Anton’s Blog

I was at the Nikon DSchool Basic yesterday. When I bought my Nikon D40 DSLR, I got the DSchool Basic course for free. The course was about 2h long and very full of content, lecturer Peter Ericsson spoke about the technical terms in photography and different measurements of colors in pictures. Some sort of theme was “It is not the camera that takes the picture, It is you”.

Ericsson talked of focal length, shutter and exposure, these terms are somewhat standard and will always be introduced in a Basic course like this. My main interest was focused on the part were Peter introduced the flash photography, I hate taking pictures indoors and in places with low light because they become as he told us very bright on the first object and darker behind it. One solution was slow sync ( read more about it at kenrockwell.com), then we had the solution of using external flashes to make awesome effects. I kind of liked the slow sync idea and will try to use that as often I can. Then there was outdoor photography and how strange it might seem at first you should turn your flash on here, this is because dark areas will be lightened up and cause a more natural looking photography.

The metering setting was also brought up. There are three different settings, Matrix, Center-weighted and Spot. The three settings behave quite different, Matrix is for strong colors and measures 256 points from all around in the picture. Center-weighted checks colors in the center and is often used when there is a contrast between fore- and background (Peter showed this image). Last one is Spot, in D80 you have a circle which it controls colors from, in D40 the circle does not show for the photographer but it is the same. The Spot mode follows the focus.

Peter also talked about different exposure modes, objectives, and much more. Check out the course if you want to know more about it. This course was in Gothenburg, Sweden but I guess there are more places in the world having these.