Photography Basics: What You Need To Know
If you are a sports fan, you know what it means when a team goes into a “rebuilding year”.This is done to correct bad habits and train new people when owners or coaches decide it just needs to be done.Any leadership of every team will say in this situation that they are going back to the basics.”
Sometimes it’s good for us as photographers to go back to basics of digital photography .The basics are the place to start if you want to learn the ropes especially if you are just getting started in the world of photography.You need to know the basics that all the professionals know about the craft of photograghy.
Anybody can take a picture. I attended a wedding reception where the wedding party left a disposable digital camera on each table at the reception for guests to snap photos. Before the evening was over, it was the children who were running around taking pictures of everything from the dirty dishes to their own underwear. These were not photographers and while those pictures will no doubt get a few chuckles, these are not the kind of professional pictures people want for their long-term memories.
Obviously, the cornerstone of basics of digital photography is the camera. When you see a camera geek walking around with enough equipment on his neck to launch a space shuttle, you get the impression that cameras are phenomenally complex, more than mere mortals can grasp. But look at the professionals and you see them working with portable, relatively easy to operate cameras.The reason is that aperture and shutter speed are the basics of operating a camera.
Don’t be bothered by fancy terms.How wide your lens is set open to let light in is called aperture. And shutter speed is just how long you let the light come in to affect the picture. For getting a shot of a fast moving event, you want a wide aperture to let in a lot of light but a short shutter speed so you capture the event quickly and close the window so the picture is caught before more light hurts the quality.
Photography is simply all about light.You need to learn about flash photography and lenses in order to learn how to control the lighting in a shot.Make sure that one of your core photography skills is the desire to never stop learning.As you get better and more sophisticated in your ability to work with equipment you will want to learn more and you will learn more.
You can get a greater control over these basic controls of the camera such as aperture and shutter speed by learning how to switch from automatic settings to manual settings.Automatic settings were created only because the general public who are really not interested in learning the basics need them.You will learn about some basic settings such as portrait, landscape and sports settings.Different situations require different settings and you learn which works best when you switch to manual.
And that takes us to the most important basic of digital photography about becoming a great photographer and that is practice.Learn your equipment by taking time to play with it. Take it to situations and take photos with different aperture and shutter speed settings, in outdoor and indoor settings and different orientations to light. Don’t get upset when some shots don’t work. That’s part of the learning curve.
You learn best by doing and you build your confidence along to way to becoming a great photographer. But don’t get cocky, there is always more to learn.Isn’t that one of the fun things about photography?
Tags: digital photography, digital photography course, digital photography lessons, digital-photos, take better digital photos
