DSLR photography student Cralle & his newly acquired Canon 40DMy advertisement on Craigslist offering DSLR Photography Lessons, which I just put up at 2am last night, has already yielded a student! Cralle called me this morning and booked a lesson for the afternoon in downtown St. Petersburg. He said he had just bought a used Canon 40D. I am of course a Nikon shooter so I did a little research on the controls of a Canon 40D.
Cralle was a very good student, asking many questions, and best of all not afraid to ask the same question many times throughout the lesson to make sure he understood it. As every photographer knows, when you are starting out just trying to get your head around a large aperture being a small number is enough to drive you crazy.
What was my experience with the Canon 40D? I realized I greatly prefer the button layout and ergonomics of Nikon bodies. I already determined this when I bought my first DSLR (a Nikon D80), but back then I was not looking at bodies in the range of the Canon 40D and my current Nikon D300. The Canon 40D has only one dial for adjusting settings, and the button to push to adjust settings is on the same side as the dial. It took some getting used to.
We ended up having a 2-hour lesson, but the end of which Cralle was catching on to which aperture to use to get a large DoF and which to use to get a short one. He knew which f-stops to use with the lenses he had and when to use which white balance. We also tackled ISO and how to use it to increase shutter speed when necessary.
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