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Beginner's Guide to Photography: 101 and Canon DSLR Gear
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This is for you guys who have asked the question: I want a DSLR, what should I buy? I think to answer that correctly, you need to learn the basics of photography, as it has a direct impact on your decision on camera, lenses and gear. So here is my brain dump on a Sunday afternoon, hope you find it useful.

Exposure Triangle: Aperture/Shutter/ISO
Photography is all about light...
These are the three key parameters that you can change to modify the exposure of your photos. To maintain a correct exposure, if you increase one, you will need to decrease another to compensate. Different gear (camera and lenses) will give you access to different range of these values, and give you the freedom to express your artistic photography personality.

An analogy to this is a window with shutters:
- Aperture is the window size, the smaller the 'f' number e.g. f/4, the larger the window, and the more background blur known as bokeh that you get (this is typically the special look that is commonly associated with SLRs). The maximum aperture is dependent on the lens, and larger apertures come at the cost of weight and price. A 100mm lens at f/4 has a 25mm (100mm/4) pupil diameter.
- Shutter is the amount of time that the window shutters are left open. Cameras control the shutter speed measured in seconds (whole and fractions). The differentiation between cameras for this comes in the form of fps (or frames per second): a camera with a faster fps rate is better at capturing sports/wildlife.
- ISO is the equivalent of you sitting in the room wearing sunglasses - it desensitises your eyes. Cameras control the ISO (sensitivity of your sensor), and more expensive cameras have higher available ISO values without compromising on noise (grainy images).

To compare the different scales used in each of these parameters, the term 'stop' is used as a unit measurement of light:
- Aperture (factors of sq root 2): f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8 ... f/22, f/32 etc
- Shutter (seconds): 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250 etc
- ISO (standard): 6400, 3200, 1600, 800, 400, 200, 100, 50 etc

The examples above are in order of decreasing stops (less light being let in by half each stop)
Increasing aperture (by decreasing f number, move left of scale above) by one stop and increasing shutter speed (decreasing shutter number, move right of scale above) have the net effect of maintaining the same exposure.

Flash Light: the fourth exposure parameter
In addition to the exposure triangle above, you can influence the exposure by directly supplementing the amount of light available through usage of flash. I won't go too much into detail here, but I strongly advise purchasing a separate flash, which totally opens up your creative options, and avoid red eye / washed out / over exposed photos. You can still get a correctly exposed photo (from flash light) and maintain the warm colours from the environment (ambient light).

Focal Length
Not to be confused with aperture f numbers, focal length affects the magnification of objects: the shorter the focal length (e.g. 10mm), the wider the perspective.
The longer the focal length (e.g. 200mm), the more zoomed in the objects will be. This is controlled by the lens (optical zoom) as opposed to the camera (which only can digitally zoom).

Full Frame vs Cropped
The sensor within a DSLR camera captures the image of the photo when exposed. Full Frame cameras have a large sensor that captures a huge amount of detail (there are only so many pixels that you can densely pack on to a sensor effectively, so more megapixels does not necessarily equate to more detail). Cropped cameras have smaller sensors than full frame cameras. The effect of this is that equivalent photos from cropped cameras seem 'zoomed in' by a 'cropped factor'.
For Canon cameras, this is 1.6 (or 1.3 for professional 1D series). A 50mm fixed lens is therefore an equivalent 80mm focal length on a cropped camera.
The upside to cropped cameras is that they are cheaper, smaller, and great for photography where greater zoom is required e.g. wildlife/sports. The downside is that lenses will not be as wide on cropped cameras, and full frame sensors capture more detail.

Why Canon?
- Unless it's out of budget, you want Canon or Nikon - they are the biggest players with the largest range of cameras and lenses and userbase.
- If the majority of your friends have Canon, go with Canon. Ditto with Nikon. You can share lenses and other gear, but more importantly, advice. I'll give you advice for example below for Canon.

What (Canon) Camera? (As at 25 Apr 2011)
- Short answer 550d.
- Long answer...Prices are from CameraPriceBuster, body only (although you should buy it with kit lens to get discount on lens). I would reco

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