It wasn't until January 2008 that I got hold of a digital camera. I had previously had ample opportunity to play with a digital SLR, but for some reason never really considered the creative potential.
This first camera of mine was a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55 point and shoot
I didn't have a clue what any of that shutter speed, aperture, f number/stop, ISO speed malarkey meant, so was quite lucky to get a pretty good camera. Through taking large amounts of (usually rubbish) pictures I began to notice a slight relation between the look of the pictures and the exif data. It didn't make sense to me that the shutter speed didn't universally control the amount of light let in during an exposure and thus staying in the final picture. This confusion led me to a great place for (sometimes inaccurate) knowledge: the Internet!
Because a point and shoot camera functions in an almost entirely automatic mode it is therefore impossible for you to lock the aperture (f number) (my Panasonic does allow me to lock the ISO speed, I assume most recent point and shoot cameras allow this) so as to fully get to grips with the affects of various shutter speeds. Even though a point and shoot would not likely let you manually adjust the shutter speed precisely, having the aperture locked would at least allow you to point at scenes of varying light levels to observe the cameras chosen shutter speed.
Strangely enough, once I turned to the internet for clarification I skipped any technical low-downs on shutter speeds and aperture sizes and went straight to the fun stuff. Of course most of the fun stuff was unavailable to me because it required precise operation unavailable in a point and shoot camera. Still, through geeking over and through lots of blogs (mostly the entire contents of David Hobby's Strobist.blogspot.com) I slowly began to understand the functions of my little camera and enjoyed taking pictures even more!
Time-lapse and stop-motion videos have been particularly fun, presenting their own group of challenges aside from not knowing what the results of a large f number might be. The first problem apparent to me (in making time-lapse videos) was keeping the interval between photos consistent. I just guess, then get annoyed at the unevenness of the resulting video. The second problem I noticed while using a point and shoot to make either stop-motion or time-lapse was that it is very difficult to reproduce the same camera settings more than once. Even with a point and shoot on a tripod pointed at a static scene it can choose different settings for two sequential photographs. I am unsure as to the reason for this but could guess that it is something to do with varying light outputs from tungsten bulbs, flickering from fluorescent bulbs, or any small change in shadows by the photographer.
In such instances where I decided to zoom the camera before collecting pictures for a video I was held at the mercy of the camera battery because once it is switched off the lens retracts and it is impossible to then zoom back in to the previous magnification.
By the end of the year I had taken over 15,000 pictures with my camera, this number not least helped by my occasional time-lapse and stop-motion exploits and so the above video is a celebration of my idea realising camera. You may notice that the camera in the video is an Olympus which means you are not looking through my camera, into it's own viewfinder, into a scene it captured. But rather are looking upon my camera observing the viewfinder of an Olympus camera capturing a scene.
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