nikon dslr workshop

I spent the day in a workshop getting to know my D80 more intimately. This is the fourth workshop I’ve taken with Vancouver Photoworkshops and they’ve all start out pretty much the same. Disorganized, no introductions, and a sinking feeling that I shouldn’t have signed up. I have to take a deep breath and remember that not everything needs to run like the Japanese rail system. Then I set aside my reservations and the learning begins.

The first thing I realized is that I actually know quite a bit about my camera and most of the things that I didn’t know aren’t really necessary…for now. Nikon includes lots of customizations for photographers even those who use a lower end model like the D80. As my learning progresses I can see myself making more use of these features. One particularly useful topic that was covered today was the cleaning of the digital sensor. It was surprisingly pretty straight forward. The only thing that will be a problem for me is getting over the fear that I am going to mess something up when I do it. At least Marc gave us an alternative to take the camera into Camtex on Burrard if we don’t feel comfortable doing it ourselves.

One question I’ve had–and had posed to me–is why one would need to shoot RAW and JPEG at the same time because that is an option. From my previous post, you might remember that I decided to shoot exclusively in RAW but Marc had a really good reason why he shows in both formats. It is specific to his photographic style and workflow but I can see similar reasons why one might want to do the same. Marc shoots in black and white but RAW files are always colour files. When he wants to quickly review the files after shooting, he wants to be able to see the files in black and white. By creating a small JPEG file, he can do this without taking up too much space and then he can delete the JPEG file when post-processing.

I also finally understood the difference between Program and Auto mode and also why you wouldn’t want to use either of them (which I never did but mostly because I am comfortable in Manual mode). Another tip that Marc gave was to use the Night Scene Shooting mode if we didn’t want to worry about shooting with a flash as it is pretty good. He also told us about a great book “Welcome to Oz” by Vincent Versace which I hope to add to my bookshelf when I’ve caught up on some of my other reading. Marc pointed out other things about my camera, some are so small it would be embarassing to admit that I didn’t know them but the bottom line is the course was definitely worth it.