I'll jump in here and defend the beginner with respect to reading the manual.
My Saturday morning classes are aimed at beginners. The only requirements are that you show up with your camera and instruction manual. Honestly, I've had to show a few people how to put the batteries in the camera. Even the best manuals are very bad, and if you don't know anything about photography they only confuse. Most do an adequate job of telling you how to turn various features on or off, but they seldom tell you why you would want to do so. I get a lot of feedback on the class, and I'm fairly confident that the students leave with a basic knowledge of how to get a decent photo out of their camera and enough knowledge to figure out how to get useful information from the instruction manual. They also leave with recommendations for additional web and printed resources to help them along the way. The best line came from a young mom in last Saturday's class. I referred to "point and shoot" cameras. She said hers was more of a "poke and hope." Yeah, I'm stealing that line. See you later, gs <http://georgesphotos.net> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 6:52 PM, William Robb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Bob W" > Subject: RE: Uh oh > > > >> I suspect it can take a lot of people a long time to understand why >> reflected or matrix light meters can get things wrong, or why AF >> doesn't always F where they want it to. It depends in the end on how >> keen people are really to learn what to do. > > It also depends on how stoic they are about insisting that the miracle of > automation they bought > is either perfect in every detail, or else third rate crap. > Just about every complaint I have read about cameras since I got onto the > internet is either > something that can be fixed by either reading the owners manual, or else > reading a good book > about photographic theory, and then putting what you have read into practice. > > William Robb > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
