It has been in the box for three weeks. Somebody who loves you spent real money on it, said something warm about your eye for a picture, and now the box sits on a shelf and you feel slightly bad every time you walk past it.
That is the most common thing that happens to a gift camera. Not disappointment. Stalling. The question of what to do with a new camera turns into a research project, and the research project never ends, because there is always one more thing to learn before you are allowed to start.
So here is a week instead. Seven days, one thing each day, none of them longer than about twenty minutes. By Sunday you will have made a photograph you actually want to keep, and the camera will have stopped being homework.
Nothing here is about menus. If you want the menu, we have the mode dial explained one row at a time and you can read it any evening this week. This is about getting the thing into your hands.
Day 1: charge it, set the clock, format the card
Twenty minutes, most of it waiting.
Put the battery on charge first, because everything else depends on it. Then, the moment there is power, do the two housekeeping jobs that are a nuisance to fix later.
Set the date and time properly. Not roughly. The clock is what sorts your photographs into order forever, and a camera that thinks it is January 2020 will scatter this week's pictures through your library in a way that is genuinely annoying to untangle.
Format the card in the camera. Not on your laptop, and not by dragging files to the bin. Nikon's own Z50II manual puts it plainly: memory cards that have been formatted in a computer or another camera should be reformatted in the camera before use. The same manual adds the warning worth heeding, which is not to turn the camera off or pull the card out until the formatting message has cleared from the screen. If the card came with the camera, format it anyway. It costs four seconds.
One thing you do not need this week, whatever the shop told you: a spare battery. Nikon rates the D3500 at 1,550 shots on one charge of its EN-EL14a, and that is a fairly typical number for an entry-level DSLR. Mirrorless bodies run a screen and a sensor continuously and get a good deal less, but even so, 1,550 frames is more than almost anyone shoots in a first month. Buy the spare when you have earned it.
Day 2: a hundred photographs of your own kitchen
This is the day people skip, and it is the one that does the most work.
Put the camera in its green automatic mode. Stay indoors. Photograph the kettle, the dog, the light on the worktop, the inside of the fridge, your own feet. A hundred frames, deliberately worthless, deleted at the end.
The point is not the pictures. It is that by frame sixty your thumb has found the control wheel without looking, you have stopped hunting for the shutter button, and you have learned where the camera balances in your hand. That is physical knowledge and you cannot read it out of a manual. Every photographer who looks relaxed with a camera got that way by handling one until it stopped being an object they were careful with.
Expect most of the indoor frames to be soft. That is normal and it is not you, it is the light level. We went through exactly why in why your indoor photos come out blurry. Do not fix it today. Today you are just getting your hands on it.
Day 3: find out how close your lens will actually focus
Fifteen minutes, and it is the day most people are genuinely surprised.
Nearly everyone assumes the kit lens is the boring lens. It is not, and the proof is how close it will go. Nikon's published specification for the AF-P DX 18-55mm VR gives a minimum focus distance of 0.9 ft, in a lens that weighs 7.3 oz, with a maximum reproduction ratio of 0.38x. Canon's own figures for the RF-S 18-45mm are the same story: about 8 inches at the wide end in autofocus, and closer still if you switch to manual.
Under a foot. That is close enough for the texture of a cut loaf, the grain in a chopping board, the eye of a toy, a watch face, moss. It is not true macro, but it is far closer than anybody expects from the lens they were planning to replace.
One detail that stops this being frustrating. Nikon's own support material explains that the minimum focus distance is measured from the focal plane inside the camera to the subject, and that the little circle with a line through it on the top of the body marks where that plane sits. So the distance runs from the top of your camera, not from the front of the lens. On a zoom that is several inches of difference, and it is the reason people conclude the lens will not focus when in fact they are an inch past the line.
Find the mark on your camera. Then go and photograph five small things from as close as the lens will allow.
Day 4: one focal length, all day
Set the zoom and do not touch it again.
Pick the long end, or pick 35mm, it matters less than the committing does. Then spend the day moving your feet instead of the ring. Walk closer. Crouch. Step back and find a doorway to shoot through.
A zoom lets you change the picture without changing where you stand, which sounds like freedom and is actually the thing that keeps beginners making the same photograph over and over from wherever they happened to be standing. Take the choice away for one day and you are forced into the decision that actually makes photographs, which is where to put yourself.
Day 5: one window, three times of day
The same object, on the same windowsill, photographed at breakfast, at lunch and in the last hour before dark.
Put a mug there. Shoot it three times. Then look at the three frames side by side, and notice that you changed nothing at all and the photographs are not remotely alike. One is blue and flat. One is harsh with a hard-edged shadow. One is warm and long and makes an ordinary mug look like it is worth something.
This is the single most useful day of the week, because it moves the question in your head from "what settings should I use" to "what is the light doing". Every photographer you admire is answering the second question. Most beginners spend two years on the first one.
Day 6: take it somewhere you were going anyway
Not a photography trip. The shops, the school run, a walk you take regardless. The camera comes with you and that is the whole assignment.
The honest obstacle on day six is carrying. Canon's own specification puts an EOS R50 body at about 13.2 oz with battery and card, and Nikon lists the D3500 at 12.9 oz, and neither of those is heavy. But a camera on the thin strap that came in the box hangs off the back of your neck, and after forty minutes you notice it in a way that quietly makes you leave it at home next time. Most cameras stop being used at exactly this point, and it gets blamed on motivation when it is really hardware.
We have made the HiiGuy strap since 2016 in Los Angeles, and this is the week it is for. Worn across the body the weight goes onto your shoulder and your hip instead of hanging from your neck, which is the difference between a camera you notice and a camera you forget you have on. It comes in two variations and length is the only thing that separates them: the Regular adjusts up to 32 in on the body, the XXL up to 44 in. Take the XXL if you are tall, broad through the chest, or shooting in a coat for half the year.
At the camera end it is a stainless steel quick release with a safety tether behind it, so the camera comes off in a second without unthreading anything. Heavy-duty polyester webbing, a wide padded shoulder pad, rustproof metal fittings, and HiiGuy backs it for three full years. You can read the full specification here, or see both variations on Amazon.
Day 7: pick one, and get it off the card
Put the whole week on a screen. Go through it once, quickly, and star the frames that make you pause. Go through the starred ones again and keep one.
Then do something with that one photograph that is not scrolling past it. Print it. Send it to the person who gave you the camera. Set it as your lock screen so you see it forty times a day.
Print it if you can, and a gift camera will make a bigger print than you think. A 24-megapixel file from the D3500 measures 6,000 by 4,000 pixels, which is a 20 by 13 inch print at 300 dots per inch, and a good deal bigger than that if it is going on a wall rather than into your hands. Nobody tells beginners this. People shoot for years on a camera that could fill a wall and never make anything larger than a phone screen.
What the week was actually for
None of these seven days teaches you photography. What they do is remove the seven separate excuses that keep a gift camera in its box: it is not charged, the clock is wrong, the card is a mystery, I do not know what it can do, I do not know where to stand, I cannot see what light is doing, it is uncomfortable to carry.
Take those away and what is left is a camera you pick up, which is the only thing that has ever made anybody better at this. The settings will come. They come easily once you are shooting every week, and they come very slowly if you are reading about them with the box still sealed.
If you want the one piece of kit that makes week two more likely than week one, we listed the five things a beginner actually needs, and the list is shorter and cheaper than you would guess.
