Changes in photography in the past 35 years

My wife wants to take better photos.  This means someone needs determine what she already knows and fill in the gaps. To work with her, I have been trying to remember the first basics of photography that I learned 35 years ago.  I realized that there has been a lot of progress in camera technology in that time.  Cameras now determine the correct exposure, focus, and some can even correct minor composition issues.  Digital is the biggest change that has happened and that was during the time that I was away from photography.  The single largest advantage that is provides is the ability to immediately review a photo and decide if it is acceptable, no more waiting to process the film and make a print to see if the image is what you expected.  That is most of the basics that I learned years ago and leaves the composition as the main basic to teach someone. The rest of the old basics now seem to be considered advanced techniques.

During this contemplation, I remembered the first camera that I used and think I still have somewhere, an old Kodak Brownie Hawkeye.  This is an old roll film camera that took 620 film and 12 pictures on a roll.  It is actually a medium format camera with a negative size of 6cm x 6cm.  It is a really basic camera with no shutter speed control, no aperture, and no way to focus.  This makes it similar to modern digital cameras in the fact that all you have to worry about is composition.  It also means that the first thing I learned was composition and did not learn about focusing and correct exposure until I was given a 35mm camera.

I need to track down basic articles and guides on composition and go through them with my wife. I will post links to any decent articles that I find. The review will be good for me and also help her to become a better photographer.  So her camera will stay in automatic mode to deal with the major settings while she improves the composition of her images and her eye as a photographer.

We are going to join the Reno Photo Club at the meeting tonight, my family were members when I was learning the feedback from the competitions was helpful and the workshops were very good.


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