Photography 101
Photography 101
Have you ever gone somewhere and taken a picture of something beautiful and when you see the picture it does it no justice? Well here are some tips to help your photos come to life!
Basic Photography
These are the basic concepts of photography. It makes no difference the kind of camera or eqiupment you have, these are things that can be applied to every picture. Even if you can’t adjust all of these settings manually these tips are still useful in understanding why your pictures turn out how they do!
Composition
Composition is the core of every photo. Now in order to have a photo show what you want, you need to “frame” in only the part of the scene that you find to be the point of interest. For example, this picture I had taken of a leaf on my windshield one very rainy fall day. This photo works so well because of the composition, the photo contains a point of interest & I was aware of the beackground as well. Now if I had sat in my car and just took a picture of my windshield without thinking about framing this shot, it would show me just a picture of a windsheild. Your job as the photographer is to show us what you want us to see, so make sure you do that when you take a picture.
Shutter Speed & Exposure
Exposure is one of the most important parts of a photograph, it can be used to show proper lighting of an image or movement. In order to retain details in a photo they need to be properly exposed. If a photo is overexposed it will have what is called “hot spots” or areas where all detail is lost. Your shutter speed controls the amount of light that is allowed to hit your sensors or film. The slower your shutter speed, the longer your shutter stays open. This allows more light to hit your sensors creating brighter images. If your shutter speed is too slow and your photo contains “hot spots” no matter how much editing you do your details will never be restored. It is better to take a slightly underexposed picture and correct it than to have an overexposed one.
However your shutter speed also controls the amount of movement in your image. For example, the image here is one I took of a stream nearour house in MA. You can see the movement in the water and the soft silky look it has, this is called cascading. This is created with the use of a tripod and a very slow shutter speed. I could also get into filters to help control your exposure and colors but that will be a completely different tutorial. Now the slow shutter speed allowed for the camera to see the movement in the water, like if you were ever taking pictures at night and had them come out blury from your hands shaking a little. Now the reason the rest of the picture is in focus is because it isn’t moving, duh! There is no right or wrong way to take a picture, just technique! Be creative, you can use movement in sports photos to show someone’s arm moving as they throw a ball, or someone sliding into home plate!
Depth of Field
Perhaps the most creative aspect of a photo is the depth of field or creative focus. Have you ever seen a photo where most of the image is out of focus except one clear spot? This is called a shallow depth of field. A Shallow depth of field is used when you want to draw a subjects eye to one specific area of an image. This is most often used in portraits or macros (images of tiny details such as insects). This isn’t always the best choice however. For example, if you saw a beautiful landscape with beautiful colors and details you would want to fill the frame with those colors and details. If you had a shallow depth of field only one focal length (or one distance whether it is the closest object to you, all the way to the farthest from you) would be in focus causing the rest of the beautiful landscape to be lost.
What controls depth of field?! Well your depth of field is created by your camera’s aperture setting. Your aperture is a ring that you can set wide open or very narrow. The more narrow the opening the more of your image is in focus, the wider the opening the more shallow your depth of field is. I will go into more detail about aperture in a different tutorial. Now unless you shoot with a an SLR or DSLR camera you can not manually set this(at least not in most cases, however many point and shoots now have semi-manual settings). However the settings on a point and shoot are pre-set to help you create these effects. For example, on portrait mode of a point and shoot camera you can now expect a shallow depth of field because you now know that a shallow depth of field is most often the best choice for portraits. The same applied to the landscape mode. In order for you to be able to capture the details of a landscape you would want a smaller opening so your image is in sharp focus. You can now use that knowledge to pick the most effective setting for what you are trying to capture.
