Photography Tips For Beginners
Photography is a medium that can take your interest and turn it into an artful masterpiece. You no longer need to wait hours for film or be restricted by darkroom conditions, you have the instant gratification of digital photography at your fingertips! Welcome to my photography tips for beginners.
Photography has never been more accessible than with today’s technology-driven world we live in. Long gone are days where one would carry around bulky equipment like portable darkrooms–you don’t even need any expensive technical knowledge anymore! All you have to do now is pick up whatever camera takes your fancy and start taking pictures from anything that piques your curiosity; whether simple objects, landscapes, animals -whatever suits your mood on the day.
But what if you were just starting out in photography and you don’t know where to begin. In this article, I’ve got you covered by sharing the most useful tips for any beginner photographer.
Focus
An improperly exposed or blurry picture will probably be unusable, but one that isn’t precisely framed may still work. Because of this, you should always work on focusing and the subject before adjusting the frame. If in doubt, you could always try zooming out a little bit. This is going to give you the option of crop into your photograph and frame it exactly the way you intended.
The next thing that you should always do is to focus on the right thing. Generally speaking, when you are photographing people, you are going to want to focus on their eyes. What you don’t want to happen, is to have a beautiful portrait of someone where the tip of the nose is in focus and the idea slightly blurry. Always make sure that you focus on the person. If that person is slightly turned away from you, make sure that you focus on the idea that is closest to the camera.
Aperture
I’m sure you’ve seen those photographs where the background is nice and blurry and you wondered how they do that. The blurry background is controlled using the app picture of your lens. The aperture is controlled by some strange numbers. Examples of these numbers are F2 .8, F5.6, and F11. The range of numbers that you can see your aperture to, is going to vary depending on the lens that you have. Here is the general rule that you need to understand, the lower that number, the more blurry your background is going to be.
The higher that number, the more in focus your background is going to be. You should experiment with your camera to see the different types of results that you can achieve.
Shutter Speed
Shutter speed refers to the amount of time the light is allowed to enter into the camera. This is measured in fractions of a second such as 1 60th of a second, 1/100 of a second, 1/200 of a second. The faster the shutter speed, the less light that comes into your camera. The idea is to have this shutter speed quick enough so that your subject is not blurry whilst at the same time allowing enough light to come into the camera so that there is enough to make the photograph.
Just holding the camera can introduce camera-shake which can result in blurry photographs, so there is a general rule the photographers use one hand holding the camera. The rule is to match the shutter speed to the focal length of your lens. This means that if you’re using a 50mm lens, your shutter speed should be 1/50th of a second or higher. If you are using a 200mm lens, your shutter speed should be 1/200th of a second or faster.
Exposure Compensation
You should also learn to use exposure compensation. All cameras have a like me to inside that will automatically set the shutter speed and the aperture according to how much lighter is in the scene. For the most part, the camera gets it right. But there are times when it’s going to struggle and you will need to override the light meter inside the camera. This process is called exposure compensation and simply means that you can tell the camera to slightly brighten up a photograph or slightly darker and photograph.
Golden Hour
Make use of the golden hour. You may have heard the term golden hour used before by the photographers. What they are referring to is a period of time approximately an hour briefly after sunrise or before sunset.
During this time, the light is going to take a golden orange tone to it as it cuts through the atmosphere. Generally speaking, this is a very pleasing light that can look amazing in landscape photography.
Shooting Portraits
Shooting portraits can be a lot of fun as well as a great way to document the people in your life. There is one tip alone that will make the most difference when photographing people. That tip is to always place the person in shade. Everyone has this crazy idea that you should place your subject in direct sunlight. All this is going to do is result in some unflattering shadows across the face or they will be blinded by the sun which will make them do some really unflattering expressions so always make sure that you place your subjects in shade.
RAW Vs JPG
Generally speaking, there are two formats that you can shoot your photographs in. The first one is JPEG and the second one is RAW. A JPEG file is going to be much smaller than the raw file. The JPEG format was created a few years ago to try and help people store as many photographs as they can on their memory card. Back then, memory cards used to be expensive and not very big so it made sense to shoot in a JPEG format to try and maximize your storage. Fast forward to today and this is no longer a problem. Memory cards are now very expensive and very large in size. The main difference between JPEG and raw is the amount of information that is stored in the photograph. On the surface you may not be able to tell the difference between the two were looking at them on the screen. The difference will be very noticeable once you try to edit your photograph. A JPEG image only holds around 20% of the original information captured so it’s not going to let you push your photograph as far as if you had shot it in raw format. Because of this, I recommend everybody to shoot in RAW format all the time.
Composition
When you’re first learning to compose photographs, it is worth taking the time to learn some of the more basic composition rules. These rules do not have to be followed every single time but they are a really good guide for understanding how to balance all the components of a photograph. The most commonly used composition rule is the rule of thirds. To use this rule, imagine a tic-tac-toe grid over the top of your photograph. The rule states that the most interesting areas in the photograph are going to be with the lines cross over. So in order to use this rule, you would place your subject so that it’s on top of one of those crossings. This is the most basic rule and has been proven over time that people will automatically look at those areas first.
Filling the Frame
Most people that start out in photography do not zoom in enough and take a photograph. Empty space around your subject can throw the photograph of balance and he can make it easier to distract the eye from the subject. Tried to fill the Frame as much as you can to force the viewer onto the intended subject.
I hope you found these tips useful. You can use them as a platform to launch yourself into photography. Don’t forget that these are all only tips are not rules. The main thing is to experiment and try things out for yourself to see what resonates with you. As always, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments section below. I’ll be more than happy to help you wherever I can.