My camera has a manual mode?

Ah! My first photography post - and we have Little Monkey Bizness to thank for it. Nothing like entertaining the kiddos (ie: Hunter and Saxon) with jumping, bouncing, sliding, and climbing while I sit, drink my iced caramel macchiato (do you know how long it just took me to spell macchiato?) and blog.

My parents were wonderful enough to see that I might actually have talent for taking pictures and invested in my future with my first digital SLR camera in 2005 - it was a Canon XT Rebel (which I also tried to purchase for myself, and got scammed...that shall be a story for another day). Anyways, on a trip back to visit, my Dad went out and put my camera on his business card and thus, Mom and Dad got me started into my future. I had never used a SLR before - I had never really taken actual photography classes before - all I knew was that I liked taking pictures. So, for the first years (it's embarrassing to admit) I took pictures in automatic mode. Ahh! I know. I cringe thinking about it today...but it's only shows how much I've grown.

When I first realized my camera had a "manual mode" I was trying to take pictures of Christmas lights. Another photographer helped me to start learning outside of automatic mode and I successfully took some pictures of Christmas lights that year. (Please excuse this photo - it was stolen from my Myspace account - I'll load the actual, much better quality version of it when I'm not at Monkey Bizness).

Since then, I've been learning more and more about things like ISO, white balance, aperture, and shutter speed. And I'm going to start telling all of YOU about those things so, if you're an automatic mode shooter too, you can start to learn how to cringe when someone says "automatic." It's almost like learning to drive a stick (which I can't do, btw).

Nowadays, I will shoot in automatic mode ONLY if I find myself in a desperate situation where I know my camera manual settings are all over the place due to taking a crazy shot and I need to get a picture taken RIGHT THAT SECOND.

So if you need help learning the different modes of your camera, stay tuned. Tutorials coming soon!