Seven days was enough to learn the camera. Nowhere near enough to learn photography.

I had never touched a digital camera in my life. So I bought one, gave myself seven days, and set the rules: manual mode on every photograph, learn the theory properly rather than pointing and clicking, and learn to edit as well. This is what happened, and what I could actually do at the end of it.

The first thing photography taught me was that memory cards have speed classes. My camera refused to take a single photograph and kept saying the image database was not ready. I am a computer engineer, so I formatted that card in the camera, then on the Mac, then in MBR, then in FAT32, and spent four or five hours proving the memory was fine. It was fine. It was a SanDisk Ultra where the camera needs an Extreme — not broken, just too slow, which is a worse kind of problem because nothing tells you that is what is wrong. Then a 20 kilometre drive to the next city to find a card that would work. If you are starting out, that is the part nobody mentions, and it is as much a part of learning this as the exposure triangle is.

After that it moved quickly. Aperture, shutter, ISO, stops, white balance, crop factor, the exposure triangle — about three days, and I think it was quick because I had already done optics as an engineer, so the knowledge only had to move across rather than arrive. Then I shot: the toy car, a lamp at 1/4000 to hold the exposure down, a 30 second frame at ISO 6400 at the other extreme, an umbrella in the rain for white balance, a scooter under a wrapper at ISO 2000. Every photograph in this video carries its settings and its date on screen, so you can check them against anything I claim.