What camera would you use to teach someone photography?

I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't believe it. I don't think a picture is taken with a camera, but with a photographer.
 
semilog said:
I have no problem at all with AE or AF for a beginner, but I'd strongly counsel against a zoom. A decently fast normal (40-60mm eq.) prime is a better choice.
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I totally agree. Semilog's point is possibly the most important one... A zoom as different lenses is a concept an already educated photographer can handle, but a beginner won't get any benefit from it, and will only think things can come closer or look bigger with the zoom, and the constant focal length variation wouldn't allow beginners to understand the very basics of photography... A normal as the only lens, with manual focus, is the best way to learn for a period of time, and then, after the behavior of that lens is inside the student, he can explore other two lenses in both extremes, to discover the differences in field of view, depth of field and general character of wide and tele lenses...

I don't think an instant screen (digital) means better or faster learning: it means faster chimping only... Indeed I think not seeing the image for hours or days is positive because we need to retain in our mind the intention, settings and scene we saw... We don't learn because we see images on a screen, but because we handle concepts in our mind and imagination...

Cheers,

Juan
 
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Pirate,

I have to agree with my dogcow friend above, you can teach with just about any and an iTouch is not a bad approach as it's very easy to carry and pretty capable.

What I was thinking of is that you said something very prolific, you have too many cameras. That said I would say sell the A1 and either the F4 or F5. With the cash picked up a pair of D40 or D40xes. You need to add a pair of prime manual focus Nikkor lenses for each camera. 24/2.8 and a 50/1.4 will be perfect. Now you will also need to purchase a pair of light meters or if you have one, get her a good one, say a Sekonic L-318.

Now the meters in the D40s will be useless so you will need to use the light meter. By using a digital you can get instant feed back as well as a Histogram to look at. Two lens, on a 35 the other a 75 is a great kit. The finder is bright enough to let you focus out side and most places inside. I think the in focus indicator will work but I'm not 100% sure.

With a digital body you can switch ASAs at will and see the the results. With two lenses you can play but not get lost. You need to have the same system so she can learn from watching you. Using your D700 will not work as well. Set everything on manual and have a lot of fun.

When you get ready for film use the cash to buy her a Nikon F and use the same lenses. Now here comes the kicker, you give her the glass, the meter and the bodies.

Work with her in the darkroom, on the computer and I bet things will work out.

B2 (;->
 
"
Alright then. Acoustic guitar. Baudelaire. Cheap French table wine or Absinthe (lots of Absinthe), or espresso...You can forget the beer bong, trust me... A bag full of camera's and a converation about the differences between rangefinders, slr's and what they offer respectively. Then it's into the streets together to shoot with wild abandon her late afternoon laughter sparkling off the wet puddles amidst the cobblestones. Or whatever.
Also, remember not to overdue the fake French Bresson like accent."

Told ya she was Lace :D

And we won't talk about me selling any of my cameras to get her something until the topic of marriage comes up, and I'm keeping the F5. She can just have the D700 and we'll call it square.
 
A DSLR. If you're teaching "how to operate a camera", that's how 99% of cameras works these days. If you're teaching "photography" then I don't suppose how the camera works is all that important. I think you need to be able to affect DOF, so a compact is probably not ideal.

While I only really shoot film, A DSLR will allow learning much faster and you can see the effects of aperture change etc. right away, rather than say "Remember that shot we took last week in f/2, see how the background is out of focus?".

By all means encourage film, but I think as a learning tool for actually learning how to make pictures, DSLR is better, it's free to operate and you learn lessons immediately.
 
