Tag Archives: focal length

A Beginner’s Guide To Photography

I’ve been writing on this site for a while now, and I’ve put together a lot of good content, but the trouble is that a lot of it can be hard to find, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. This post will walk you though everything that a beginner in photography should learn, and in the order that they’re supposed to learn it. Welcome to my 100th post.

You should know that there is now a video version of this post, and it can be viewed here.

Exposure

The most basic and essential part of photography is exposure. Learning how exposure works will help you to take control of your camera, and take better photos. As you start to learn what shutter speed, aperture and ISO does, you’ll learn about the other effects that each have on your photos, which can produce creative results. If you only have time to learn one aspect of photography, then this is it, as you’ll start to move away from full auto or program modes, and learn how to use your camera properly.

Aperture

If we cover exposure in the order that the light enters the camera, then the aperture always comes first. The linked article will explain aperture in much more detail, but to put it into layman’s terms, the aperture is very simliar to the pupil of your eye – the wider it is, the more light it will let in. There are side effects to using certain apertures, namely depth of field, but we’ll get to that in a post further down the page. I found exposure much more complicated before I learnt the aperture scale, so try to make sure that you memorise it, and understand the f-stop scale, so that you can use the knowledge to take better photos in the future.

The scale is as follows: f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22.

Here is the full tutorial on Aperture.

Shutter Speed

After aperture, comes shutter speed. It will effectively take the amount of light that the lens has let though, and then only use a fraction of a second’s worth (usually), depending on the lighting situation. Different speeds can have different uses. You would want to use a longer speed of around 30 seconds for night photography on a tripod, but you may want a speed of around 1/1000 of a second if you’re shooting a fast moving subject. It all depends on what you’re shooting and how much light you have available. Shutter speed was the first thing I learnt when I got my SLR because I wanted to be able to freeze motion and remove any potential blur. Looking back though, I wish I’d learnt aperture first.

Here is the full tutorial on Shutter Speed.

ISO

Once you’ve decided how much light you’re going to let through to the sensor, it’s then time to decide how much more you need. This may sound confusing, because surely you let in as much light as you need in the first place, right? Wrong. The problem is that you have to be able to change your aperture and shutter speed to suit your shooting situation if you want to get good, and unblurred results, but unfortunately this doesn’t always provide you with enough light. This is when you can then decide to increase your ISO to make the camera more sensitive to the light. Watch out though, because the higher the ISO, the more grain the camera will produce. More about that in the full post though.

Here is the full tutorial on ISO.

Understanding Your Camera

Metering Modes

Rather awkwardly for beginners, exposure isn’t as simple as learning about aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you also have to learn about how your camera looks at light. There are different metering modes, that can be used for different lighting situations, which will better instruct your camera how your want it to expose. This is especially important if you’re not shooting on manual because you leave part of the exposure up to the camera. By using various metering modes such as ‘spot metering’ you can completely change the amount of light going into the camera. Understanding this may just be the key to understanding why your photos are coming out underexposed.

Here is the full tutorial on Metering Modes.

Depth of Field

When you’re shooting in low light, you invariably have to widen your aperture to allow enough light into the lens, but this has one rather major side effect – shallow depth of field. This can be used very creatively, often to excess, but it’s not all good. There are many situations, such as group photos, where you’ll want to have a narrower aperture so that you can get everyone in focus. This tutorial will walk you though everything you need to know about choosing the right aperture for the right situation.

Here is the full tutorial on Depth of Field.

White Balance

White balance is something I wish I’d learnt more about much sooner than I did, because I look back on some photos now and wonder what I was thinking. The white balance changes the colour cast of the entire photo, and is responsible for the warmth of a photo. It is effectively shifting the colour from blue to orange, from cold to warm, and it does so depending on which balance you choose. Auto white balance doesn’t tend to do a particularly good job, particularly with tungsten light, so the sooner you learn how to control it yourself, the more accurate your photos will look.

