Enough of my rant about modern society and lets move on.
Whatever your motivation might be, the key to taking good photos is knowing your basics, and that's what I'm going to write about in this post. I'm going to go through the basics Camera settings and some of the keywords/things you need to know, also the basic post production and Photography Types, so let's begin.
- Focal Length
- Shutter Speed
- Aperture also known as F-Stop
- ISO
- Overall exposure
- File System
- Photography Types such as Portraits etc.
- Basic Gear
- Post Prodcution
The Focal Length
The Focal Length measured in millimetres (mm) basically represents your zoom factor. If you have a long 300mm lens your angle will be greatly reduced and you will be zoomed in on a specific object or an area. So the higher the focal length, the higher zoom factor. On a 18mm lens for example you have a much wider angle of view, you can capture wide areas in a single shot and that's ideal for Landscape Photography, but at a certain point the image gets distorted, that means straight lines get warped etc. an extreme example would be a fisheye lens which starts at 15mm of focal length, with a lens like this the image is completely distorted, but you can capture up to 180 degrees of your surroundings. That means you capture everything all the way from the left to the right. Here's a chart to demonstrate:
As you can see the Angle of View in Degrees gets lower as you move up your focal length, there's no way to bypass that, that's a rule of Optics.
Shutter Speed
The Shutter is responsible for how long your sensor or film gets exposed to the incoming light, if a shutter is open for about 1/500 of a second the time frame in which the sensor is exposed to light is relatively short but when you expose your sensor for 1/60 of a second or even whole seconds the exposure to light is much longer and therefore much greater.
The main feature of the Shutter speed is to control the amount of light getting in, on a bright sunny day you need a fast shutter speed since enough Photons are hitting the sensor in a very short time, on a cloudy and dark day not as much Photons are bouncing of the surfaces so it takes longer to gather enough photons on your sensor to get a proper exposure.
The secondary feature of shutter speed is motion blur. If you photograph a fast moving object with a very high shutter speed let's say 1/3000 of a second the light is only recorded in that time but the object didn't really move far in that time so it seems like it's frozen, if you photograph the same object moving exactly as fast with a slow shutter speed say 1/120 of a second, the fast moving object will blur because in 1/120 seconds the object might have moved forward a little and the sensor also captured the progressed state of the object.
This can add an artistic effect to the image and is quite often used on purpose.
Aperture
The Aperture ring is an Iris inside of your lens, it regulates how much light at one time gets through your lens to the sensor or film of your camera. For example you might have a 3.5f lens that means your lens can open up it's iris to 3.5f (the f number is calculated by dividing the focal lens with the diameter of the entrance pupil) that means more lights gets in because the iris is opened up much wider than in 8.0f.
You can really think of the aperture like the pupil of the human eye, when it's dark more light needs to get in or through to see properly, that's how the aperture works it regulates how much light can even get through the lens to the camera.
The primary feature of the Aperture is of course exposure control just like before just one other way to set the correct exposure but it also has a secondary feature and that's called depth of field. If you open your aperture wide open, everything which is not in focus will get blurred and very smooth looking. But if you close down the aperture you will get back detail in the places which are not in focus like the tree behind a person will appear sharper even though it's not in focus.
Also highlights which are not in focus and get blurred will create a lot of Bokeh and that gets more apparent the larger the aperture is. A side note to Bokeh, the shape of the Bokeh is determined by the shape of your aperture namely the amount of blades your lens has.
ISO
The ISO is basically just a number which represents the sensitivity to light of your recording device. If you bump up your ISO on your camera you won't need to open your aperture as wide or use a slow shutter.
But generally you want to keep your ISO number low to reduce digital noise, if you move your ISO up, the chance of noise is much much greater depending on how high you go. A good rule of thumb is to change the ISO last, only if you have no other choice or want to achieve a certain effect by setting either Aperture or Shutter Speed.
Overall Exposure
If you set Shutter speed, Aperture and ISO you have your complete exposure and you have to balance each setting to get the correct exposure for you environment.
File Sytem
If you are at least kind of serious about your photography and plan to post process the images you will need to shoot in RAW. RAW is the uncompressed unprocessed 14bit file which comes directly from your buffer, you have all the information which the sensor captured still in them and you can later use it to process your picture more efficiently and effectively. But the files are usually 5 to 10 times higher than your normal jpeg files so you need to keep in mind to pack enough storage.
I always shoot in raw, even if I don't plan on processing them, because I might want to one day and that information I lose when I shoot in jpeg I will never get back, you can always jpeg your finished images later on.
I only think there are 3 situations useful to shoot in jpeg. One being if you don't have enough storage and just need to take a lot of photos, the second being timelapses which kinda falls in the first. And if you don't want or can process later and want a reasonably good picture from the start (picture styles are more efficient and better looking in jpeg.
Photography Types
There are many different types of Photography but there are 3 main categories. There's no particular order to the categories so I'm just going to fire away.
Portrait Photography, is like the name suggests, taking pictures of people in certain situations or environments, like the last vacation etc.
For people mainly wanting to do this I suggest Prime lenses with a large Aperture (lenses without zoom, they are fixed to one focal length) and with a focal length of 35 and above.
Landscape Photography is taking pictures of nature and basically your surroundings, for this type of photography you want to capture as much as possible that means you will need lenses with a wide angle of view 35 and below. Even though they're said to be not as sharp as prime lenses but I would suggest a zoom lens for this, because sometimes you'll need to reframe or change the focal length just a tiny bit like 3 to 6 mm and you either don't have small steps like that with prime lenses or it's just to ineffective.
In Macro Photography you take pictures of tiny things like bees flowers or details of rather large things like a car tire, in Macro you want to capture the finest details in objects or even sometimes people.
For macro you need specialised lenses which support that feature, some normal lenses also have a switch to change between the normal and macro mode. You can also bypass the lenses and make every lens to a macro by using lens whacking but that's more advanced and I'm not going to cover that in the basics.
Basic Gear
Well, basically you just need a camera with a lens on it, that's it. But that's not really ideal and you have many limitations so lets just say a camera with a lens and a tripod. The tripod is very useful to stabilise your shots and get angles which are hard to hold steady handheld.
I'll say this though, some might argue about that but I think if you're really just starting photography have no experience what so ever, get a crappy or just very old camera first, you know something which is really cheap and you can easily afford. And here is why, you learn to work around the short comings of your camera and try everything out to make the picture look good, it's hard and not at all easy but if you switch to a good camera after sometime, everything seems easier and you can get much better pictures just because you learned to think in that way.
Since this is a blog I will add some personal experience here, I started with an old Olympus E-300, it's one of the first DSLR's and it had a crappy resolution, hot pixels everywhere on a exposure longer than 1 second and it was so noisy and the overall image quality and dynamic range was not good at all, but when I got my Canon t3i I could think out of the box to achieve better images and that wasn't just due to the better camera, I learned to think different.
Post Production
Post Production or processing is basically retouching and refining your image you've taken to make it look even more desirable, by adjusting the brightness of the highlights and shadows and how intense the darks and whites are supposed to be, also cropping and much more, but that are the basic adjustments done to almost every image.
Good software for that is Lightroom or Apples Aperture it runs around 100 Dollars and is very powerful for the basic stuff. A lot of you may think Photoshop is the best program, but that is more advanced and that's something entirely different you need to learn for the start just stick with the basic programs you can even use free once like Picasa etc. for the beginning that's all you'll need.
Take Care
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