Photography Basics: What You Need To Know
Posted on May 19, 2009
Filed Under Digital Camera Features, Good Digital Cameras |
Most sports fan know what it means for a team to go into what’s called a rebuilding year.This is when coaches and owners decide it is time to correct bad habits in people and train new ones as well.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 .If you are just beginning in the world of photography and you want to learn the ropes, the basics are the place to start.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.
It goes without saying that the camera is the conerstone of photography basics . 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.If you notice professionals you’ll see them working with light weight, portable and easy to operate cameras.The reason is that aperture and shutter speed are the basics of operating a camera.
Now don’t get nervous about fancy terms.How wide your lens is set open to let light in is called aperture.The shutter speed is the amount of time you allow light to enter the lens and in turn 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.
Basically photography is all about light.You will learn about ways to control the of lighting of a shot by learning about lenses and flash photography.Make sure that one of your core photography skills is the desire to never stop learning. The better and more sophisticated you get in your ability to work with the equipment, the more you will learn and the more you will want to learn.
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.Every camera has automatic settings but they were only created for the general public because they are not really interested in learning the basics. So they give you some basic settings like landscape, portrait and sports settings.You learn best what settings work in different situations by switching to manual.
Practice is the most important digital photography basics in becoming a great photographer. Take some time with your equipment and 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.When some shots don’t quite come out like you want them to, don’t get upset.Everything has a learning curve and that’s part of it.
You learn best by doing and you build your confidence along to way to becoming a great photographer.There is always more to learn so don’t get cocky.This one of the fun things with photography?
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