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So, on April 11, I’m starting the Basic Digital SLR Photography offered by Focal Point. Even though I’ve had my Nikon D80 for almost a year now, I feel like I did not use even a fraction of the features it has.

Before this camera, I owned a D40 for around half a year which I bought without doing my homework too well. I was amazed by the colours and contrasts some HDR pictures can have and I wanted to take shots like that myself. Well, the D40 is a superb camera (and really cheap right now as well) for the beginner DSLR photographer. I learned quite a bit from it; shutter and aperture speed, white balance, ISO speeds and so on but unfortunately it did not have Auto Bracketing so making an HDR took quite a bit of time since it had to be manually done; but to be honest, a good HDR taken with the D40 made me so proud since they are quite a bit harder to achieve since you need a tripod and the subject to not move for quite a bit.

Now with the D80, it’s so easy to take bracketed shots that I almost feel like “cheating”. If the shots are taken on a nice day, a tripod isn’t even needed since the pictures are taken so fast and even if they are a bit off, they can be aligned back home during processing.

I really hope this course will teach me things I do not know about photography (I’m sure it will), and provide me with some guidelines related to what options to use in which environmental settings. I will be going on a 2 month vacation and I would really love to take some awesome shots!