Along with the purchase of my Canon 450D EOS (apparently named for the Greek Goddess of Dawn but changed in the marketing literature to mean Electro-Optical System by some classics philistine at Canon. So what if she ate her children, this is Greek mythology for goodness sake.) came a whole bunch of software which beautifully and competently screwed up my Outlook Express. Luckily that’s not what this post is about but as I still haven’t managed to sort it out I thought I would momentarily vent my spleen. Ah, that’s better. Out with anger........in with love.
Software aside, the documentation also included information on Canon accredited courses to help you learn how to use your camera and software properly and by way of incentive you got a £30 discount voucher. Now, as an SLR virgin and general photographic numpty who really just wanted to drop into John Lewis and buy the first DSLR on offer, I am also a Virgo and as everyone knows, we Virgo’s like to do things properly. This meant I bought a selection of digital SLR magazines and spent an unnecessary amount of time neglecting my work and instead reading the ‘best buy’ sections to try and ascertain the optimum value/quality/functionality ratio. I am glad to say that I did not quite resort to plotting a scatter diagram in an attempt to be more scientific in my decision-making, but it came alarmingly close. I finally made a choice on which-make which-model two days before my volunteering trip to Namibia and tripped into John Lewis, light on my feet with the glory of having made a decision, only to find they didn’t have the one I wanted. Nor did Jessops and nor did Youngs. As a consequence I retraced my steps to see the cheery and knowledgeable young man back at JL who didn’t seem at all surprised when I returned and bought ..... the first DSLR on offer - the aforementioned Canon 450D EOS. This quandry of indecision and procrastination bought me the dubious delight of unpacking the camera the day before my holiday, loading the software onto my laptop the morning of my holiday and reading the user manual on the flight. As you can imagine reading a camera user-manual does a very fine job indeed in sending you off to sleep far more readily and deeply than the pre-requisite on-board gin and tonic.
Having come back from Namibia with some passably good shots taken only using the Auto PIC modes I was keen to find out if using the creative modes (P, Tv, Av, M, A-DEP) would have made any difference. In order to do that, and having failed miserably to absorb with any permanence the instructions from the manual (I needed Eos, it all seemed Greek to me...), I decided it was time to cash in my discount voucher and join the geeks on a course at Experience Seminars http://www.experience-seminars.co.uk/.