Archive for photography basics – Page 2

Photography 101: How To Go From Good To Great

By Chris Nitz
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

This week I am going to tackle a question that has plagued me ever since I turned away from fondling network cables in favor of a pushing a shutter button. That question has been, and probably always will be, how I go from good photos to great photos. While there is no simple answer to point you to and say do this, I have found a few things that have helped me get better in my chosen trade. Let us tackle this shall we?

Step one: Read
Yeah, everyone out there has this tip listed somewhere in the how to become a professional photographer handbook. There is a good reason though. When I decided to pursue my passion of photography, I had no idea what a rule of thirds was, or even how ISO and white balance factored into a photo. I just knew I liked to click a shutter button. It was not until I had a horrible stock submission experience that I realized I had a lot more to learn. Thus, I started reading about photography.

I did not just stop at reading all the technicalities of photography. I also read forums, photographer blogs, and anything else my greedy eyes could be graced with. There is a world of books and websites dedicated to the numbers and science behind photography. You should take all of that in. However, what no technical book is going to teach you is the inspiration. This is where reading photographer blogs really helped. I could see the shots professional photographers posted, enjoy the stories behind the shot, and learn what drove the photographer to capture the scene. This in turn taught me how to find my own inspiration.

Reading never ends by the way. I still pick up magazines, surf the net, and spend a good two or more hours a day reading photography related material. I pick up new tricks, find new inspirations, and even try my hand at styles that are not my own. This is all part of the growing, learning, and improving process. Read More→

Categories : Make Better Photographs, Photography 101 - The Basics
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Finding Your Feet: The Special Three: by Jacob Lucas

By Guest
Thursday, November 4th, 2010

Thanks for diving into this third part in my “Finding Your Feet” series. In case you need a re-cap,

– Part One: Getting Started In Photography
– Part Two: Choosing Your Camera

This post is going to cover three crucial camera settings that you’ll need to know to start photographing effectively to meet your vision. Often referred to as the exposure triangle, these settings are ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed. At first glance, they appear quite technical but once I took the time to read about them and understand them they actually became almost second nature to me – just like breathing or blinking. These three settings relate to one another very much in an almost symbiotic circle – what happens to one impacts the other in some fashion.

JFL_4687

ISO 200, f/2, 1/250th of a second

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Categories : Guest Bloggers, Make Better Photographs
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Photography 101: ISO With A Side Of Light

By Chris Nitz
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

We are finally onto the last, and hopefully easiest, part of the exposure triangle. By now, you have played with shutter speeds and fiddled with aperture settings. One last building block is still missing from all of this. That building block is your camera’s ISO setting.

ISO (or International Standards Organization) is how we control cameras sensitivity to light. This is the equivalent of film speed, but without the need to lug around six different rolls of film for shooting in various lighting conditions. I know that in prior articles I have used light and detail as interchangeable terms. For this article, light will stick to meaning brightness.

ISO has a wide range of values depending on your camera, what the manufacturer is capable of producing, and the demand for higher ISO settings. Common ISO numbers range from ISO 100 to ISO 6400, but these are just common settings and not the full gamut of ISO setting available on the market. What does this range have to do with you, and ultimately the exposure triangle? Well, quite a bit actually.

Let us say you set your camera to an ISO of 100. This is common for a fair amount of photographers when shooting in bright light, outdoors, and other brightly lit conditions. An ISO of 100 means your camera sensor is not super sensitive to light. Think of ISO 100 has having sunglasses on you camera sensor. It takes in light, but it is not sucking in copious amounts of light. Setting a low ISO means we can now use larger apertures, or slightly slower shutter speeds as we have the camera sensor set to a low light sensitivity.

An example for using a low ISO is shooting during the middle of the day while the sun is brightly shinning. There is so much light flooding your scene that you will want to take in detail before the light over exposes the scene. Setting an ISO of 100 makes it so the sensor does not become overwhelmed by light before the detail can take hold.

Example photo: This is shot in the late morning hours when the sun was bright. A low ISO allows for more detail to come through before the light causes over exposure:

Shutter: 1/180
Aperture: f/11
ISO: 200
White Balance: Daylight Preset

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Categories : Make Better Photographs, Photography 101 - The Basics
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Photography 101: Shutter Speed Fun

By Chris Nitz
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

Shutter speed might be less complicated than aperture, but the effects of this setting can play a big role in your photographs. The shutter is your cameras barrier to the world. When the shutter is open, the world is flowing onto your camera sensor, or film. Knowing how long to let this detail past your shutter is what makes shutter speed an intricate part of the exposure triangle.

Before we dive into this article, I will only be talking about shutter speed. There are more nuances to this mechanic that play a role in choosing a shutter speed. For now though, we will look at what shutter speed does, and why you would play with this aspect of photography. I also want to note that I use light and detail as interchangeable terms.

There are two main reasons many people will want to play with shutter speeds. The first is to portray motion in a still image, while the second is to control the flow of light. Let’s dive into each of these setups and look at their use and why you might consider one shutter speed over another.

Starting off, the control of motion is quite possibly the most widely used trick for shutter speed manipulation. Shutter speeds come in measurements of time. For example, you might see a photos metadata listing a shutter speed of 1/125. This means the photo was captured at 125th of a second. Shutter speeds can range from hours, to fractions of a second as quickly as 1/8000th of a second. Read More→

Categories : Make Better Photographs, Photography 101 - The Basics
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Photography 101: Aperture And You

By Chris Nitz
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

You have been shooting your photos in auto mode for far too long. You want to take the plunge and kick those photos up a notch. Where do you start though? Aperture, exposure, ISO, slow lenses, fast lenses, cake or pie? These new ideas start flooding in when you start reading up on how to go beyond auto shooting mode. Take a deep breath and relax.

One of the biggest areas so many photographers deal with is the exposure triangle. This is the correlation of ISO, Aperture, and Exposure. Each of these items plays a major role in your photos, how they look, and influence the overall feel of the shot. Even more complicated is how closely these three items intertwined with one another.

For this article, let’s focus on one aspect of this triangle in aperture. A more common term used for aperture is f-stop. I am not going to go into all the mathematics that comes behind aperture. You math gurus can easily hit up Wikipedia to get your formula geekery on. Let’s get the show started.

Aperture is one of those weird numbers in photography. By weird, I mean the smaller the number the larger the aperture the smaller the depth of field. The first part of this is the smaller number equals a larger aperture. Read More→

Categories : Make Better Photographs, Photography 101 - The Basics
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