Jeannie with her Canon T3i practicing photographing moving subjects in downtown St. Petersburg FloridaOn a slightly cool Saturday morning I met Jeannie for our first of four 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lessons in downtown St. Petersburg getting her started with her new Canon T3i. Like many of my hundreds of photography students, Jeannie just got her DSLR after only shooting with small, point and shoot cameras in the past. She did some reading in a photography book before we met though, and following a suggestion I gave her on what to do before the first lesson, she familiarized herself with how to change aperture, shutter speed, ISO, WB and focus mode on her Canon T3i. Every first lesson I teach, pretty much for a student of any level of experience, starts with me showing that person how to change key settings on their DSLR camera body. After all, even if you have full knowledge of the five key things to making a well exposed and sharp photograph in any situation, if you do not know how to change those settings on your camera, it does no good.
The Canon T3i has enough dedicated buttons that the menu is not needed to change any of the five key settings, which is an advantage when it comes to being able to quickly change one, two or all five of those settings as a shooting opportunity arises. We covered a lot of things in the first lesson, concluding with some moving subject practice. Jeannie put on her Canon 70-300mm lens and with Saturday morning being very busy in downtown St. Pete, there were plenty of cyclists, etc to practice the moving subject shooting technique on.
Jeannie has already written to me saying she has been out practicing since our first lesson, which is very good, and will help her even more when we meet for our second of four lessons.
