Category: Photo Light Box

Just days prior to my acquisition of my very first DSLR camera, and thus soon taking the plunge into digital slr photography, I wasn’t able to help myself from buying a couple of books on digital slr photography, “The Digital Photography Book” volume 1 and volume 2 by Scott Kelby. As this is my first foray into this jungle, I’m not sure if Scott Kelby is considered a cool author in the photography world. (If he is, then I must have been guided into making him my first photography books’ author). These books actually also come as a 3-book series boxed set but I opted to buy only the first two, thinking that as a first-timer, I may have to spend a lot of time reading and experiencing whatever knowledge and wisdom is in books 1 and 2.

I have pored through book 1 and has so far been enlightened on a lot of points I have earlier been ignorant about. The book was formatted in such a way that it provided easy reading for me and Mr. Kelby simply spewed out tips and tricks that other photographers would probably prefer to just keep to themselves. I like his injection of humor and I indeed got into a lot of “Oh, so that’s how they do it…” moments.

I now see photographers as artists and not just dumb clickers who point and shoot. When I say photographer, I mean of course the ones who make digital slr photography a serious business, or at least a serious hobby. I understand for instance how they mind those little artifacts that we laymen wouldn’t have minded having in our pictures. I understand why they lug around those bulky-looking tripods wherever they go. Inspite of their fine artistic hands and fingers, they don’t trust that those wouldn’t create even the minutest shake that could snatch away perfection out of their final output. They have to use tripods. And some go as far as choosing tripods made with carbon fiber to dampen even the humanly undetectable vibrations.

Of course, there are instances where they couldn’t use tripods.Well, they got tricks to compensate. In wedding settings inside churches for instance, they would increase their ISO settings just enough so that noise is kept to a minimum and use their fastest lens to minimize the effects of hand shake. Kelby btw showed a technique of holding the camera to add extra stability and thus minimize hand shake, in the absence of a tripod.

After reading the book, I thought of increasing my budget in order to accomodate additional gadgets e.g. some particular glasses for specific purposes. No, actually I plan to buy those extra glasses some other time. These little beasts are not cheap, you know. I just have to type out these sentences to show that I use ‘glasses’ instead of ‘lenses’. Kelby says I’d sound more non-amateurish if I do that. Wait, will I sound professional if I include, say, ‘white balance’ and ‘f-stops’ whenever I talk about pictures?

At this point though, I still don’t agree with a photographer’s trick in shooting waterfalls where the output shows a very fine water flow that almost makes the water look like thick mist. It still just looks so artificial to me. This seems to be a standard among them, however, as I always see these effects in all exhibits I see where waterfalls or water is featured. Me, I still prefer to be able to see actual droplets and coarse splashes. Wow, I’m yet to enter the portals of digital slr photography and I’m already a rebel.

Now, I’m literally kicking-eager to go to the Canon outlet to get my camera. Oh no, not the skyhigh-priced ones. As I’m an absolute first timer and the budget is sorta tight, I’d settle, for now, for a Canon Rebel, the E0S 550D. I suppose this will turn out to be cool enough for my amateurish purposes. Earlier, I had set my sights on the new 60D. However some friends tell me to start off with the Rebel and that, should I pursue this art further later, I can upgrade to something even better than the 60D or 7D (or the Mark units, chill), or perhaps jump to the Nikon wagon altogether.