Thank you for the advice. This camera was my best opportunity to get in a full frame camera, I know its outdated by todays standards. I feel it will be a good learning tool. I'm retired and this is a new hobby that I can focus my time on. I also have a used 7d canon that I use for birds and wildlife. I want to use these older bodies to learn the basic technique before investing in a new modern DSLR. My new focus will be some good glass. I will set my camera to factory setting that is good advice I'm reading the manual now.

In general I think this is good advice about how one learns - or how different people learn. I agree that creative modes can be confusing from the learning perspective, I don't think I've ever used any of the ones on any of my Canon digital cameras, but that doesn't mean that something like a Canon Rebel kit is a bad thing. Like you I learned when cameras were simpler, I may have even started earlier, with fully manual cameras, but even the most basic Canon DSLRs, mirrorless, bridge, or P&S cameras usually have all the main controls for exposure. I've just looked at my latest Canon DSLR and discovered it doesn't even have creative modes, I've had it for over two months and had to check to find that they weren't there!

For myself, even though I knew what all the features did from prior experience, my first digital camera was quite a learning curve, even though the Canon terminology has remained consistent from around 1976 when the AE-1 was introduced. Any modern camera has many layers of complexity, and in some ways the pro models can be even more confusing given the number of options that can be set, even though they lack the automated creative modes.

At the end of the day, learning the basics of photography, what effect they have upon an image, and how to control them on any camera is the most fundamental thing. This can be done with most modern cameras - not so much smart phones - but the basic principles need to be mastered if one wants to take control of the images created.

An interesting anecdote (to me) from recent history was related to the recent California wildfires. Although San Francisco wasn't affected by the fires directly we had some serious air quality problems, sunsets were spectacular - a bit like the skies over Mordor or from Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' painting - so many people wanted to capture the scene. My wife who was traveling home on public transport ended up with people having to get off the street car. Lots of people immediately got out their smart phones to take pictures of the sky, and the overwhelming (overheard) comment was that the smart phones couldn't capture the image people could see in their minds. Since she is a photographer, some would say a beginner, she just stayed silent while thinking "Yep". She uses her smart phone quite a bit, but was thinking I need my old Nikon SLR or my Canon DSLR for this. She didn't have those of course, did have her smart phone, and just decided not to bother.

I think the beginner is better served sticking to JPG and focusing on the more important aspects of photography, such as composition, exposure and coming up with interesting ideas. Learning how to process RAW files can come later, after the beginner has mastered the basics. The less the beginner is overwhelmed, the easier the learning process, and the less likely the beginner will lose interest and give up. Besides, if the camera is set to RAW file output, does one really need the camera to spit out JPG files as well? Having both the camera and the photographer process and convert the same images independently seems a bit redundant to me.

Hello All,

I'm getting back into photography after some years' absence and have noticed that my eyesight isn't what it used to be...

I am shortsighted, -3 in each eye, and I usually wear contact lenses.

With contacts, my long distance vision is great. However, close up stuff, which I would normally see clearly, is a little blurred. For reading and so on I usually remove them, or sometimes stick a pair of cheap magnifying reading glasses over them.

Now, I like the idea of wearing contacts for photography, as it allows the eye to get closer to the viewfinder than glasses. However, that problem about close up things being blurry remains. With no dioptric correction in the viewfinder the data along the bottom of the image is blurry (this is on a Canon Eos). By winding the dioptric wheel as far as it will go in the '+' direction I can get it almost perfect... but not quite.

The '+' direction is the opposite direction to my -3 prescription of course, as I am wearing contacts and presumably the things are making me artificially long-sighted rather than my natural short-sighted.

Would a Canon dioptric adjustment lens improve things further? I'm not far off, so I would have thought that one more notch on the plus side would do it. So would that be a +1 lens? And does anybody know where the best place to go hunting for these is? My Canon 50D is not longer manufactured, and a quick look at the Canon website didn't bring any joy.