Salvatore Ventura - DSLR Photography for Beginners

This book would have not been possible without the help and support of family and friends. In particular, I want to acknowledge Natalie, for proofreading the manuscript, and dealing with my late hour's habit; my brother Maximilian, for the book design and formatting; my friend Garry, for his constant support and positive encouragement; prof. Marc Levoy, who made his excellent Lectures on Digital Photography freely available on the Internet, and from which I learned the most technical material. I highly recommend you to explore the full content of his lectures.

I am infinitely grateful for the CC0 community and their selfless contributions which make it easy to find quality images for content producers like myself. Throughout this book I have made use of many CC0 images, to enhance the reading experience, and complement my own imagery in areas where I dont have valid samples. I have omitted credits on individual images in order to make more compact and focused captions. However, I did include a credits page at the end of the book, where I listed all the photographers whose contributions I have used.

Here is a printable version of the exposure triangle diagram, followed by a cheat sheet for shutter speed, aperture, and ISO.

Table 8 - Camera distance vs. focal length

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This book is designed to provide information about digital photography. Every effort has been made to make the book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty of fitness is implied.

This book expresses the authors views and opinions, and the contents within should not be treated as fact. The information contained within this book is provided without any express, statutory, or implied warranties. The information is provided on an as-is basis. The author shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book.

Pinhole cameras exist today, and have the advantage of having an infinite depth of field. However, the use of lenses allows gathering more light, producing brighter and sharper images. This unfortunately comes at the cost of having only one plane of the scene in focus.

Note that attributes like wide-angle or telephoto are attributes of the focal length, not the lens itself. In fact, there are zoom lenses that can cover the whole range from wide angle to telephoto.

This will get clearer after we discuss the exposure triangle.

One additional place where the crop factor comes into play is actually depth of field. We will discuss that in a later chapter.

Note also that digitally cropping an image also alters the effective focal length of an image, trading it for resolution.

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The difference between focal length and focus distance might be confusing at first. Zooming changes the focal length, which is effectively the convergence power of the lens. Once that is set, changing the focus distance shifts the entire lens back and forth to achieve focus at the desired plane.

This is true as long as your camera is not in any of the AUTO or SCENE modes. Those modes usually perform subject selection automatically.

Actual formula is:

The amount of light that reaches the sensor is proportional to the area of the aperture, which in turn is proportional to the square of the aperture diameter. Hence to double the light flux, you only need to increase the aperture diameter by 2=1.414...

More technically, it is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image.

These checked all available as of 2019.

Shutter speed not reported.

This is also the same reason why in early days photography, pictures of city streets look empty, save for the few people engaged in conversations.

The circle of confusion applies also to the reproduction of the image, like on prints, screen projections, wall projections, etc. Influencing factors also include viewing distance and human vision power.

If we move away from the subject, it gets smaller; so we need to increase the focal length to maintain the same size on the image. This is called the dolly-zoom effect, or also the vertigo-effect, from Hitchcocks film, Vertigo.

As I am putting the finishing touches to this second edition of DSLR Photography for Beginners, I keep revisiting my own journey into photography, my learning experience, and the many books, articles, and tutorials that I have read and watched over the past; the many pictures taken, edited, and deleted. There is always so much to learn, practice and refine.

I keep thinking that photography is as much as art as it is a craft, which is probably why it looks so simple yet it is hard and elusive. Good photographs? They can be done with relative ease. Meaningful, touching, and engaging photographs? That's a whole other level.

This book is meant for beginners, those who have started exploring a more manual approach to photography, and would like some help in making more sense of aperture, shutter speed and ISO, the creative flexibility that they offers, and the DSLR as an instrument.

Many people can handle a standard camera with no problems. Yet they start running the moment they hear the terms aperture or shutter speed. In this fast-paced, TL;DR; age, we are all pressed to jump to the end of the story and use infographics to just find the answer to what needs to be done next. You end up with an endless collection of seemingly unrelated recipes; or very superficial material that will make you long for more. That's not the way I think real learning works.

Some authors of similar books entice their readers with phrases like "let's skip the jargon!", "this is a hands-on guide!