Big Cypress

New Users Corner

It’s here

Your spiffy new DSLR has arrived and you are wondering, what next? Naturally you will charge up the battery and head out to do some shooting. But if you are new to DSLR cameras the results may be disappointing when compared to your old point and shoot.

Why is that true? Because unlike P&S cameras, DSLR cameras demand that you do a lot of the thinking that the camera did for you when you used the less powerful model. DSLRs are not just bigger and more expensive point and shoot cameras even though camera manufacturers advertise them as if that was the case.

If you feel a burning desire to buy some things for the camera then get a couple of extra batteries, Sterlingtek is a good place to find them at less than a quarter of the cost from your manufacturer. You can find them on Amazon and eBay too but won’t know who you are buying them from.

A couple of extra memory cards is a good idea. 4 GB is a good size to my way of thinking. That will usually hold a day’s casual shooting but it doesn’t hold so many shots that it would be a disaster if something happened to the card. If it gets lost or ruined in some way. NewEgg is a good source as is Amazon.

If you are using the high speed UDMA Flash cards then you will want a fast UDMA Card Reader. Otherwise a slower but cheaper USB2 Card Reader will do. I never have thought it makes much sense to use your $1000 camera to do the job a $18 card reader can do faster.

Getting a Cleaning Kit is also a good idea. I like the Giotto Rocket blower as the first line of defense against dust on your sensor.

I would wait to buy lenses or other major accessories. You of course need to decide what you need and when. But the way you look at these items may change a good deal in the next few months. You could buy something and then come to regret the purchase as you learn more.

The three steps

So to become master of your new camera and to learn good photographic technique you need a plan of action. And I have a three step plan for you:

• Step one–learn how your camera works.
• Step two–learn basic photographic technique.
• Step three–learn post process editing for your files

By taking this process in small bites you can make noticeable progress and see that your photographic skills are improving.

Step One

Learning how your camera works can be a tedious process. The first and really vital step in this process is to do the dreaded: read the manual. Find a quiet place where you can have an hour or so alone and get the manual in your hands and the camera in your lap. Read a section of the manual and then find the things that were mentioned on your camera that you have in your lap. Try the different functions and menu items. Do this a section at a time, it may take several sessions.

Now you will not remember all this stuff. But you will recall that there was a way to do something that you are puzzled about and you will be able to find it in the manual weeks later. I carried the book in my camera bag for the first year after I got my first DSLR. And should still be carrying it since I frequently need to look up items four years later.

I have heard of people photographing the manual and saving it on a memory card so that they can pop the card into the camera and read that section on the LCD. That was a step too far for me.

I actually worked on doing a section a week for months. I’d work on recalling how to set focus points one week, and I’d do white balance the following week. Even tho I had 20 years of using SLR cameras, before I bought my first DSLR, all these complex functions were new to me.

While this is going on, visit your camera manufacturers website. They will have a lot of training material available. Usually in short video clips.

• Canon Digital Learning Center
• Nikon Digital Learning Center
• Sony Tutorials
• Olympus Digital School
• Pentax Pentaxian site

If your manual is just too confusing there are third party books on a lot of camera models. I have not read any of these but I have occasionally heard comments from people who seemed to find them useful.

• Short Courses
• Digital Field Guides
• Magic Lantern Guides

And you can just get on Amazon and search for your camera model in books or videos.

Shoot, shoot and shoot some more

While all this is going on, keep on shooting. The more the better, and look at your work after you have a shooting session. Think about how you could improve your images. Remember once you have a digital camera it costs you nothing to take photos. I estimate that it took me 1500 shots or more before I thought that I had a basic grasp of camera operation.

During this step I think you are better off learning about your camera than you would be trying to learn shooting modes. However using jpeg modes on your camera teaches you nothing. What does the camera do exactly when you put it in night mode or sports mode? Most likely you won’t have any idea, and how can you learn from that?

So I suggest putting your camera in program mode, your camera may call it P mode. That is something for you to check in your manual. The camera will also probably select focus settings for you. Leave the other settings at default settings unless you have a reason to change them.

