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
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.