Conventional wisdom says that failure is the best teacher. I am inclined to agree, at least judging from my recent experience. Perhaps a little context is in order? Last weekend, I brought my camera along to a fitness competition to grab some (hopefully) good shots of my buddies tearing things up. The whole time I was shooting quickly without the chance to review. Unfortunately for me, I had accidentally triggered a tracking mode. This caused a large number of these photos to be out-of-focus and completely unusable.

I had two failures. First, I did not know the shortcuts to activate things like tracking. And second, I didn’t realize that it was running and thus ruining my focus. I could have mitigated, if not completely avoided both of these, if I had taken more time to master all ins and outs on my camera, and spent just a bit more time reviewing the shots I had already taken.

At the end of the day, your camera is simply a tool. It can be a very expensive tool with a ton of utility, but if you don’t take the time to really learn it, sooner or later you’re going to have a mishap just like me.

But How Do I Learn?

As I mentioned, failure is certainly an effective teacher, but let’s look at something a little more forgiving first. Luckily, we live in the information age and have access to just about anything we could ever care to learn. That’s a blessing and curse, though, because it can also be completely overwhelming.

So where do you start? Depending on your level of experience, if you really want to know your camera, you should probably at least glance at the user manual. I know, I know, it’s boring and dense and no one wants to read it. That’s fair. but it’s also full of quick diagrams that will walk you through all the major controls.

Next, you’re going to want to do some deep dives into your camera’s features and functions. Here, I would recommend leaning on our old friends YouTube and Reddit.

YouTube is a goldmine for long-form video tutorials on your exact model of camera. Here’s a great video I found for mine. They even cater these videos to your specific use cases (e.g. street photography, portraits, video). You can’t go wrong. Modern YouTube videos are great because many of them have chapter headings, allowing you to quickly jump to exactly what you’re looking for.

Reddit comes in when you need an answer on something that’s not covered in those videos. There’s a subreddit for every major camera manufacturers, and even many specific popular models. Join those communities, read a lot, and post your questions only after you’ve completely exhausted the search function.

Finally, and most importantly, get out and start shooting. If you want to know your camera, the best thing you can do is use it frequently, experiment, and see what happens. Fail hard, fail often, and you’ll learn fast.