Set the file size to large jpeg and you may want to think about using the raw+jpeg file option if your camera supports that. This might be especially important if you are shooting some event that is important to you. The camera will then save two copies of each image file. One as a large jpeg and one as a raw file. Don’t worry about the raw files now, but later when you learn how to post process your images, you could go back and reprocess those shots. So just save those files for the time being. For now just use the jpeg files to email or get prints made.

The camera will probably set the metering mode to evaluative which is fine at this stage. Concentrate on learning to frame shots and understanding your camera.

OK are we ready to move on to the next step? That will be in the next post.

Big Sur Naval Station

Buying Compact Flash Cards

Just a short post.

This post will only apply to those of you who use cameras with Compact Flash (CF) cards. Almost all point and shoots have switched over to Secure Digital (SD) type cards but most DSLRs still use the higher quality CF cards. Canon and Nikon have turned to the dark side with their XTi and up Canon models (the xxxD series) and the D80 and up (Dxx series) for Nikon. They use the slower SD cards.

Over the years I have always been of the opinion that people have been wasting their money by buying cards that are too fast. Camera bodies only operate at some maximum speed and buying cards that work at higher speeds is just wasted money. Some people argue that the  higher speeds are useful when downloading the cards from the card reader to the computer. But that is only true if your card reader and computer both support the higher speeds. I just let the download happen in the background while I read email or do something else so I have never been in all that much of a hurry anyway.

In the Canon 30D and Nikon D70 days camera bodies only ran at 8 MB/sec or so and almost any reasonably fast CF card was faster than that. So it made no sense whatsoever to spend 3 times as much on the the Super Ultra Fast version when the plain old fast version was fine. Camera body speeds have crept up until the 40D/D90 are in the 11-13 MB/sec range so buying 133X or 266X cards was justified. Still a lot cheaper than the top level cards which work at 40 MB/sec or faster.

Also buying premium brands never made a lot of sense either. If you go to NewEgg and check out the buyer reviews, and there are a fairly large number of reviews, and those reviews are good then so far as I can see you are safe buying the card. Now does that guarantee that your card will never fail, of course not. But I have heard of all sorts of brands failing including SanDisk and Lexar brands. I have personally bought and still have cards from Transcend, PNY, Kingston and RiData and have never had one card fail. One additional worry you have with buying SanDisk cards is the flood of counterfeit SanDisk cards on the market. They do have a very high failure rate. So only buy SanDisk cards from a major safe vendor.

However with the advent of video capable DSLR cameras manufacturers have really jumped camera write speed up. This can be seen on any of the Canon bodies with the Digic 4 processor ( 5D Mk2 and 50D) and in the Nikon D300/D700 bodies. The write speeds are now in the 30-35 MB/sec range and you are now wise to buy a top grade card. The newest Canon Ti has video capability but uses a SD card which would seem to be problematic. Of course the Nikon D90 does the same.

Ron Gailbraith has updated his database of camera and card speeds and it is well worth browsing through for information about this subject. He has a good write up on CF card technology as well as the difference in CF and SD cards. CF cards have built in electronics to speed up data transfer rates that SD cards lack.

Tom’s Hardware has a recent review of the upper end cards that show that the Transcend cards are just as fast effectively as the pricey SanDisk cards. A SanDisk Extreme III 8GB card is $105 from Amazon while the Transcend TS8GCF300 8GB 300x is a little cheaper at $82. The 266X Transcend TS8GCF266 which is rated at 40GB/sec is only $68 from NewEgg.com. Those prices are only true for the day I post this of course.

This could obviously be a major expense if you are upgrading from one of the older model cameras and have a bag full of older cards like I do. I suspect that you might do just fine with 266X cards unless you are doing video captures. Then you probably do want the max speed.

So if you have a pre-Digic 4 camera from Canon then you should be just fine using 133X cards. Even the speed demon Canon 1Ds MkIII only writes at 20 MB/sec and the 1D MkIII is 15 MB/sec. The same is true for older Nikons the D70 and so on. If you have newer models then you may need to buy at least some faster cards for video capture.

If you want maximum transfer speed from the card reader to the computer then you need to be sure that your card reader is UDMA compliant.