Why Photography Skills are Useful

Although I've been using various types of cameras for quite some time now, many years in fact, I didn't really learn much photographic essentials until I got myself a DSLR. Now, DSLR's are based off SLR cameras (but of course), so they maintain a lot of similarities. This in turn creates a steeper learning curve, as there are that many more things to keep in mind while you are taking a photo.

In saying that, anyone can take a photo with a regular point and shoot camera. But that is exactly what it is - you frame up the shot, push the button and the camera takes the picture. Some cameras give you a little more control over the image, for example limiting the sensitivity through ISO and occasionally shutter settings, but for the most part most people won't worry about changing anything. The camera does most the hard work, seeing all the aperture, shutter and settings for you to give what it thinks will be best for your photo. The other thing to keep in mind is that you're stuck with a fixed lens, which has a fixed zoom level and speed rating. This may be perfectly fine for most photographic needs, but one really doesn't learn too much about photography with a camera like this. You can learn composition and framing, but all the technical knowledge will mostly be lost on one of these cameras.

When I first got a DSLR, even with some knowledge of photographic terms learnt through my digital film making background, I was blown away with the sheer amount of information and options available to take pictures. Some DSLR's are making it easy, offering a full auto mode where you can operate them almost like a point in shoot camera, which is great for beginners. But if you really want to get the best from your camera, it will pay off to really look into all the different functions offered, and learn some of the photographic lingo and what everything means. All this knowledge can come in very handy if you're interested at all in anything to do with photography or imagery, for film making or certain areas of art.

It wasn't too long ago that I really had no idea about a lot of things - lens speeds, the effects of aperture and zoom on depth of field, the photographic differences between different focal lengths etc etc. One thing that surprised me the most was the absolute difficulty of manually focusing a lens with a wide open aperture - where you get a razor thin depth of field, meaning simply that only one tiny area of the image is going to be in focus... and you had better hope it is the right one. In doing any kind of cinematography work on a decent camera, these types of things will no doubt pop up, and at least with a working knowledge of photographic basics, one will know what to do.

So my advice is this - if you are interesting in photography at all, or any area where these types of skills might come in useful, you'd be well served to get yourself a DSLR camera. You don't even have to spend a lot of money - the entry level DSLR's like the Nikon D40 (which is the one I chose) or the Canon XS or XSi Rebel's are very good cameras for a fairly low price. And a little investment in this regard could help out in bucket loads further down the road if your area of interest lies around these kind of areas. I'm going to do a series of posts on the basics of photography, that can be applied to any photography or film making related area. Keep posted.