(Re) Discovering my love of Photography

First Impressions

My first experience was using my dad’s 35mm Asahi Pentax Spotmatic SLR when I was around 10 years old. It was a manual film camera. You had to load the film, wind the film, focus on the objects, adjust the shutter speed and aperture and the take the photos. And till they were developed and printed, you had no clue about how good or bad they were. Take multiple shots if in doubt. Since then I have had various point and shoot as well as SLR cameras, but none could replace the charm of my first SLR.

The Fundamentals

Starting with a 35mm manual SLR gave me an opportunity to learn about concepts like zoom, telephoto, wide angle, aperture, depth of field, shutter speed, ISO ratings etc. All the things you needed to be aware of, to ensure a well taken photo.

Auto Mode

When digital SLR’s came out, the first one that I fancied and bought was the Canon Rebel EOS T2i. As time went on, I settled into a strange balance, SLR was for the “fancy photos”, I mainly used the Auto Mode/No Flash Mode, and the smart phone was for everything else. You cant find fault, smart phone cameras were getting better, they had AI built into them to simulate various shooting modes… and pretty soon, the SLR was languishing in my camera case only to be shown the light of day once in a while or on vacations.

The Snap

I took out the SLR recently, since I thought I could benefit from its zoom, to an event at my son’s school. I took a photo of him receiving his award, and it came out terrible (dont worry, we used an iPhone as a backup, and those photos turned out fine). I started with the standard excuse, its my camera its not me! Convinced myself I needed a new camera in order to take good photos. I spec’d out a new mirrorless Canon camera and matching zoom, prime lenses… $7k. Bit of a sticketr shock. Made me reconsider… I told myself, let me take another look at every option this camera has, and see if I can do better. If that doesent work out then sure, I will buy a new one. But at least let me give it a try.

Exploring

With that being said I decided to dive right into exploring my camera and all the options that are present in it, to do a thorough summary of its functionality. Painstakingly! In parallel, I plan on taking a lot of photos… a lot! I will summarize my journey in a series of articles of self discovery, and a handy cheatsheet, that I can carry it with me to guide me. There is so much to learn and do… This is going to be a fun project!

Hero Mode

Not to stop just here, I have also embarked on a journey to learn how to fix minor errors in photos as well as to “enhance” photos to create some magical effects. The tool of choice for me is Luminair Neo (support my blog by using the link: https://skylum.com/c/v2vem3ntp2).

Tools like Luminar are quite awesome in their user friendliness and the ability to correct photos of lower quality as well as to enhance the photos for some stunning photo effects.