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Godless_Heathen

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  • Birthday 02/10/1965

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  1. I strongly agree with this. Photography is a skill, and the technical aspects (exposure, depth of field, and the like) are the least difficult aspects of doing it well. If you're in too much of a hurry to learn the basics, any success you may have will be accidental. Photography is largely about light. Exposure figures into this, but understanding light is also important for understanding things like flash. Kangaroo mentions an external flash, which is vital if there isn't enough ambient light. Not so much because a camera's built-in flash is weak, but because an external flash will have a bounce head which lets you reflect the light off of appropriate surfaces. Direct flash produces terrible images because of the angle, but also because flash falls off dramatically with distance, so you want to direct the flash so the overall light path to your subjects is about the same. Otherwise subjects in the foreground are overexposed and subjects in the background are underexposed. Any really serious wedding photographer will have as much money invested in lighting as his camera and lenses. For posed shots, they'll have multiple remote flashes and reflective umbrellas to act as diffusers. Honestly, wedding are not where I'd start. Too many variables interfere with learning. It's better to get the basics down with stationary subjects under well controlled conditions, so you can experiment and understand how each decision you make affects the photograph. At last in this day of digital photography, you can get immediate feedback about what you're doing, no need to wait for film development.
  2. You can take acceptable photos with any camera, down to the cheapest point and shoot, but professional results are another matter. DSLRs have two major advantages over point-and-shoots: larger sensors and better lenses. A large sensor means better low light performance. Point and shoot cameras will give you great results in bright sunlight, but as you boost the amplification (known for historical reasons as ISO) with one, you'll get more and more noise, and with moving subjects (i.e. people) you can't just use a longer exposure to avoid boosting ISO. Point and shoot cameras have a fixed lenses, and these lenses are almost never as sharp as a good-quality DSLR lens, particularly if the camera has a wide zoom range (10:1 is pretty common). Since it sounds like you have little experience with photography at this point, it doesn't really matter. What you really need is lots of practice, and you need to learn basic concepts like how exposure works (a combination of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO). That's really more important than what equipment you're using at this point.
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