+1 for DSLR, faster to learn and cheaper. Film is good, but we are in 2010 and most people don't like waiting a week for seeing their photoes, they want to see the results, post them on flickr or facebook and send them by email... and everything ASAP...
Film has a different approach, I do appreciate shooting with film but hate developing and scanning time :-(
The risk is your pupil losing enthusiasm towards "serious" photography.
Cheers
 
I won't enter the debate on what's best. But I will tell you what I actually did. When my 16 year old wanted to learn photography, I taught her the basics of camera operation, seeing and taking photos on what I had handy, a Bessa R with a 35mm Pancake I lens. Within a few days she was working her way around the city snapping away in black and white. I let her take that camera plus a 75mm Heliar for a year abroad, and she came back with some sophisticated and beautiful photos, which I taught her how to print in a wet darkroom. She returned the Bessa kit only to "raid" my stash for an M6 with a 35mm Ultron and 50mm Summicron, a Yashica Mat 124G and an OM2n with a complement of lenses. Only after she mastered those did I relent and give up my Pentax *ist DS with kit zoom, and she taught herself to navigate around Photoshop 4. She helped pay for her college by working evenings as a darkroom supervisor (same job I had). Despite her youth, she's spent the better part of 4 years traveling the globe and is a fine photographer, at ease with several types of cameras. So she learned the same way I did: film first, then digital (except I don't do digital, having given my DSLR to her).
 
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Your Nikon F (eye level finder)and a 35mm or 50mm lens will do the job. If the enthusiasm is there then what more could you wish for?

Ted mentioned an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic, which is great and so is the glass, but I have picked a camera out of your list.

Hope this helps
 
kevinparis said:
shadowfox

can you explain how shooting film is a richer and longer lasting experience?.. to me the means of recording the image is secondary to the image itself and the audience for an image cares not about how the image is made.

this is an interesting thread for a newcomer to this forum. Some of the responses seem to advocate an almost hair shirt monastic approach to the act of capturing an image, in which the process is more important than the result.

under full disclosure i will reveal I am more than 50 years old, have shot on film and developed my own and have never had more fun or produced such good images since I started shooting digital

K
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Kevin, I'm so sorry I didn't see your question earlier.

My statement is based on my own experience. Which is likely to be mirrored by some of the newcomers to photography in this digital age to whom that sentiment was addressed.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I came in very late into photography. By that time digital is already started to be come the mainstream. I dabbled with digital photography for about seven years, almost to the point of boredom... before I was awestruck by the simplicity of an old manual film camera.

Ever since then, I have gone beyond what I expected out of film photography. Never have I experienced a "world" that is both historically rich and refreshingly new (because my subjects are today's world). Both the process and the results.

More to the point, it is not solely the process, it *is* also the results.

And mind you, my process is far from being hair-shirt monastic :p. It's more like: spoiled-by-100-years-of-other-people's-research.

But I'd be lying if the results are not made more satisfying because of the process.

And let me be specific, by "the process" I really mean the whole film workflow, from capturing the image using a camera to printing it in the darkroom. If you just use film camera and then switch to digital workflow, I think it's incomplete. But nothing wrong with that either.

Every now and then I meet people like you, Kevin. People who has done both, choose digital, and couldn't be happier. I'm truly happy for you guys :)

But I'm not like that and I suspect that there are other people like me out there. And it pains me if they miss out on trying film, just because they never get a chance.

Hope this make sense.
 
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Ranchu said:
Cheap is not the object, nor is non time consuming, teaching well and learning photography is the issue. As everyone admits, a good understanding of aperture, shutter, and film speed and how they interact is fundamental. I'm curious how anyone could learn these things with an iphone? Hah?

And what would looking at the contrasty screen and histogram of a digital SLR teach a person beyond 'I'm blowing the highlights', and 'shallow depth of field, wow'?

Is that anything much at all?
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well learning with an iphone would teach the fundementals of composition without worrying about the technical details of exposure - if there is no composition there is no satisfactory image...

Also who said that using a dslr means you have to review the pictures only on the camera lcd... laptops are not rare devices... home computers are ubiquitous... the cycle of shoot and review is so much more immediate with digital than it is with film

K
 
kevinparis said:
well learning with an iphone would teach the fundementals of composition without worrying about the technical details of exposure - if there is no composition there is no satisfactory image...