Here is the full tutorial on White Balance.

Focal Length

This was actually the first tutorial that I wrote, because at the time, it wasn’t something I understood too well. Have you ever wondered what the millimeter on your lens actually means? Or why people use longer focal lengths for portraits? It’s all discussed in this tutorial, as the focal length affects more than just the zoom, it changes the perspective too. I also cover which focal length you would use in certain situations, as well as their possible side effects. It’s really a worthwhile read and one of my favourite tutorials to date.

Here is the full tutorial on Focal Length.

Crop Factor

A lot of you may not realise it, but unless you spend about $3000 on your camera, then you’re more than likely going to be shooting on a crop sensor. That basically means that your sensor is smaller than professional SLR cameras, and that basically crops the image. This has a range of effects on your photos, as it’ll crop the image to a narrower viewing angle, and will influence your choice of lens purchases in the future. This tutorial is a must for any beginner photographer who wants to understand their camera more.

Here is the full tutorial on the Crop Factor.

The Nifty Fifty

What can I say about the nifty fifty? What’s not to love? For those of you that don’t know, when I talk about the nifty fifty, I’m talking about the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens that can be picked up very cheap for most digital SLRs. It’s a great introduction to buying better quality lenses, and an excellent way of getting to grips with aperture. The article linked is a review and a guide, and I wrote it because I recommend this lens as the first upgrade that every beginner photographer should make. It’s easy to use, and for the price, will yield some excellent results.

Here is the full tutorial on the 50mm f/1.8.

Composition

It’s important to understand exposure, but if you can’t get to grips with basic composition, then you’ll struggle to take really good photos. I’m not saying that good photos always include compositional rules, because that’s often far from true, but it helps to learn these rules so that you can forget them in the future. That may sound stupid, but these rules are really only guides, and the more you know about them, the better your understanding will be of how a photo works.

Rule of Thirds

This is probably the first compositional rule that any photographer comes across, and that’s for a very good reason – it’s simple and it works. The basic premise is that you divide your camera’s frame up into thirds and plant key objects in these lines, and the composition will work better. This often works really well and if you’ve not learnt much about photography yet – it’s a great way of dramatically improving your photos and making them more interesting. The idea is that the viewer gets to see more than just the subject and is free to, and encouraged, to explore the photo themselves.

Here is the full tutorial on the Rule of Thirds.

Visual Weight

Visual weigh is different to size or weight as we know it, and it’s largely down to different elements, such as human eyes and writing. When you can understand visual weight a lot more, you’ll start to understand how people look at photos, and how you can position certain elements in a frame to direct the viewers attention. It’s no so much a tool, or a rule, as it is an understanding.
Here is the full tutorial on Visual Weight.

Balance

Balance in a photo has a big affect on how we feel when we look at the photo, as an unbalanced photo can make us feel uneasy, where as a balanced photo, will make us feel more relaxed. It really doesn’t matter whether you choose to make the photo balanced or unbalanced, but you should understand why you’ve chosen one or the other, and have reasons to justify this choice. Again, it’s one of those situations where the more you know, the easier it will be to produce the desired effect.

Here is the full tutorial on Balance.

This was my 100th tutorial today, so I hope you’ve gotten something out of it, I know I’ve gotten a lot out of writing them. If you have any questions, please come over to Facebook and I’ll be happy to help. Thanks, Josh.

10 Ways to Critique Your Photos to Improve Your Photography

Introduction

I get asked to critique photos all the time now, and I’m happy to do it, but I often feel that people’s photography would dramatically improve if they could see for themselves where they’re going wrong. Small things that I would do differently can make a big difference to the end result. The sooner you learn to critique for yourself, the better, as it means that you’ll be able to study your photos as you’re taking them instead of getting home and wishing you could go back and retake them.

If you would like your photo critiqued, click here.

Where is the Visual Weight?

