The article that I chose to read was “Do-It-Yourself DSLR: Take Your Organization’s Visual Destiny into Your Own Hands.” The article basically laid out the basics things to remember for beginners using a DSLR camera for photography or videography. This article was interesting for me because I’m fairly adept at using a DSLR and often hold trainings for Daily Bruin’s video department interns.
The article puts DSLR use in context of improving museum documentation through digital media. I think visual digital documentation is a very important tool for museums, with some museums doing a better job of this than others. For example while working on my dh101 project on the Turner collection at the Tate I looked through youtube for museum videos about the collection that may enhance our website. The Tate had several videos around the collection that were very well done and had a lot of views. However, the Getty’s video on the collection was long and of poor quality, making the information on Turner harder to attain than the well done video by the Tate.
Besides the valuable context that this article provides, I think it does a sufficient job at briefly explaining how to use a DSLR camera. To improve the article I think some visual representation should be made available for people unfamiliar to aperture, ISO, and shutter speed to fully understand the concepts. My one other critique on this article is that it is hard to tell who the audience is. Is this article meant for people completely unfamiliar with DSLR’s or just unfamiliar with manual settings? For the most part it seems targeted for complete beginners, and in that case I think jumping into completely manual shooting may be too much to grasp at first. Specifically the piece of advice of shooting in RAW. I would say I have a good amount of experience and do not shoot in RAW because color correcting in post-production in very difficult for me. Other than that I would say that this was a very useful guide for beginners.