Harvey photographing a pelican coming in for a landing during our digital photography lesson in St. Petersburg FloridaI have been teaching 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lessons in downtown St. Petersburg for almost four years now. In that time I believe I have only twice before taught someone with a non-DSLR camera. My reasoning for that is that there is a uniformity to DSLRs even across brands allowing me to quickly show a person how to shoot in manual mode. Non-DSLRs have no such uniformity and it took quite some time just figuring out how to change the aperture on Harvey's Sony digital camera. Although it took more time than usual, I was able to figure out how to use the camera in full manual mode and thus began teaching my 5-step process to Harvey.
He kept asking me, like many people do, "which settings should I use for this and that," which I can never answer because unless I am looking at the same subject and light, I cannot really say. This is why I stressed to him and to others that I teach a process that allows you to determine which settings to use on your own. Of course there are basic default settings one can start out with in typical shooting situations, and those can be found in my photography tips section, but I cannot answer questions that contain the words "always" and "settings."
Eventually Harvey became a bit more comfortable, and accepting, of shooting in manual exposure mode.
