). None of the 3 cars has ever broken down during my ownership.

Anyway, I agree with John's post and was also wondering if we set ourselves the photographic equivalent of what I'm trying to do with cars, is there any usable kit out there that would achieve the same end result, i.e. costing us nothing over years of enjoyable ownership?

Cheers
David

Friends of ours have one, very nice.

Is there life above f4 ?

Or should that be "below f4" ?

🤔🤔🤔🤔😂😂😂😂

How big is YOUR "Aperture"? (Makes you think, doesn't it? :shock

PS: still trying to answer our U3A Digi Photo Group Members who ask "How do I get my (name any camera you can think of:roll out of "Automatic" (or do they mean "Programme"? I don't even know how to find out until they tell me which camera they have - which they then don't!) mode ?