Photography tips

I sometimes feel bad for people who are just starting out in photography. At times, it must be awfully confusing and frustrating. While it is often easy to find information the information can vary wildly, especially in social media forums and that is not even mentioning the so-called trolls who are just out there to cause trouble. You also have the snobs who love to talk down to new photographers. Most of the problem comes from social media but social media forums are often a first attempt to find information especially for new photographers and often for seemingly good reasons. A quick internet search for photography exposure tips leads to 12 million results but if I join a social media forum I can ask a question and get answers from people who have learned but. A question I saw in a Nikon photography group goes something like this, “I have a d800 I’ve been using for several years now. I’m having a hard time getting crisp photos out of it. I’ve recalibrated my lenses, and I still feel I’m not getting the pictures I should be getting. I’m wondering if having them professionally calibrated and the camera serviced would help.” There were a number of responses that were all over the place but no one asked what appears to me to be some crucial information.

1. How did you have the lenses re-calibrated?
2. Can you show us/me some examples of photographs with the following information, shutter speed, aperture, lens focal length.

To me, this is important. If you re-calibrated your lenses yourself and don’t know what you’re doing you can really mess things up and it can be a user error. I have asked these types of questions before on similar posts and in many instances which are far too frequently met with little to no response from the person asking the question or the equivalent of hate mail from others, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to help others.