Just found a 60D for really cheap from a friend for my wife - new in the box too...I know it's not a high end camera, but it's a marginal step up from the little Nikon point and shoot she is using...Neither of us have any background in photography, but would like to learn, so any helpful guides to start with we would appreciate it. Mainly will be family pictures, events etc...

Also, what would be the best SD card to get for it? What's the current fastest class/capacity suggestions?

Thanks for any help!

Such a helpful subsection lol

Transcend 32GB SDHC Memory Card Class 10

should be good enough for u.

the photography forum is a small group, so it takes some time before we see and respond to posts

there are loads of guides/tutorials online
sites to start you off, they all have tips and tutorials etc
http://fstoppers.com/
http://www.slrlounge.com/
http://www.photographytalk.com/
http://www.dpreview.com/

basically need to learn and understand
composition
exposure
move over to shooting on aperture, shutter speed priority and then manual

as far as memory cards go
different manufacturers display the speed in different ways
you don't need to go for the fastest card, look for:
class 10 / C10
100x, 133x or even upto 266x, you certainly wont need higher than that
15MB/s up to 30MB/s

I like Lexar
Sandisk and Kingston are good

This post was edited by jayandnix on Mar 18 2013 06:03am

Ok I'll look at it thank you!



Sorry, didn't mean to sound impatient, I had just noticed there were 12 views at the time and no responses...

Thanks a lot for the information, really appreciate it!

Haven't had time to really do anything with the camera yet, been really busy with work...but I have a question, there's a setting when choosing the size of the pictures you're taking, and there's Raw and Jpeg...what's the difference, and which is better to use, or just use both? I noticed in a couple of pictures she took today, that when you first open the Raw picture, it looks vivid and then after a second the picture changes, goes darker. I'm hoping to read the manual this week and check out some of the guides online, just wondered what those were though in the meantime.

Thanks!

what are you opening your RAW photos in? I've never seen mine change.

RAW files are unprocessed and store more information than a camera-jpeg. Start with RAW as soon as you can and learn how to edit them

if you are going to edit the photos (photoshop, lightroom etc) then use RAW, if you will just be viewing them then shoot jpeg
Raw files are much bigger as all the data is basically stored in layers where jpeg is essentially a flat image

Honestly just get anything by sandisk (30mb/s) and ~8gb should be enough to start with.

Thanks! The program we were using was Picasa...just to look at them and resize them so she could upload some to her FB. I have PS, need to get lightroom, but I have a lot to learn before I am ready for that stuff lol...I'm not sure why the image quality changed...every single picture did the same thing, I'd open it, it would look good, then after a second it got darker, picture still looked good, just different.





Thanks!



I ended up just getting a SanDisk Extreme 32GB SDHC UHS-I...got a really good deal on it and free 2 day shipping