I take full responsiblity for not reading through and researching more about these but the learning I got from these setbacks were tremendous

Light, light and more light

 

Surprise# 1  Some lens does not auto focus.

Man this hit me big time. I thought AF meant auto focus, but surprise, its not. It just means the lens will autofocus on the high end camera bodies that has an inbuilt motor. If you happen to use D3100, D3200 , <mention other cameras here > the lens won’t autofocus and you have to do the focusing manually

What did I learn ?

Range finder and manual focusing with my hand and zooming with my legs

50 mm lesn asks you to set the aperture in low light
<put the error message here >
Big surprise, 50 mm did not give me the incredible light and sharpness as promised by everyone in flipkart and amazon

answer : for a very long time, i did not find ANY difference whatsoever with my kit lens and the 50mm prime lens.  I have shocked.

Sharpness, guess what, most of my photos were so blurred that I could not even make out what it was after I took the photos. It looked absolutely clear in the viewer and okay in the LCD but when I reviewed the photos. Bingo !

Two things

1. Make sure you check the focus mark while in manual mode or the use the range finder option in all other modes during the photo shoot. What you see in the view finder can be misinterpreted by your eyes, making you believe the image is sharp

2. While in live mode, make use of the Zoom button so that you can zoom in, and really make sure that the picture is in focus

The clear difference in the amount of light let in by the prime lens was evident during my trials with macro photography. The prime lens did let in a lot of light and helped me a lot with macro photography. But this difference in light might not be known to you during normal photography.

And the error ‘set in lower f stop’ dont worry about that. Even though you set it in the lowest mode, the camera will still adjust that to the correct mode based on the setting you set in the control dial. I had thought that. Luckily I did not resort to ‘fixing’ the lens as mentioned in this video < link >

Surprise# 2 –  Lack of ‘sufficient’ light

If you are planning for indoor photography without sufficient light, be ready for some awesome cool blurry images

Now you might wonder, yeah I knew that. But what is ‘sufficient light’ ? If you are photographing someone in the evening or at night, especially for a portraiture, then you are in for some really bad luck, if sufficient light means using CFL or other light bulbs in your home

Also trying to take picture of flowers in shade without a remote shutter release ( wired or wireless ) will ensure messed up images, all the time, especially when you want close up shots, where the buds have to be hihlighted. Most of the time due to lack of light the insides of the flowers, including the buds and the stems will be out of focus because of lack of light

Surprise # 3  – Lack of Wi fi capability in basic cameras

This means you can’t trigger wireless flash remotely unless of course you buy the costly commander unit or cheap China ones, which can fail at any point of time. This also means you can’t operate the shutter system remotely. D3100 does not support infrared or Wifi. What that means MC-DC2 is the ONLY remote control you can use to control the camera shutter release

Backdrop letter doesn’t look as cool as it looks in the website

 Surprise # 4 – Will real Rich Ritchie please stand up ?

You need to have loads and loads of cash to be a great photographer

In the past weeks, the Internet is flooded with countless reviews, podcasts and even arguments about the latest camera from Nikon, that has hit the streets, namely the D4S, a slight iterative improvement over the original D4, which costs around 4 lakhs rupees ( around 6,000 dollars ) Wow, that a lot of money to be spending on a camera body and that too an ‘iterative’ improvement according to several sources. People go on arguing why they should junk their fully working, awesome super cool <put the name of your camera here > for the latest and coolest camera that was released last week. Hell yeah ! Are you out of your mind ?

Hold on, we are not there yet. I have read countless articles on the fact that, if you need to get a glass ( lens ) it should support f 2.8. Ofcourse, it may say you back by another lakh or two ( two or threee sound dollars ) just for a piece of glass, but why bother ? Right ?  No ! Wrong !
And of course, they have a reason too, “those glasses are for those low light condition”. But then you would ask, in most situation, I would ask the client to move to a location where there is more light ? But then they bark at you “What about when you need to cover a basket ball match in a indoor stadium, that has poor lighting” ?” And then you are stunned without an answer, not because you don’t have one, but because it is not worth proceeding with this kind of an argument.

Hold on, we have more coming up. Did you forget about speedlites, filters, flash triggers(command and control units), portable power sets, diffusers and tons of other equipment ? I know that less than 5 % of the world population has the kind of money to have all the things that are thrown on to thier face through ‘creative’ advertising.

The point is, if you are not among the uber rich, may be you should start using your brains more often to figure out the best way to make sure you have the same creative freedom in getting the photographs that you want and definitely not set back by the amount of money that you have in your bank account. Dude, if you really have that kind of money, save and donate to some poor kids in a third world country like mine ! No, I was kidding ( no pun intended )