Originally Posted by Dan Martin

You don't need to buy a package, just go to your local camera shop and get the factory kit from Canon or Nikon. When you're buying your first camera, it's best to go to a brick and mortar store to get your hands on the gear and try them all out. See what one feels best to you and which one is easiest to work with.

Anything you get from Canon or Nikon will be fine. Just don't buy some kit off ebay where it's bundled with a crappy "wide angle adapter" lens and a $15 tripod. You just need the bare minimum to get you going.

This is all I would buy on my first trip to the store:
- Any Canon or Nikon DSLR with the 18-55 kit lens
- A bag to carry it and a couple lenses
- 16GB of memory
- A card reader if you don't already have one
- a microfiber cloth for cleaning the lens and a dust blower bulb (not compressed air) for cleaning everything else

I wouldn't even worry about a tripod on the first trip because there's a lot to learn about them too, and you don't want to buy something you'll regret in a month or two.

Originally Posted by Dan Martin

There are two parts to every tripod: the legs and the head. Ideally, you want a tripod that is rigid and will let you upgrade the head as your skills improve.

The sky's the limit when it comes to tripod pricing, but you don't need to blow a ton of money on a good set to get you going. If you realistically set aside $120 to $150 for the tripod, you'd be able to get a nice system that will last you a long time. If you drop $50 on a tripod, you're almost guaranteed to be back in a month to buy the $120 model, so you might as well get the right stuff to begin with.

Things to look for in tripod legs:
- Height: you want something that will let you stand up without slouching
- Weight: if you're going to be hiking with the tripod, you'll want something light. If you're just driving from location to location, you can get away with something heavier.
- Number of leg segments: 3 segments is faster to set up, 4 segments will typically pack to a smaller size
- Type of locks (flip locks or twist locks): this is just a preference thing
- Material: Aluminum is cheapest but heaviest, carbon is most expensive and is the lightest, basalt is somewhere between the other two.

Things to look for in a head:
- No matter what you buy, make sure you get a head with a quick release plate for the camera! You don't want to have to screw your camera on to your tripod every time you want to use it. The quick release plates screw to your camera, then you just clip them in and out of the head.
- The two main styles are 3-way and ballhead. This is a personal preference thing; they both have their pros and cons. 3-way heads are generally more precise to position, but they are slower to get there. Ballheads are fast to maneuver, but can be finicky to precisely position. Generally, you need to spend a lot more to get a good ballhead than you do to get a good 3-way head.

Models that I would look into are from Bogen/Manfrotto. Check out the 3021 or 3011. The 190 series is also nice but they can be a little on the shorter side.

Originally Posted by Billiam

One additional note regarding ball head vs. 3-way: a ball head lets you very quickly compensate for your tripod not being setup level with the ground. Technically speaking, you might be able to do the same thing with a three way head but it can be a real PIA. With a ball head it's completely intuitive and fast.

Oh, and if you think you might keep the tripod long enough to use it for macro photography, then definitely take into consideration the minimum possible height as well as the fully extended height Dan mentioned.

Originally Posted by ChodTheWacko

The only time JPEG is better is if:
1) You don't have the memory space to store RAW
2) You don't have a way to batch convert RAW to jpeg, which means tons of extra post processing time.
3) You just want a quickie pic that you aren't super picky about
4) You are shooting in burst mode, and RAW files fill the buffer too fast.

Otherwise, you can always just autoconvert everything to jpeg and, if your pictures are shot well, you are done and no worse off.

RAW's biggest benefits:
1) Color balance can be accurately with less color strangeness.
2) Higher bit count, which means smoother color changes.
3) No compression on pictures, although it's probably not notabily better than low compression JPEG.
4) Higher bit count means you can mess around with colors with less artifacts.
5) In-camera post processing is not done, which means you can recover if you have sharpness/saturation/etc set wrong in the camera.

Think of RAW as a little bit of photo insurance.

Originally Posted by wackjum

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“Exposure” is how a camera takes a picture. The easiest way to imagine how a camera works is with an empty bucket. Let’s assume that in order to take a picture, the empty bucket has to be full of water. The bucket is sealed on top, and the only way water can get into the bucket is through a pipe. Let’s also assume there is a valve (like a faucet) that opens and closes this pipe.

So what are the two ways you can control how fast this bucket of water fills? The first is by opening the faucet until the bucket fills. Just turn the faucet and wait. The second way is by changing the size of the pipe. If the pipe is really wide, water will flow quickly. If the pipe is narrow, the water flow will be a trickle.

So let’s say you have a narrow pipe leading into the bucket. In order to fill the bucket, you would have to open the faucet a long time. On the other hand, if you had a big pipe, the rush of water would be fast and you only have to open the faucet a short moment. You should also notice that there are a lot of potential combinations. For example, you could have a really big pipe that flows a lot of water, but you open the faucet just a fraction of a second, and this might fill the bucket as much as a small pipe opened for a long time.

