For years I had been taking pictures with (mostly other people’s) SLR (Single-Lens Reflex) cameras and a year or two ago I bought my brother’s old analog Canon SLR after he bought a digital point and shoot camera. It came with a 18-55mm and 55-200mm lens, I think. I played around with it a bit and liked the comfortable feel of it in my hand.

I wanted to go digital though, so I bought a Canon PowerShot A640. It was quite a sophisticated point and shoot camera with a 10 megapixel sensor and a lot of control over the settings of the camera. For a while I took a lot of nice pictures with it. I kept looking at the analog SLR on my desk though and decided to sell the A640.

After that I bought a digital SLR, a Canon EOS 400D with the 18-55 kit lens. A lot of people say this is a crappy lens, but you can take beautiful pictures with it, if you know its limitations. I noticed some distortion on the wide side and some odd colors on certain pictures, but I did take some very nice pictures with it.

Due to my experience with analog SLR’s I already knew about aperture, shutter speed and ISO values. Well, to be more precise I knew very roughly how they work together. I didn’t know about the math. Which can be very valuable under certain circumstances. Like for example taking pictures outside in the dark with long exposures. A guy named Peter wrote a nice article about the math behind the combination of aperture, shutter speed and ISO.