Beginner photographer Tutorial !

If you just got a camera for Christmas, like a Nikon D3000 D5000 D300s or any Canon's XSI T1I or any other slr. This little tutorial or camera guide might help you and your wakeskating or any other type of photography!
...Well if you are gonna shoot a fast moving action sport make sure you just experiment. Try to keep your shutter speed over 1/500. If you don't, the pictures might be blurry. Do not be afraid to shoot on manual mode either. That is the best way to learn. Don't forget that if you take a bad picture you can look at it and see what you did wrong, fix the problem then just delete the bad photo.

A cool thing you can do is make a shallower depth of field. That is when your focal point is sharp and everything else in front and behind the subject is blurry. The way you do this is by "opening up your aperture" which would mean you are letting more light in. The smaller the number 2.8, 3.2, 3.5, 4 ect would mean the more light you let in. Each of those different numbers is called an "aperture" or "f stop". On some lenses that number can be from 1.2 to 32 or even 64. For each stop down (going to a bigger number, lets say from 2.8 to 3.2) you are letting half as much light in at 3.2 than you are at 2.8. So If you are shooting ANY sport at mid day, and you had your aperture at 2.8, your shutter speed would have to be about 1/4000 of a second. Now lets say you stopped down to 3.2, your shutter speed would only have to be 1/2000 of a second. The only reason you would shoot wakeskating at mid day like that would be to blur the background a lot. During mid day or when I am shooting at the "golden hours" (dawn and dusk), I usually don't use an aperture smaller than an f stop of 4.

Another important technical factor of shooting is your ISO. The lower the number 200, 400, the slower the "film speed", the higher the number, the faster. So during the day or well lit situations you should have your ISO anywhere from 200 to 400. If you are in a low light situations you can bump up your ISO to 800 or 1600 to have more leeway with your shutter speed and aperture to try and freeze the situation.

Hope I helped a little! If you have any specific questions about anything feel free to ask me! Ejazzle44@aol.com

Dang, I totally forgot about all these!
http://www.alliancewake.com/wake/wake-photography-101-2/

read them! It will help a lot more than I did.