I hope the pipe and water analogy isn’t too silly. Cameras work with the exact same principal. Instead of water, a camera deals with light. The size of the pipe in the analogy translates to the aperture of the camera lens. The aperture is literally a hole in the lens that lets in light. You can adjust the aperture to make it bigger or smaller, and this has the same effect as changing pipe sizes.

The camera sensor itself is protected by flaps of metal. These flaps of metal open and close to let in light to the sensor. We call these flaps the “shutter” and they are just like the faucet/valve in our analogy.

So light needs to come into the camera and you have two ways of controlling how fast the light comes in. You can open the aperture really wide and use a short shutter time, or you could use a small aperture and a longer shutter time. Either way, a certain amount of light needs to enter into the camera in order to get a proper picture.

Again, you should notice that different combinations of shutter and aperture could potentially give you the same amount of light. There are also different effects on your image when you change the shutter or the aperture.


Aperture and its effect on your images

Aperture is the hole in the lens that lets in light. Two different factors control what aperture you will use. The first is how much light is available. If there is a lot of light (outdoors on a sunny day), then you have too much light, and you can use whatever aperture you want. Of course, if you use a wide aperture, your camera will have to open and close the shutter really quickly. Otherwise, it will get too much light.

The second consideration is depth of field. This is how much of the image is in focus. The wider the aperture, the less of the image is in focus. For example, if you have a fairly wide aperture and you were taking pictures of a model, she might be in focus, but the bookshelf she is standing in front of will be blurry. On the other hand, if you used a really small aperture, the model and the bookshelf will be crystal sharp.

Aperture is measured in stops. The full stops are f1.0, f1.4, f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16. These numbers are meaningless to you right now, and for many photographers, they will never know what it means. There are two things you must remember. First, that f1.0 is very wide and f16 is very narrow (bigger numbers mean smaller hole). Secondly, each full stop lets in half as much light as the previous. If you are standing out in bright sunlight and you set your lens to f1.0, it is letting in 100% of this bright sunny light. If you set it to f1.4, your lens is now letting in half as much, which is 50% of the light. F2.0 would be 25%, f2.8 is 12.5%. You’ll notice that very quickly, you are not letting in very much light at all. By f4, you are only letting in 6% of the light.
Most cameras can change the aperture of the lens in ½ or 1/3 settings. So instead of going from f4 to f5.6, you might get f4, f4.5, f5.0, f5.6. This has a corresponding effect on the amount of light being let in and lets you fine tune things. Going from full stop to full stop is a big change (twice or half as much light as previously).


Shutter speed

Shutter speed is how quickly the camera opens and closes the “valve” over the sensor. Shutter speed is measured in seconds and fractions of a second. Just like aperture, full standard shutter speeds let in twice or half as much as light as the setting previous.

The standard shutter speeds are: 1 second, ½ second, ¼ second, 1/8 second, 1/15 second, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000.

Obviously, if the shutter is open for only 1/8th of a second, it is letting in a lot less light than being open for one whole second.

There are two considerations for how to pick a shutter speed. The first is how much light is available. One important factor is that you can always get more light into your camera by changing the shutter speed vs the aperture. Why? Because aperture is how big or small the opening is. But what if there isn’t a lot of light to begin with (example, indoor pictures at night)? It doesn’t matter how big the hole is, there simply isn’t a lot of light coming in. You can, however, set the shutter to a longer time and leave the sensor uncovered as it waits for light to flow in.

But then there is the issue of camera shake and blur. If the camera is shaky because you are holding it, you can’t set the shutter speed to 2 seconds for example (nobody can hold anything perfectly still for 2 seconds). Just FYI, the best photographers can hand hold a camera down to about 1/20th of a second.

Secondly, shutter speed can blur or freeze motion. For example, if you are photographing a moving car, from the time the camera opens the shutter to the time it closes, the car will have moved within the frame. If you want the car to move less (less motion blur), then you would set a faster shutter speed. If you wanted more blur, you would set a slower speed. This doesn’t just apply to cars. A very vivid example is photographing a water fall. If you set a slow shutter speed, the water will be soft and flowing in the photo. A fast shutter speed will stop the water and you will get sharp drops suspended in the air.

Finally, there are two settings you should be familiar with on your camera. Aperture priority, and shutter priority. Aperture priority means that you set an aperture, and then the camera will calculate a shutter speed based on the existing light of the scene. Shutter priority means you set the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture according to the light. In both cases, the camera is trying to get the sensor properly exposed with the right amount of light.

On the other hand, using fully automatic means the camera will give you a combination of aperture and shutter appropriate for the setting. Your level of control is low. So use aperture and shutter priority. They are great.
And that is the basics of exposure.