Good Intro to Manual Photography

Elran unearthed this article for me and us all on how to wrap yourself around manual photography. If you’ve got a goodly camera and now you’re wondering how to make it behave, this article offers a great walk through. It’s full of all kinds of stuff that’s good to know if you’re gonna go about trying to catch some of the beauty that’s out there and you’re not in a place to invest yet in a full-on photo education.. like this bit:

Another important property of aperture is that it controls depth-of-field (DOF). DOF is the distance in front of and behind the subject which is in focus. The technical aspects of DOF are somewhat complicated so for the time being, I’ll focus simply on the basic implications of aperture on your photographs. If you want a shallow DOF, which is helpful to accentuate the subject or make a distracting background a pleasant out-of-focus one, you will want to use a larger aperture (smaller f-stop number). By contrast, if you want to have more of the scene in focus, you can use a smaller aperture (higher f-stop number).

Good to know if you didn’t before, no? 6 pages of this type of thing and you might just be better equipped then you were before for photo taking and tip swapping with other photographers. Yesterday at our Assembly meeting, for example, there was a crazy hodge podge of creative conversations and note swapping and brainstorming, and one of the best bits I caught went down between Indyish staff Tristan Brand and dedicated Indyish art-maker and event participant, the ever-dear, Martin Reich. These guys are very different but of a similar stripe that allows them to discuss powerbook settings and final cut hacks and their fancy SLR cameras with honest to goodness guy glee. It is in tribute to them that I direct your would-be photographers to this article.
May you emerge as triumphant shutterbugs to geek and scheme with your kin!
Peace!
Risa