photography tutorials part 1: Foreword

Good day!
          If this is your first visit to my new blog, my hearty welcome to you and hope you found what you are looking for. This is Part One of the series of Photography Tutorials that would follow over the next few days. I am not a professional photographer or an arts major, infact I am an engineering student from India. But with a passion for photography and the urge to show,share,with the world what I see, I have involved myself in photography.
 You can check out my photography hobby at Flickr via the flickr widget at the right or at www.myphotohobby.co.cc 

    Let me assure you, I am here to share with you my photography tips and techniques and hoping to get some ideas from you in return, but hey, dont worry, its ok even if you have no idea about photography, we'll all eventually learn. :)
So then, to the point, here's what I will be discussing with you in tutorials part one.

The First and the most important question, (no its not about the camera) Do you like taking pictures? Yes, just this simple question, if your answer is yes, try answering this one - Do you pay attention to details? If your answer to this is also an yes, then my friend you can read the rest of the entry.

Lets get started already!

Here's a list of stuff you will need to start your hobby:

1.A Camera:
A photographer is one who "paints" or sketches an image with light. Photos(light) and grapher(write). In order to do that, we would need a camera. The camera definitely need NOT be a expensive high end prosumers or DSLRs that cost you an arm and leg. Remember, the audience for this tutorial is hobbyist/amateur photography here, people like you and me, so lets just stick with affordable and decent ones. Hope that cheered you up a bit ;)

Now the big question, which camera should I buy??
        This is a tricky question that plagues all amateur coming into photography. I would say, as a starting point, even your mobile phone camera is good enough, but if you want to print them out, and are really serious about pursuing this hobby, i suggest you look into 6megapixels cameras or more. Most importantly, invest carefully and make sure you steer clear of this "wooohoo a newer model! lemme buy it" upgrade bug! Dpreview has a comprehensive list of cameras and price list with reviews, maybe you wanna check them out. And here's a really nice secret that will make you feel loads better. 90% of the images in my flickr page like these, these and these were taken with a Canon IXUS compact point and shoot camera! No DSLRs here :p
       But i would like to point out, that as our tutorials advance, we would be looking into manual mode of adjusting various parameters to create pictures,so make sure that the camera you own or will be buying will have a full manual mode i.e the camera lets you manually adjust the exposure, iso, shutter speed etc. Some canon point and shoots lets you install thirdparty firmware to enable manual mode, but then again, this is for the advanced users, maybe I'll write about how you can achieve this in the forthcoming tuts.


2.A photo processing software:
    Wait! i know you read that as Photoshop CS 5!!  I do know that photoshop is a great great software to post process images but let me tell you, for starters, its an overkill and has a steep learning curve. If you are an advanced user, then I suggest you go ahead with photoshop, but for the rest of the starters, all we will be doing in post processing is a bit of level adjustments, curves, highlights, contrast adjustments etc (dont worry, we'll get back to this later).  For this sort of work, softwares like paint.net, gimp, picasa are more than enough! And the best part is, all are free!


Alright then, we have all the equipments we need to start our photography hobby. I can hear you say, "wait! thats it??"  Dear friend, yes thats it! As tutorials proceed, I will introduce you to additional accessories.

The next tutorial will cover Basic Picture taking with focus on composition and paying attention to details. This is where our journey will begin!

If you like the way I write please bookmark me or follow me and keep coming back for more tutorials and videos. A comment or two would be a great encouragement and also let me understand what you readers want the most ^_^