People sometimes ask what settings I used to take a certain photo.
I’m always happy to answer.
But when I start talking about aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, I can see it in their faces—I might as well be speaking a foreign language.
What they’re really asking is:
“Which icon do I turn the dial to?”
That, unfortunately, I can’t answer.
When I showed up for my second day of photojournalism class, I thanked my professor, Rus Elder, for letting me into the class and reiterated that I had my own camera so I wouldn’t need the school’s equipment.
“You won’t be using that,” he said. We walked back to the lab where he handed me a 20- or 30-year-old Yashica twin lens reflex camera. “This is what we use in this class.”
I wasn’t a camera expert, but I could tell at a glance this camera was inferior to mine by a couple generations.
I didn’t understand.
Patiently, Rus explained.
“Because this camera does nothing by itself, you will learn to do everything.”
And I did.
Learning to set everything myself changed the way I used a camera.
When I went back to automatic settings, I understood what the camera was doing—and if it wasn’t doing what I wanted, I knew how to make it do something else.
I don’t know portrait mode from landscape mode from sports mode on today’s cameras.
But I do know how to control a camera to capture the shot I’m after.
I’m always happy to share that information.
Whenever I’m asked for camera advice by someone who wants to learn photography, my answer is, “buy one that has the option to turn all of the bells and whistles off.”
That was the first lesson I learned from Rus.
I’ve been sharing it ever since.
Subscribe to Stories from the Pack and follow along as new posts are published. If you’d like to see what I learned from Rus, you can visit my photography website–there’s a lot to explore there.