This weekend, we 
attended a wedding ceremony plus the dinner afterwards and managed to shoot some photos too. Here’s something I noticed: it looked like everyone was carrying a digital camera. Many moons ago you wouldn’t even think of taking a camera with you to a wedding because, it was actually pretty expensive to have the film developed. Additionally, you were never certain if photos actually turned out or not. If they did turn out, you were either extremely lucky or just plain gifted.
During the first quick browse through my photo set (the morning after the wedding), I ended up throwing out between 20 to 30 photos: most of them out of focus ones. While I had a flash, I was frequently switching between auto-focus and manual focus: the camera had a (tremendous) hard time to focus on subjects particularly at places where it was (apparently) too dark. Luckily, most people were wearing some white (or light coloured) clothes [reflection is what made the auto-focus work again].
I don’t mind making pictures of people though. There’s something rewarding about having the perfect picture (from a different angle) of people caught with mixed emotions during ceremonies like marriage.
I don’t think so. Film is a different medium. Shooting digital has the advantage of seeing directly the exposure. So you can correct aperture and exposure time.
Digital photography brings down the learning curve fast: You instantly see what a change of aperture does to both light exposure and what’s in focus and what’s not. In the film days you learned it by waiting a day of adn find out how the exposure ended up.
It’s still about composition though.
Also remember the focusing system works with getting the contrast right (correcting blurriness). Focus on something very contrasty and focus will be right. That’s why you can’t focus correctly on surfaces without contrast (white paper).
If you’re not sure, find something contrasty at the same distance, correct aperture so the object that needs to be in focus resides in the DOF.
The only thing that remains is you have to learn how the lens works. That is the part of the learning curve that has not changed with digital photography. The characteristics of a lens is something you learn while using it.
(DOF tables help ofcourse, but it takes practice and experience to guess whether an object will be in focus given an aperture and your distance to the object).
And this brings us right to composition 101. What is in focus and what’s not, how much of it is in focus, and how focused objects relate to other objects within the frame, and the background, that’s part of how you influence composition of a photo.