Digital Photography SLR
If you want to take great photos, Digital Photography SLR is the only way to do it. There is absolutely no substitute to a great SLR camera and some photography know-how…
But in order to be good at digital photography, you have to understand some of the basics like what an SLR camera is, how it works, what makes great pictures… Things like that.
And the settings! Pick up a SLR camera for the first time and you’re head will get dizzy from all the different settings and buttons the things has! Don’t get me wrong, once you understand them you won’t be able to take pictures any other way – but getting to know them is the hard part!
In this article, I’m just going to walk you through digital photography and touch on what SLR cameras are and why they’re extremely important to a professional photographer. On the right, I’ve got a Classes In Photography mini-course all set up where we dive into this stuff deep!
Digital Photography Evolved
Very simply, digital photography is a form of taking photos using digital technology! Hard, huh? Previous to digital photography, we had film for the camera which ran out after 24 or so pictures. (Looking back, I can’t even imagine taking 10 rolls of film with me to shoot a sunset…)
Digital photographs can be manipulated easily, displayed through a variety of means, stored, transmitted and archived using computers and the Internet. They can appear on digital photo frames, sent through email or uploaded to Facebook. The digital photographs themselves can be altered and touched up easily with software like Adobe’s Photoshop.
Digital photography is technically a form of digital imaging; like scanners and radio telescopes. We don’t think of them that way though!
The quality of digital photography lies in the pixel count. Pixel counts, or megapixels (millions of pixels) is only one of the mojor factors, but it’s the most heavily marketed. I’m sure the last time you bought a camera, you were sold on the number of megapixels, right?
What digital camera manufacturers don’t want you to know though is that megapixels aren’t a major factor in evaluating a digital camera! The processing system inside the camera that turns the rax data into a color balanced photograph is! That’s why some of the low-megapixel cameras produce the highest quality photos and are so expensive!
Some other things to consider about digital cameras are the lens quality, capture medium, capture format and processing format. I’m going to save the detailed explanation of each of these to other articles on the site and the free mini-course, but you get the idea!
Digital Photography SLR Explained
SLR stands for ‘single lens refrex.’ An SLR camera uses one semi-automatic moving mirror which allows the photographer to see exactly what will be captured. Focus can be adjusted manually by the photographer or automatically by an autofocus system.
A Digital SLR (DSLR) is a digital camera that uses a mechanical mirror system and pentaprism to direct light from the lens to an optical viewfinder on the back of the camera. DSLRs are prefferred by professional still photographers because they allow an accurate preview of framing close to the moment of capture. They also allow for the phographer to change lenses which is great for a huge variety of shots from a single camera!
If you’re interested in a complete look at SLR and DSLR cameras, including their history, just click the links!
Summary
There is so much information I want to give you on digital photography SLR techniques! There’s only so much space in this article though! The short, summary is digital photography is going to be the default standard from this point forward. Digital camera quality is getting better and better as technology improves, and prices are coming way down!
If you want to take amazing photographs, you’re going to want to pick up a DSLR camera as quickly as possible. Prices have dropped considerably and you’ll be able to pick one up for $300-500 almost anywhere now. The key is to just do it. Get started playing with the camera. And sign up for our Classes In Photography mini-course! In the course, we expose some buying secrets, photography tips and software tutorials that we created just for you!
