After lugging my Nikon D40x digital SLR all over South Africa (catch photos here), the Arctic (Arctic Album) and the Baltics, I decided it was finally time to actually learn how to use my camera.
Enter Living Social. PhotoSafariNYC is a company that organizes tours around the city – to the Met, Central Park, Madison Square Park – focused on how to photograph those sites.
On a Saturday morning in September, we meet Zim on the steps of the Museum of Natural History. Six New Yorkers ready to learn how to capture the city we live in on film (or pixels).
Zim brought incredible enthusiasm and simplicity of technique to the art of photography. Can you think of a more inspiring classroom than Central Park? Clustered atop the rock formations at the edge of 81st St, we began to learn the basics: ISO, fstops, shutter speeds, etc. I find that photography, like algebra, is one of those things, you can tell me the same thing over and over again and I don’t totally get it. But one day, I have that “ahha”moment, and it all makes sense.
After about an hour of instruction, we set off to test some of the skills we had learned. The beauty of the class, and I why I highly recommend it, is that Zim was very specific about which aspect of equation we were to focus on. We spent some time with the aperture settings, focused on the same object, from the same angle in order to learn what the impact of varying aperture settings would have on our pictures.
And she left us with the best advice, for anything, really – practice, practice, practice. I look forward practicing on another NYC Photo Safari.
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