About This Website And Its Author

 

Hello there, reader. My name is Bernardo Malfitano, and I am the creator and webmaster of this website. I am also the creator and webmaster of - AirplaneDesign.info: a site about airplane design, made using the content of a course I created and taught; and - AirShowFan.com, where I display my photography (primarily aviation pictures but all kinds of other pictures as well); I am originally from Brazil, but have lived in the US for about half my life. I have a BS from Stanford and I am currently an engineer for Boeing. I live in the Seattle area. I enjoy flying (and, really, anything aviation-related), teaching, swing-dancing, and romantic walks on the beach. You can find out a heck of a lot more about me at my personal homepage. If you like any or all of my sites, or if you hate any or all of my sites, if you have any comments or feedback or suggestions or questions, if you need some digital camera advice, or if you just want to say hi, please do feel free to shoot me an email.

 

I have almost always loved photography. I got my first camera for my 11th birthday, in 1993, and my second camera in 1996. I bought (or got as a gift) at least one new camera every year starting in 1999; seventeen cameras in twelve years. It wasn't until I got a digital camera that I started being able to observe how the camera behaved when I pointed it in different directions and asked it to take pictures under different lighting conditions. I could see the image on the display getting darker and brighter, I could see when the camera prepared to make certain changes to what it was about to do, I could see what decisions the camera had to make and how it made them, and I could see when it was that certain problems (blur, grain, strange colors, parts of the image being too bright or too dark) were most likely to happen. In other words, the instant live feedback on the little screen allowed me to familiarize myself with the parameters that are adjusted in taking a picture, with when these parameters are adjusted by the automatic camera, and with what the results are. I quickly learned to "trick" the automatic camera so that it would adjust the parameters in the way I wanted it to (rather than in the ways it was naturally programmed to), but I kept thinking that more direct control would be nice. This led me to get digital cameras where I could control more and more of what the camera could do, eventually leading me to get an SLR. In other words, I learned photography just by playing around with digital cameras, trying the different settings and seeing what happened, learning about aperture and shutter speed and ISO not by reading books but by building intuition through experimentation. (But once I did get an SLR, I spent a lot of time talking with photographers, asking questions in online forums, and reading photography websites, so I could be sure I was getting the most out of my equipment). The instant feedback of having a digital camera is such that I could not help it but learn about photography, such that I could not help it but re-take each picture until it came out just right.

 

Unfortunately, many people feel afraid to experiment with digital cameras. Many people would rather learn by looking at a step-by-step guide than by trial and error. Many people feel so overwhelmed with the whole world of digital photography, they feel lost and don't know where to begin learning even if they wanted to - which is a real problem since all sources seem to assume you already know when you should want to use certain settings, what the common problems are when taking pictures in tricky lighting situations, etc. I worked at a camera store for some time during my last year of college, and I was astounded by just how afraid people are of digital photography, and how clueless they are when I started to explain something to them. And since I kept getting the same questions, I thought I'd make a website with my answers, and with the cameras I recommended. And that's what I did. When people asked me questions, I answered them as patiently and thoroughly as I could, but as each customer was getting ready to be done with my little "lecture", I would tell them about my website, and many found it very helpful. Particularly the parts where I actually show comparison pictures to illustrate what I'm talking about (something apparently done by a surprisingly small number of other photography-learning websites, classes, books, manuals, etc). That was in the fall of 2004. This content was initially hosted on Blogger - it used a blog engine and even a modified blog template, but of course it was not a blog, just a series of explanations and recommendations, based on the questions I got most often as a salesperson (and on the misconceptions I was exposed to most often) and on the cameras I recommended. Once that site started growing to the point where it really needed to be spread out over multiple pages (which on this site are "Page 1" and "Page 2"), I took that content and added it to my personal website, AirShowFan.com. So for a long time AirShowFan.com had a big "Guide to Digital Cameras" button right there on the main page. In transferring all that content to AirShowFan.com, I added to it, writing what would become "Page 3" on this site. That was in 2005. However, as I told people about my site, they were confused. People would ask me for photography advice (which happens a lot if you carry around a big SLR and a huge lens to all kinds of events) and I'd tell them "Just go to AirShowFan.com and click on Guide To Digital Cameras, it answers all those questions", and people would ask "You mean there's a Guide To Digital Cameras at a site called AirShowFan.com? Are you sure? That doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense". I could see that the theme of one site was not obviously related to the theme of the other, so I decided I wanted to move that content to a new site. I registered "EasyPhotography.info" and designed this site. I also kept adding to this site (especially the part about how to pick an SLR) based on the email questions I got most often from my readers. That was in 2006. And that's how EasyPhotography.info came into being.

Thanks for visiting :)

And, again, please do tell your friends about my site!

Thanks for visiting.

Sincerely,

Bernardo Malfitano
Creator and Webmaster