Camera Trainer: Learn to Shoot

Learn one camera. Then you'll know how to face any of them. More than 70 lessons with a whole professional camera on your screen: you learn by taking real photographs.

You learn to use a professional camera by using one.

Camera Trainer puts a whole camera on your device's screen — mode dial, two dials, shutter button, AF-ON, a quick menu and a lens with its rings — and walks you through it while you actually shoot. It isn't a manual and it isn't a video: it's the camera, with someone beside you explaining it.

WHO IT'S FOR

• You've just bought a camera and it's still in the box. • You've had one for years and never left Auto mode. • You want to buy one, but you don't know how to use it. • You gave one to your child and you want them to really learn it.

All four are missing the same thing: someone beside you.

THE LESSONS SIT BESIDE THE IMAGE, NEVER ON TOP OF IT

You're told what to do, you do it on the real control, and you see the result in the image — without a panel covering the very thing you're supposed to be looking at.

YOU START AT THE BEGINNING

More than seventy lessons in eleven blocks, from your very first photo to hyperfocal distance: not too dark, not burnt out · freeze or blur movement · seeing in the dark · how much comes out sharp · all three at once · letting the camera decide part of it · focusing where you want · true colours · near and far · and photos that take their time.

And around twenty challenges you pass by taking photos, not by answering questions. The app marks most of them itself: it knows the settings you shot with.

AND WHEN YOU DON'T WANT LESSONS, IT'S A CAMERA

The learning strip steps aside with one tap and the camera stays whole, with no text, for taking your own photos. In its place you get the histogram, the level and your last shots with the settings you used on each one. The course ends; the camera doesn't.

THE CONTROLS DO WHAT THEY SAY

Shutter speed is real exposure time: set 1/4 and the motion blur is there. ISO is ISO. And the light meter actually meters — spot, partial and average — so the needle moves with wherever you point.

• M, Av and Tv. No program modes: this is where you learn to decide. • Bulb, plus exposures up to 30 seconds and a neutral density filter. • Full focusing: one-shot, tracking and manual; AF areas, half-press and AF-ON under your thumb, with a distance scale and hyperfocal. • White balance in kelvin, with fine tuning. • A bag of lenses: fast primes, kit zooms and telephotos. • An APS-C sensor, with the 35 mm equivalent always on screen.

THE SAME CONTROLS AS ON A REAL CAMERA

The controls you'll find on any modern camera: mode dial, front and rear dials, AF-ON and a quick menu. And three complete sets of names, switchable in the menu — Av/Tv or A/S, M-Fn or Fn, INFO or DISP — each with its own bag of lenses. Learn one camera. Then you'll know how to face any of them.

THE PHOTOS ARE REAL PHOTOS

Every shot is saved to your library, JPEG or RAW, with the settings you chose. You review them and delete them from the camera itself.

AND THE CAMERA DOESN'T LIE

It doesn't fake the result. Motion blur and noise come from the sensor, not from a filter, and you check them in the photo you took — just like real life. A camera that invents the result teaches you to watch a screen, not to take pictures.

WHAT IT DOESN'T DO

The device has a fixed aperture, so aperture is emulated through light: it changes the exposure, not the background blur. It says so here, and it says so inside the app.

And that emulation is paid for in ISO: to take light away, the app lowers the sensor's gain — which is exactly what ISO does. With the aperture closed you can ask for ISO 12800 while your device runs at 600, so the noise you see is the noise of 600. The app tells you where it really went. On your own camera you pay that price in full.

Camera Trainer doesn't teach you photography with videos. It teaches you by letting you use the camera until your hands know it.