I generally don't care for online photography tutorials, because I find them, well, not concise enough. A lot of talking, not much useful detail.
Don Beaton alerted me to a tutorial by George Mann at the Digital Photography & Macintosh Computers site. Again, too much verbiage for my liking, and an emphasis on software I don't use (PhotoShop), but I was relieved to read his commonsense advice, such as:
+ "I have to confess that I myself do not often look at histograms and also leave the camera on full automatic in many cases..." but he recognizes that manual mode has its place. Maybe now camera companies will abandon all those useless "shooting modes" that nobody uses.
+ He tends to prefer JPEG over RAW, because JPEG is less hassle (hooray for convenience!). Actually, his Nikon camera stores pictures in both formats (JPEG+RAW), so he tends to use that mode, recognizing that each picture consumes 20MB on the memory card -- that's just 51 photos on a 1GB card.
I am glad to read of a professional photographer who understands that the camera is the tool with which photos should be made, and that the most important thing is to TAKE the picture! (He kind of negates that philosophy by having numerous tutorials on Adobe image processing software, but oh well...)
That's what I love about digital photography: it lets me concentrate on taking the picture far more than do film-based cameras. I tried going back to using the Zeiss Ikon Contaxflex I used as a teenager (and borrowed from my father, who bought it in the 1950s) -- a beautifully made piece of machinery that works without batteries. But I can't go back.
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