F-stops & isos

Spent a great morning relearning how to use a camera...

Many years ago my dad gave me one of his cast off cameras, then later a new Pentax SLR. This was all back in the days of film and developing tanks where you had to know your F-stop from your aperture, blah blah blah.

My lovely digital camera does all that too, but like so many people I've got into bad habits and have a tendency to leave it on auto.

Fortunately one of the members, Jill, from the American Women's Club Düsseldorf is a proper photographer, who actually makes money from taking photos, and she volunteered to run a training session, teaching/reminding us what all the other buttons on our cameras could do (see, it's not just men who ignore the instruction booklet and jump straight to playing with the new toy!)

After two hours of fiddling with apertures and shutter speeds (or is that the same thing...?) and taking many photographs of a plant (some of which were worryingly black) my brain was spinning as though I'd sat through 90 minutes of German grammar. However, I resolve to play with the settings more until I am the boss of my Nikon and not it of me!