Reply To: Where Are You in Your Creative Journey?

[Mrs Woo]

@camera clicker – I think that she applied for college with photography/journalism as her major and this is her first photography class.  When she described the assignment I had to laugh, because the way she was doing it made it unlikely that what was to be demonstrated to her would make its point.  She said she had an assignment where they had to take pictures of a moving object at different shutter speeds.  I know that that is to demonstrate motion blur and how it is affected by shutter speed.  She asked me for a short cut to make it easier to switch the shutter speed, which is why I asked her if it had to be manual or if she could use shutter priority and if she knew how to use her camera’s built-in light meter.

What made me laugh?  She decided to take pictures of a car driving towards her.  She will not notice that drastic of a change from that perspective.

I guess I can hope she is a fast learner?  We all began sometime.  My father was sent to photography courses for his job and brought home all the lessons and taught them to me, then I learned developing and printing (film days here) from a wedding photographer.  If I had had the option of starting with something like a Canon Rebel, which gives you automated modes where you don’t have to understand the relationship between ISO, shutter speed and aperture, I might have spent quite a long time in those modes myself.  Instead, my dad started me on a Pentax K1000.  Except for its TTL light meter, it really didn’t offer any assistance whatsoever acquiring an adequate exposure.