Where do you start..

Where do you start when you decide to get into photography?

The obvious answer is to just start shooting.

When I bought my first DSLR a year ago I immediately became overwhelmed. Years ago I did play around with my parents DSLR, but I never took it out of "Manual mode". The only thing I ever manipulated was focus while shooting macro images (at this time the only other camera I had was my flip phone camera which spit out terrible quality pictures). 

When I got my camera, I had no idea what f-stop was, ISO, shutter speed, composition, etc.. Youtube was a valuable resource for all things photography, and I spent hours and hours watching video after video on the photography basics. Going to school to study photography was something I thought of doing, but in the end I came to the conclusion school wasn't for me. There is so much free information online you can teach yourself anything you want (you just need to be self driven). I did sign up with Lynda.com, an online program that teaches photography, I forgot to cancel my free trial and I ended up paying for a year...so i'm going to try that for a year..

Below is the first picture I took on my DSLR and edited in Photoshop.

-Imperfect Action is better than Perfect Inaction- Harry Truman