This started as a series of emails that I sent to someone who had just bought a digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) who asked for advice on how to take good pictures with it. It’s a collection of things learned reading and discussing photography with my friends and family. It’s meant to be short enough that someone would read it even if the last book they read voluntarily was Skinnybones in the 5th grade.
While keeping it short, I’ve tried to go into the technical details that are most important if you want to understand what all the settings do on an SLR if you just decided to leave the world of point-and-shoot cameras with their abysmal response times. This isn’t to say that I think point-and-shoot users can’t benefit from reading this, but with some cameras it's hard to change the settings I talk about here and with some you just can't change them. Forgive me for getting wordy where I talk about digital sensors.
The main reason I spend so much time there is because I’ve seen that it takes some convincing to get people to use their camera’s raw format instead using of jpegs. I think once you understand how digital sensors work, it’s almost painful to use jpegs knowing what you’re throwing away, especially with memory so cheap these days. One more thing: just because I love SLRs doesn’t mean that I don’t like point-and-shoot cameras. I had a Canon point-and-shoot that I loved until I started trying to take pictures of my son. Frankly, I think they just don’t cut the photographic mustard for kids since it’s hard to tell a kid, “Hold that pose for a second while the camera gets ready to take the picture.
