A Year With My Camera starts here...

A Year With My Camera starts here

Welcome to the first day of your year with your camera. In just 6 weeks you will be shooting off auto mode and ready to explore everything your camera has to offer.

This email is longer than usual because of a few admin points I need to cover. Normally you can expect just 1 photography lesson each week with a project to complete, some reminders, and suggested further reading or watching. Bear with me for this first email though - please read all the way to the end.

WHAT IS A YEAR WITH MY CAMERA?

I teach photography in the real world as well as online, and a couple of years ago was becoming increasingly depressed at the number of students I would meet who had been learning photography for months or even years, without making any progress. They just could not understand the dials well enough for all the information to stick, so they were leaving their cameras on auto and feeling guilty about it.

I asked my students many questions about where they were getting stuck, and came up with 4 main problems:

1. Just not being able to understand the dials.

2. Learning something in a workshop but then forgetting it after a week.

3. Knowing practise is essential, but being overwhelmed with the sheer volume of things needing to be learnt.

4. Being intimidated by other photographers either in camera clubs, or in Facebook groups, and being envious of how other people's photos seemed to be much better.

So I designed this course from the ground up to fix these problems

WHAT TO EXPECT

The first 6 emails contain the entire "Get off Auto" course from my A Year With My Camera workbooks, one chapter at a time. If you follow along and do the projects you will be able to shoot on Manual mode in 6 weeks' time.

Once you have finished the first 6 emails, you will continue to get an email every Thursday for the rest of the year. These subsequent emails contain the essentials from the rest of the course, and you can complete the whole of A Year With My Camera just by following the emails. If you don't want the rest of the emails you can opt out at any time (details below).

If after the first 6 weeks you would prefer to carry on with the expanded lessons you can buy the A Year With My Camera workbooks on Amazon (there are 2) - links at the end. The workbooks contain much more detail than is practical to include in the weekly emails. They have extra projects, more homework options and all the checklists you could wish for. The first workbook takes you through the first 4 months of the course, and the second finishes the year.

THE FIRST LESSON: EXPOSURE

That's the introductions over - on with the main event:

In the next 6 weeks you will learn all about the 3 ways the camera controls the amount of light hitting the sensor - aperture, shutter speed and ISO. You will learn about their creative effects. You will learn how to and why to change them. But for today you are just learning one thing: how does the camera decide what the correct amount of light is for each photograph it takes?

This concept is often left until the end of many photography courses, because it's not straightforward. But if you understand it right at the beginning, all the remaining lessons will be much easier to follow and your progress will be much quicker.

What is your camera doing when it takes a photo?

The very expensive computer in your camera measures how much light is falling on whatever it is you want to take a photograph of, and then makes sure it lets in exactly the right amount of light through the lens and onto the sensor so that you end up with a photo that is not too light or not too dark. This example is a correctly exposed white paper origami crane on a white background:

How does it work?

How does the camera know which of those 3 images is the correctly exposed one? Take a minute to think about it. It doesn't have a consciousness to tell it which is an acceptable exposure, and which would be considered too dark or too light, so how does it do it?

The answer is in the programming. What has it been programmed to expose for? Bear in mind that it doesn't know if it is taking a photo of an origami crane, a raindrop on a leaf, or a black cat in a coal cellar. How does it decide?

It doesn't. And this is where it starts to make mistakes, and where you need to take control of the exposure. Your camera is programmed to assume the whole world is a mid grey tone, approximately 18% grey.

This is the most critical thing you will learn on this course, so take a moment to digest it.

Every image you take, on auto modes, will default to an overall tone of that grey box above. Whether you're taking a dark and moody scene or a bright and airy scene, your camera has been programmed to assume something different: a mid-grey average tone.

And that's why you're reading this. You are going to learn how to override the camera's programming, so that when you are faced with a scene that is NOT a mid grey tone, you can tell the camera what's going on.

What is overall tone?

To keep this email manageable, I've put the rest of this week's lesson in a short blog post. To read more about how the camera works out the tone of an image, and to download this week's checklist, click here:

THIS WEEK'S PROJECT

Well done for making it this far. The project this week is simply to see the camera's mistakes in action. Please actually do this project - you will remember it much better if you've seen it on the back of your camera than if you've just read about it.

Take 2 photos: one of a piece of white paper, and one of a piece of black paper.

1. Leave your camera on P (Program) or A (Auto) mode.

2. Make sure each piece of paper is lit in the same way, ideally by placing it next to a window during daylight, but not in direct sunlight. There should be no shadows on the paper, no highlights, and no reflections. You're aiming for an even, flat light.

3. Fill the frame with the paper for each shot, so the whole image is either the white paper or the black paper. There shouldn't be any table or background showing.

4. When you've taken the photographs you should notice that both images are approximately the same shade of mid grey - not black, and not white. If they're not, read through the troubleshooting steps below.

Troubleshooting

Does your paper fill the frame?

If there is anything else in the photo - table, pens, lens cap, shadow - then the camera isn’t looking at a completely uniform tone. Try again, and make sure that all you can see through the viewfinder is a rectangle of white (or black) paper.

Are you on auto or program mode?

This exercise is designed to show you that the camera defaults to a mid grey tone, no matter what you are taking a photograph of. You must be on one of the automatic modes for it to work. Double check your dial is set to "P" or "Auto".

Camera won’t focus, or won’t take a photo

Because you are filling the frame with a monotone, your camera might have trouble finding something to focus on. It doesn’t matter whether or not the paper is in focus for this exercise, so just put your lens onto Manual Focus for now, and take the photo. Don’t forget to switch it back to Auto Focus when you’re done. (Look on the side of the lens for the "MF/AF" switch.)

That's all for this week

This is the longest email of the whole year, so if you're still reading, congratulations. Here is your summarised to-do list:

1. Read the lesson, in this email and the continuation blog post.

2. Do the 18% grey project.

3. Join the Facebook group and share your homework in the pinned thread. (Click here to join the Facebook group.)

4. If you are on Instagram, have a look for the #AYearWithMyCamera hashtag, and share your 18% grey photos if you want to.

5. Don't worry if you don't understand everything. Read through the email again, have a go, and ask questions in the Facebook group.

6. If you think the course is not going to be for you, unsubscribe right here. We'll part friends and you'll not get any more AYWMC emails:

Click here to unsubscribe - you won't get any more emails