Beginner's Introduction to the Canon EOS Rebel SL1 / 100D

The Canon EOS Rebel SL1 / 100D is a great camera for beginners to step up in to the world of DSLRs. It can however be more than a little intimidating to look at the camera, with all the buttons and dials, and have no idea how to drive it. It this short ebook, I take you through some basic (and advanced) steps to get you started on the road to getting the most out of your new camera.

I'm not going to refer to you as a 'dummy' simply because you don't know how to do something, lets be honest, I'm sure there's things plenty of things that you know that I don't, I just happen to know about cameras because I've been working with them for 20 years. So it's perfectly acceptable not to know what you're doing, but we'll change that in a short time.

In this ebook, we don't delve in to advanced photographic theory, instead I simply walk you through how to use the different features of the SL1 / 100D to enable you to go from taking just OK photos to taking fantastic shots that your friends will want to print out.

Excerpt:

Of course the longer the shutter is open, the higher the chance that the resulting photo will be blurry, either because you moved the camera or the subject moved, so in all the basic modes, the camera will do it's best to avoid blurriness, sometimes though, this blurriness is a good thing and can add a great deal to the photo.

So when would you want to have blurriness in a photo? Well a popular time to set a longer than normal exposure time is where you want to convey movement, such as a photo of a water fall or a fountain. If you take a photo of a fountain on full automatic mode, you'll likely end up with a photo where you can make out the individual drops of water, which can look OK, but it doesn't give any feeling of movement as the water shoots up in the air and then falls back towards the ground. If we use a longer exposure time, then the individual drops of water will move through their path, blurring in to a long arch. Alternatively, you could be taking a photo of something moving, a cyclist for example, extending the exposure time and moving the camera to keep the subject in the one place in the frame will blur the background giving the impression that the subject is moving.

Of course if you have a long exposure time, the camera will try to compensate the other settings to still take a good photo, but there's limits to what the camera can do and if too much light gets in, the resulting picture will be very white or 'over exposed.' If this happens, you'll need to adjust the exposure time to a lower value and try again. Using a long exposure time also requires a very steady hand, or a better option would be to use a tripod.