Ok,  you have your first camera and kit lens and have watched hours and hours of You Tube videos from your favourite You Tuber. You are ready to take on the daunting world of photography, you go tiger.

Depending on what you want to shoot defines what gear you will need, that comes later. Firstly get out and start shooting. 

Nobody reads the manual especially on the side of a mountain in the driving rain. Juan Carlos Mcphoto on You Tube told you what settings you needed for all occasions. 

The conditions are different everyday (unless you live on a desert island). My tip is take a note pad and pen and write the settings down and later in post processing check the image and next time you go out take your note book and try again. 

The questions that will arise is why are my images so dark? Why is my image blurred?Why is it not in focus? Why doesn’t it look like Chris Burkhards image that I saw on Instagram. My camera must be broke.  

You will asking yourself the same questions for weeks, This is where the camera manual should come out, and you switch to a You Tube called Carlos, I’m actually an expert on taking the perfect image channel. Or you could give up on photography and it isn’t for you and all images taken are fake and photoshopped. 

Top tip; if you are in doubt that this is not for you, stop now.

From this point on photography gets very expensive and consumes all of your time and you begin to refer to daylight as F8 250th of a second kind of a day. Once dark you will look up and start searching for the Milky Way  then you will downloading apps to pinpoint exact locations of stars and Milky Way movement.

The learning can consume you and you may find that you shoot less at times but gain a greater knowledge that needs to be practised out in the field. Don’t give up, your doing great.  

Be prepared to take criticism as well as the praise, the criticism helps you learn, the praise drives your ego.

All this happens and you still don’t really know what you want to shoot and the 100’s of cat photos shot in various light conditions with every setting are now redundant and you’re on you way to owning the photography world-ish.

Essential learning equipment.