Above: Carmen focusing on the Pier Below: Carmen in front of the downtown Saint Petersburg skyline
This morning's first DSLR photography lesson with new student Carmen was well timed with a 10am start because the rain was already rolling in by 1pm. Carmen has the new Nikon D5000 DSLR, my first time to have any hands on experience with it. For a compact DSLR I was impressed with how it felt in the hand and really impressed by the menu system. Compact DSLR bodies lack the buttons semi-pro and pro bodies have making you more dependent on going into the menus to change settings so a fast and well laid out menu system is a definite need.
Since getting her Nikon Christmas present from her husband (must be a great guy!) she has been shooting in auto-mode. We quickly remedied that by having her become an Aperture priority shooter. There are always quite a few things to go through on a very first lesson, but Carmen being a good student was diligently taking notes and her memory for which settings to use when was quite sharp.
Downtown Saint Petersburg was covered in overcast skies which gave a chance to practice using higher ISO levels than students and I normally use during Florida's typically sunny days. We also had good chance to practice action photography when a woman let us photograph her labrador chasing a ball.
Carmen said she would practice more by herself this week in order to better remember which buttons in her D5000 body do what before our second lesson next weekend.