K
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Composition is something I 'learned' over time, if I can even say I've 'learned' it. I let my eye do what it thinks best for the most part. Works for me often, not always.
kevinparis said:
Also who said that using a dslr means you have to review the pictures only on the camera lcd... laptops are not rare devices... home computers are ubiquitous... the cycle of shoot and review is so much more immediate with digital than it is with film

K
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The fact is is that that's what we do, and then we adjust the exposure comp and take 'another' shot. Then we look at the goofy thing again. None of this requires actually thinking about what the light is doing in the shot, you can but you don't 'have to'. We wing it because we shot raw and can dial it down or up in post. Because feedback is immediate, it matters less to get it right the first time, so we don't make as much of an effort to do that, and we think less. Less *needs* to be learned, and so less is.
 
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Just started raining, Grabbed that SR-1 and took a couple pics out my backdoor, 1/60 at 2.8 on 160S. Went back inside grabbed a meter, I'm about 1/2 stop hot. Rain just stopped as I type this.

So.

:cool:
 
kevinparis said:
well learning with an iphone would teach the fundementals of composition without worrying about the technical details of exposure - if there is no composition there is no satisfactory image...
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When our brain knows it will be able to check the image (the results) soon, the whole act of composition loses importance because part of the brain is waiting for the check, instead of being inside the composing mode exclusively... No problem (from my point of view) with using digital for learning (though I wouldn't feel real photography that way), nor with checking images on computers, but the images shouldn't be checked during the shooting... The brain requires that effort, that concentration for some time... Seeing a screen is not learning...

kevinparis said:
Also who said that using a dslr means you have to review the pictures only on the camera lcd... laptops are not rare devices... home computers are ubiquitous... the cycle of shoot and review is so much more immediate with digital than it is with film
Click to expand...

Learning how to use a digital camera is one thing, and learning film photography is a different one. In fact, no camera is strictly necessary for teaching composition and DOF. Where I cursed my career it wasn't taught with a camera, but with projected examples (photographs) on slide film... A couple of magazines or photo books would be just as good...

Looks like the girl wanted to learn photography AND use a mechanical camera... That's easy: she can use exactly the camera she likes... What does the teacher need another camera for in his hands?

Processing would be another field, of course. And composition takes a lot of time... I couldn't imagine a better way to teach her the basics, than showing her some images, talking, and then making her check the same things she just saw on images: focus and DOF, on a manual camera...

Cheers,

Juan
 
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kevinparis said:
shadowfox

can you explain how shooting film is a richer and longer lasting experience?.. to me the means of recording the image is secondary to the image itself and the audience for an image cares not about how the image is made.

this is an interesting thread for a newcomer to this forum. Some of the responses seem to advocate an almost hair shirt monastic approach to the act of capturing an image, in which the process is more important than the result.
under full disclosure i will reveal I am more than 50 years old, have shot on film and developed my own and have never had more fun or produced such good images since I started shooting digital

K
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Easy,
For a new person who has no "Process" to understand "HOW" to get the "Result". They must have at least a minimum of "Process" tools they understand so they CAN get the "results"... "Hit and Miss" rarely teaches us what we really need to know in our short lives.
 
Ranchu said:
I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't believe it. I don't think a picture is taken with a camera, but with a photographer.
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This is true.... but, at the beginning, if you are asking to learn photography, then, the real question is that she wants to know how to adjust her camera so she can take the image she sees, (the photographer part).

There is nothing wrong with "Knowing" what ISO is and how it effects the final image, or to understand F/stops and Shutter Speeds, DOF, Lens choice, how all these interact for a good capture... It is a good thing to know.

And it will help her get the technical results faster, so she can concentrate on "Learning" the "Photographer" part sooner. Composition, Light, Shadow, Angles, content... etc.
 
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