Jess with her Canon 7D and 24-105mm lens in North Straub Park during our DSLR photography lessonOn an overcast evening in downtown St. Petersburg I met Jess with her Canon 7D for our first 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lesson. She has taken group photography lessons before with a local photography organization, so she had pretty good knowledge of basic photography terms and ideas. It's just that those group classroom classes suffer from one serious flaw - you do not actually get out and shoot with the instructor. To me it's like taking a piano lesson, but not playing the piano during the lesson!
So during our 2-hour lesson all out in the field with our cameras on, I helped Jess organize the knowledge she already had while showing her how aperture, shutter speed and ISO relate to each other when shooting in manual mode. Before the lesson she had mentioned issues with getting in focus shots, so I made sure to switch her 7D from the awful auto-point selection to the very reliable single, center focus point method I use and trust myself, even though my own Nikon D300 has an available 51-point autofocus option.
We ended with using her Canon 430EX II Speedlite for a brief intro to flash portrait making. I even showed her how to use her Canon 7D to trigger the speedlite off camera using the built in lighting system with the pop-up flash! After a very info packed 2-hours Jess now has a lot of new knowledge to use when photographing her baby son!
