Back to skool

After last year's abortive attempt at an MA, I've opted for something less academic but more creative: a beginner's course in digital photography. 24 weeks, 60 hours, of learning how to use my rather nice Pentax digital SLR camera properly -- no more "Auto" settings for me! We kicked off last night with an "in at the deep end" session on what all the different settings on our cameras mean, which was something of a revelation. Tv = shutter speed priority; Av = aperture priority; AWB = auto white balance; ISO is sensor (or old-skool film) sensitivity; P = program (more control than Auto, but no difficult calculations of aperture or shutter speed); M = manual (scary stuff). We then moved onto apertures and shutter speed. Let me see if I got this right.

Aperture is the size of the hole through which light passes on to the sensor. The shutter speed is how long the light is allowed through that hole. You're aiming to get a perfect amount of light onto the sensor for the picture you're taking. The wider the aperture, the shorter the shutter speed can be; the narrower the aperture, the longer the shutter speed. Now, the complicated stuff comes with the numbers. The widest aperture setting has the lowest number (F1.8); the higher the number, the narrower the aperture, which seems completely counterintuitive but I'm sure there's a good reason for this -- if only there were some kind of worldwide network of computers that shared all this information in an easily accessible format ... oh yes, let's see what Wikipedia has to say.

"The lens aperture is usually specified as an f-number, the ratio of focal length to effective aperture diameter. A lens typically has a set of marked "f-stops" that the f-number can be set to. A lower f-number denotes a greater aperture opening which allows more light to reach the film or image sensor. The photography term "one f-stop" refers to a factor of √2 (approx. 1.41) change in f-number, which in turn corresponds to a factor of 2 change in light intensity."

O-K. This is veering dangerously close to physics, a subject that made me cry when I studied it at O level. I will just take a deep breath, try to repress the awful memories of ticker-tape machines and wave pools, and focus on remembering that the lower the aperture number, the higher the shutter speed.

One week down, 23 to go. There are 17 in the class -- 12 women and 5 men. I was a little surprised by that, stereotypically figuring that more men might be interested in photography, but perhaps the name of the class "Digital Photography For Complete Beginners" provides the explanation; are women more willing to acknowledge that they are complete beginners?