Beginner Would love your feedback on my beginner's guide

"Hello human photographer" that's the first thing that makes me want to exit.

is your target audience for children ? You've put a lot of work in at first glance, but the 'childish overtones' don't work for me. I'd drop the bear idea and come up with something more mature - unless you want to educate children.
 
To be honest I quite enjoyed the humour in it, possibly ott for some but lightens it all up a bit. As a beginner myself I think it made things simple to understand compared to some sources but there were a few typos. Overall well done
 
Yes, mainly targeting children and parents with small children but I'm hoping the content might appeal a bit more widely. I agree there may be too many undertones at the start of the articles, will look at taking them out. Thanks for the feedback.
 
very good, and enjoyed it, for beginners it will be fine, it explains all the basics very well, nice job
 
Photograbear said:
Yes, mainly targeting children and parents with small children but I'm hoping the content might appeal a bit more widely. I agree there may be too many undertones at the start of the articles, will look at taking them out. Thanks for the feedback.
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Then you're spot on then !
 
Just had a flick through, looks very nice, must have taken you an age. Best of luck.
 
Photograbear said:
Yes, mainly targeting children and parents with small children but I'm hoping the content might appeal a bit more widely. I agree there may be too many undertones at the start of the articles, will look at taking them out. Thanks for the feedback.
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Children, with DSLRs...?

There's more to depth of field than just aperture - which is one of the reasons why you need a DSLR or CSC, as shallow DoF doesn't really exist with compacts or bridge cameras.

The water/bucket thing. How long you leave the tap on is shutter speed. How hard you turn it on is aperture. The size of the bucket is ISO, and water pressure is the ambient light level. No hose needed.

Good luck with it :)
 
If it's for kids, fine. I can't stand a lot of talk, I prefer bullet points as much as possible, so I would personally not wade through your chatty style to find what I want.

As Hoppy has said, not many kids are going to have dslr's.

I'd like to understand why you decided to write your guide. What are you aiming to get from it? What do you think you have offered that hasn't been done already?
 
Thanks for your feedback guys. Genuinely appreciated.

I think you'd be surprised, lots of teenagers have DSLRs or at least access to one because their parents do. I know because I used to be a secondary school teacher, and it always amazed me the quality of camera that popped out of kids bags on a school trip. You're also forgetting that just about every sixth form has 20 or 30 16-18 year olds studying GCSE photography, for which the curriculum isn't great.

There is also something I believe, but I may be totally wrong - The majority of pictures taken everyday are by young people on things like Instagram, snapchat, etc. Kids spend hours taking pictures on their phone; once they take a few thousand, some of them will start to get good and will want to dive in a bit further and learn how to control a DSLR or CSC.

That said, I don't want only children to access this. Don't want the bear to put off a beginner of another age group and if it does I may have to rethink things slightly.

Richard - I know there's more to DOF than aperture, but didn't want to overwhelm anyone at that point. Same with the analogy, want to keep it as simple as I can to someone whose just starting to get their head around it, I do like yours though.

Jenny - Decided to write it because I think that a lot of photo blogs are a bit daunting to beginners, and crucially, very few consider pedagogy properly. I think there's room for a blog from a teacher who understands things like progression, differentiation, etc. Again, I might be wrong, but I enjoy doing it and it might help some people so surely no bad thing to give it a go?

Cheers,

PB x
 
IMHO i would drop the photograbear theme it might work for 7 year olds but i don't think a 15 - 16 year old teenager would take it seriously enough to learn from it and the average 7 year old wouldn't have a clue what your trying to teach

i can see you are trying to appeal to a younger audience but i think the way it is written reads a little like a story book which is no bad thing if you are aiming for a 7 year old audience
 
Hi. I just opened the link and only found a short piece showing the Alsatian so must be something amiss,maybe because I am on an I pad.

