Photography 101

I felt like really contributing to the community, so I decided to write this - many people ask how I take my pictures and want me to teach them and what not and even offered to pay. I decided I'll just write this for free and provide people with tips and tricks to learning photography. This will hopefully turn out to be a series of tutorials and I will be updating the thread(s) constantly if it gets enough attention with new tutorials and content to help out everyone out there wanting to get into photography.

Current index:
• Becoming familiar with your camera




I. Becoming Familiar with Your Camera
Many people ask me how I take my pictures and make them look so professional. Well today, I'll teach you how I do it. After this tutorial, you will finally know enough to take your camera off of auto mode, Guaranteed! If you don't, just PM me and I'll help you out personally.

There are 3 basic settings on the camera that affect the outcome of your picture, these 3 things are:
• ISO
• Shutter Speed
• F-stop

While you're shooting in auto mode, you camera decides all of these settings for you. The technology is getting better for auto mode, but not as good as YOU can make it. If you want to learn to have full control of every picture you take and create amazing shots, you'll want to learn to shoot in manual, but to do so, you need to learn the settings you will be operating with.

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First on the list: ISO



If you take a look at the picture above, this setting decides the overall exposure of your shot. Using a Low ISO (100-300) number will make smooth pictures but will give your picture less light and contrast. High ISO (3200 - 6400) number will give you plenty of light but the higher the number the more grain (fuzzy looking stuff) will also appear in your final picture. Low ISO is usually used to shoot during the day, whereas a High ISO is used for low light photography (Night time). Low ISO generally provides the cleanest looking picture. It is very smooth and barely grainy at all, but you can only use it during the day if you want the best picture from it. There's a way to shoot with 100 ISO at night, but I'll get to that later when talking about shutter speed. On most DSLR cameras this setting can be accessed quickly from a button on top of the camera and will start in ISO 100 and double after each number all the way to 6400 ISO. That is only the default for most cameras, there are many cameras out there that allow for low light photography (High Maximum ISO), and they will go up to about 24000.

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Next up: Shutter Speed


From slow shutter speed (left), to fast (right). To have same light in these pictures other settings have been changed, such as ISO and F-Stop. Changing ONLY the shutter speed WILL affect light, so make sure you know what you're doing.

This setting is all about how quickly the camera snaps the photo. You're probably used to hearing it snap twice (quickly), then a perfectly exposed picture comes out. Well when you're in low light, this handy automatic feature becomes almost useless, unless you use a flash. But if you're doing landscape photography, you definitely don't want to use a flash. A quick shutter speed will be able to "freeze" objects in motion as if they were standing still. You can use this to freeze things like, water, cars, etc.. Basically anything moving. The faster your shutter speed is, the less light your pictures will have - simply because the camera doesn't have enough time to let light be captured/recorded. A longer shutter speed is the solution to that problem. You're probably always used to hearing a camera click twice fairly quickly. This is the sound of the shutter opening and closing, capturing your picture. When you set a long shutter speed, the shutter will open and every tiny little bit of light that can be seen (sometimes not even by the human eye) will be "recorded" onto the picture. This is how most photographers go out at night and take amazing pictures. You may wonder how photographers take pictures of many, many stars - well now you know! They set their camera to a long shutter speed (usually 30 seconds) and take a beautiful picture - "But how come I can't see that many stars?" Well the human eye only sees light in real time, and we can't "record light" and put it into our brain. Pretty much all stars emit light right? So when you have your camera set up to take a 30 second picture, all of that little bitty light coming from that star appears on the camera almost perfectly. Anyways, enough about stars - Longer shutter speeds can be used to smooth out water and give it a "milky" look, draw with light (light painting), or give the picture some motion. Most DSLR's generally go as fast as 1/2000 of a second, some of them even faster! And they pretty much all will allow up to 30 second shutter speeds. Some cameras even give you the opportunity to have the shutter speed me as long as you want it to, just as long as you're holding the shoot button (or the remote button). Keep in mind that when you're shooting with a long shutter speed, you will NEED to use a tripod, otherwise your picture will come out blurry and not clear whatsoever. I recommend using a tripod for almost any shot you do - sadly us humans move even when we don't want to, so it's hard to shoot a clear picture without a tripod! The shutter speed setting is usually changed by scrolling the wheel left/right at the top or front of your camera. This will decrease/increase the shutter speed.

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And lastly, but certainly not least: F-Stop



This is the setting that determines the depth of field or focus. This basically means that adjusting this setting will make the focus depth smaller or larger. Higher F-Stops gives allows for more things to be in focus whereas lower F-Stops focuses on one main focal point, and everything else is blurred out. Higher F-Stops would be used more for portrait pictures, where you need to get all of the person's clothes, or you have multiple people that aren't standing together, but need to be focused. A low F-Stop would be used when shooting an object or subject close up and you want the background to be blurry. No other nearby objects will be in focus, just the subject in mind. Whenever your camera goes up an F-stop, it only receives half as much light in the shot as the previous F-stop. That means having high f-stops for large focus will make your pictures darker and will need more light.

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What do I do now?
So after reading all of this, you may be asking yourself what to do now? Go out and try it! I wasn't taught by anyone, I just sat there for hours with my camera and learned it. It's always better to learn how to shoot in manual mode, and keep it that way! Your pictures will turn out MUCH more like you want them to, and you will be much happier with the results. You need to find a balance between all of the settings, and understanding them is the first step to becoming a master photographer. Most professional photographers can determine the setting's they'll use to take the shot before they even take it. You will probably not be able to do this at first, but if you practice and get a better feeling of how the different settings affect each other, you will be better in no time.

For help on different situations that need different settings, you can use the different modes that your camera has (Tv, Av, etc..) You turn the wheel on top of your camera to reach the wanted mode, and then you simply watch the setting that the camera changes and the type of picture it takes to help get a better understanding of all of this information.

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A few closing tips:
• Shoot in RAW - 60% of what makes a good picture is the processing of the picture afterwards. When you change your camera to shoot in RAW mode, it allows you to pull so much information from the picture than you thought was possible. The camera can't capture the same thing that the human eye does automatically, but you can process the picture to make it look as close as possible.

• Invest in a decent SD card - As the technology in camera grows, the megapixels get higher, and the images get bigger; more space is needed. Not only do you need a somewhat large SD card (32-64gb) but you also need one that can read and write quickly - there is nothing more annoying than taking a picture and not being able to view it for about 10-20 seconds due to a slow SD card!