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Overcoming Cameraphobia

I know I am not the only person to react with panic when a dSLR is thrust their direction. I’ve been perfectly comfortable stumbling through any point and shoot when the owner asks me to take their picture and says “just push here”. Yet when my partner or anyone else did the same with several thousand dollars of computer jammed into several pounds of black box, I got all nervous and stupid. I decided I needed to get over it, and after one false start, I succeeded by going through these steps:

1. Admitting My Problem
2. Relearning the SLR Basics
3. Handling the dSLR
4. Practice, Practice, Practice

1. Admitting My Problem

I think it was 1985 when I agreed to join my partner in taking a university Intro to Photography course. Since his father had taught photography and been a pro since my partner was about 4, he had a bit a head start but he’d never actually taken a class. For me, I’d only used my trusty Kodak Instamatic before, so this was a genuine challenge. In the class I learned the basics of using the Nikon FG SLR he lent to me, along with things like lighting, composition and darkroom skills. My partner later gave me the FG and I used it in our world travels for the next 10+ years. Over time I switched to a more convenient Olympus point and shoot and slowly reverted to taking mostly snapshots. When that got upgraded to a fairly advanced Canon digital p&s, I learned how to manipulate the autofocus and exposure a bit, but didn’t get far with many other features.

By the time my partner got his Nikon D70 digital SLR, I no longer felt totally confident in using any SLR. When you add the digital menus and automations, it all seemed too much to learn at once. He really wanted to me to learn it with him, but couldn’t convince me to do more than use it like a point and shoot in its fully automated mode. Even then, I felt confused by whether to use the LCD or viewfinder, struggled with zooming, couldn’t figure out where to put my left hand, and just generally felt awkward. I have passively avoided touching it if at all possible.

Every once in awhile, though, he needs me to shoot him, or tries to get me to “play with it.” Plus he’s always raving about how intuitive and easy it is to use. I once enjoyed taking more than snapshots and part of me knew I would enjoy using a real camera again. So, I finally decided I should try to get comfortable with it, and maybe even learn to get past treating it like a very large point and shoot.

It probably hasn’t helped that I never acknowledged my intimidation or said anything to him. I just sort of let it be that “you’re the photographer” and I stuck with my point and shoots. Yet, since we talk endlessly about lenses, composition and exposure and spend hours looking at photos, he just couldn’t imagine that I didn’t want to play sometimes. So, if he’d suddenly push it at me saying “Here, you try. I have it at f8″ I would panic. Secretly embarrassed, I would take a random shot and hand it back, hoping it didn’t happen again anytime soon. Each of those events reinforced my sense that I was no longer a photographer, and that I should avoid the camera even more. It had become a classic, irrational phobia.

Not long ago, he temporarily acquired a second dSLR and suggested we both go out shooting together. I couldn’t come up with a good excuse not to, and decided this was my chance to learn. It was a lovely sunny morning and we went to the Queen’s Garden to play. My first shot was horribly overexposed, and my second came out half white. He was coaching over his shoulder while digging through his bags for a memory card. Somehow, he’d left his at home, and so we in fact only had one working camera. We discovered that by shooting upward, my glasses were causing reflections creating the exposure problems, but by then I was so frustrated, I just gave him the camera and went back to my usual role of observing and consulting on possible shots.

We were quickly back down to one dSLR so the issue didn’t come up again, until he once again had a second one on hand. Again, he immediately suggested we go out and try together, this time with two memory cards. This time, I finally realized that I had a problem and needed to admit it and then move forward. This edged me out of panic mode, and I started thinking about what I needed to learn. I stopped thinking of the dSLR as a totally foreign technology, and realized that it was just a combination of an SLR camera and a digital camera, both of which I have used before. Before we went out again, I needed to feel more comfortable with the basics of SLR photography and with using the camera’s digital features.

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This article was written on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 and is filed under Mastering Skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.