I have a lot of experience with children ranging from 9 - 18. The feedback above is right... Kids don't read masses of text anymore unless They are motivated to do so and very few of them would describe themselves as kids between 16-18. Make that 14-18. Whilst many of them might fit in to stereotypes, a lot of them, the vast majority of them, don't. Yes some of them have dslrs but not that many so, I too would suggest, based on the small amount i have seen, that you bullet point and avoid thinking that they don't know anything... Lots of them will do ICT now with digital imagery and manipulation required to complete their portfolio of work. I would also suggest you contact a local school or your previous school and ask if there would be an volunteers who would be willing to give you more feedback.

Hope that helps. Good luck with it.
 
Again, thanks for the feedback guys. I would never consider dropping the bear at this point, it's only just kicked off and I have to give my gut feel a bit of time, at the very worst case I can just transfer all the content to my personal photography site (which is only slightly more mature!) at some point in the future, no massive loss.

I'm still hopeful that not just 7 year olds would enjoy the bear concept. It might just be selfishness but I like having a character rather than myself presenting it, it gives me much more freedom in my writing and topics and at it's a bit different.

I know it sounds like I have no idea what I'm doing, and that's because I don't! I've never written a blog before and only pretend to be a bear on special occasions, but I'll keep trying to churn out 4-5 posts a week for a while because I enjoy it and because if nothing else, it's massively helping me consolidate my own photography knowledge.

Cheers for your feedback and good vibes people.
 
Photograbear said:
Again, thanks for the feedback guys. I would never consider dropping the bear at this point, it's only just kicked off and I have to give my gut feel a bit of time, at the very worst case I can just transfer all the content to my personal photography site (which is only slightly more mature!) at some point in the future, no massive loss.

I'm still hopeful that not just 7 year olds would enjoy the bear concept. It might just be selfishness but I like having a character rather than myself presenting it, it gives me much more freedom in my writing and topics and at it's a bit different.

I know it sounds like I have no idea what I'm doing, and that's because I don't! I've never written a blog before and only pretend to be a bear on special occasions, but I'll keep trying to churn out 4-5 posts a week for a while because I enjoy it and because if nothing else, it's massively helping me consolidate my own photography knowledge.

Cheers for your feedback and good vibes people.
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Good luck with this. At the very least, as you say, having to explain things in simple terms is a great way to consolidate your own knowledge. I don't like the bear thing personally but at least it's different and memorable and that's a big advantage when there are a thousand other blogs doing the same thing (and most of them very poorly).

It's not easy (I've done a few of these things myself, in my magazine work). One of the big difficulties is keeping it simple and easy to understand and I would advise not scooting over things. As I mentioned above, I don't think you can talk about depth of field and only mention aperture. At the very least, the other factors should be mentioned, perhaps with reference to a later chapter explaining them.

Shutter speed is another one, for controlling movement blur. You mention camera shake and go on to the hand-holding rule of thumb. Which is fine as far as it goes, but the key factor there is 'effective' focal length, ie actual FL x crop factor, that is not mentioned. So now you have to explain crop factors to put that properly straight.

Somehow you need to cover these things off or readers will soon get tripped up :)
 
Richard, totally agree with your point. The plan is to go back and link in as and when I do write the new content that takes things further. I originally had loads of place holder sentences but as they all read something like "learn more about this soon", I decided to take them out.
Already have a draft for the DoF, crop factor and few others, but hadn't thought about going deeper into shutter speed, will add to the to do list!
 
Photograbear said:
Richard, totally agree with your point. The plan is to go back and link in as and when I do write the new content that takes things further. I originally had loads of place holder sentences but as they all read something like "learn more about this soon", I decided to take them out.
Already have a draft for the DoF, crop factor and few others, but hadn't thought about going deeper into shutter speed, will add to the to do list!
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Unfortunately, while the various technique aspects of photography are not too difficult in isolation, the tricky bit is there are quite a lot of them and they are all acting and inter-acting together with every picture you take. Some of it is a bit contradictory too, and it all gets very confusing.

Apertures for example, effect both exposure and DoF, work in conjunction with shutter speeds and ISO, f/numbers are confusingly related to eachother and appear to work back-to-front. There are no shortcuts to just having to learn that stuff - basically by reading, taking a lot of pictures and thinking about what's going on, then reading and shooting some more.
 
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