This is the first thing you’ll notice when you look at the photo. Ask yourself, where do your eyes immediately go? Where do you want the eyes to go? If you read my post on visual weight, you’ll have a good understanding of how to use if effectively, but if not, there’s a few elements that you should consider.

I really enjoy taking photos of models as its a relaxing, fun and a great way to play around with some new tricks you’ve picked up, but the important question to ask yourself is whether the photo would still be good without the beauty of the model being a large part of the visual weight? If the answer is no, then you need to consider what is good about the photo? The lighting? Your technique? Or are you just relying on your model to make it a good photo?

If you’re trying to direct the viewers attention to a certain part of the photo, but the first thing you look at is something else, such as writing, or a person’s eyes, then you need to recompose your shot. The sooner you learn to think like this, the better, as you’ll start to be able to fix your photos as you’re taking them and you won’t be left wishing you could go back and reshoot.

Are There Any Distracting Elements?

Whatever isn’t adding to the photo, is taking away from the photo. That’s my rule and it’s something that I carefully consider whenever I take a photo as it’s a very important part to the composition. If there’s a branch leaning into the photo, or a dark shadow covering part of your scene, then they’ll likely be taking away from the overall effect of your photo.

Another popular problem I see when you have lines that lead out of the photo, but don’t lead to anything. This is good when you’re trying to convey a feeling of dynamic tension, but the most popular instance of this is when an limb doesn’t quite fit into the photo, when it really should do. Unless there’s a good reason for a body part to into a photo unfinished, I like to include it. Check out the photo below to see what I mean.

Is the Exposure/Metering Correct?

Sometimes when you’re shooting on the wrong metering mode, you can end up with poor results as the camera doesn’t know how to correct the exposure. Most of the time this happens, your camera is left on evaluative when it should really be on spot mode so that it can meter for the right part of the photo (often the subject), and not the whole thing. If your metering is fine, but it’s still coming out too light or dark, then you know what you have to do. “I’ll fix it in post” are the words of a bad photographer. Get it right in the camera.

Would it Look Better Through a Different Focal Length?

There’s a lot more to focal length than meets the eye, it’s not just about how close the subject appears. If you don’t understand exactly what it is, then I suggest that you click on the link in the previous sentence, as there’s a lot to know. The main difference that the focal length can do is change the perspective of the photo – the longer lengths appear to push everything in the scene much closer together.

Have a look at the example below to see what I mean. You’ll often see portraits are shot at longer lengths because this compressing effect is flattering and isolates the subject from the camera, making the shot feel more natural. When you understand the effect that different lengths have, you can best decide what would look best for your photo.

What is the Background Doing?

Every pixel counts. Whether it’s your background, your foreground, or your subject, a pixel is a pixel and you should do whatever you can to make sure that each of them counts. Have a look at this link to see what you can do to make your backgrounds more interesting. This relates heavily to visual weight and distracting elements, as it’s important to consider what makes your photo great? This is why I don’t like shooting on a white background as you limit what you can do with the photo to make it more interesting.

How is the Composition & Balance?

There are plenty of composition techniques that you can follow to improve your photos, just make sure that you don’t follow them blindly. The rule of thirds is a great way to take photos, but don’t do it for the sake of it, it needs to work for your photo. There’s plenty of times that a centered photo will work the best, or even slightly off center – it all depends on the feeling that you would like to produce. For most instances a balanced photo is going to work best, so study the visual weights and make sure that you have them placed around the photo so that they weigh each other out. If you want your photo to be unbalanced then you know what you have to do.

Does the Photo Require Post Production?

More often then not when I take photo, the answer is no, but that’s only true to a certain extent. The photo is usually good enough to stand up on its own without post production, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t improve the photo if I do it. My photo below went up on the Facebook page with no post production, but that’s because I wanted to demonstrate that it doesn’t really need it, I will still end up putting a few finishing touches onto it though.

If your photo needs post production purely because your technique is poor then it’s best to fix it in the camera. Some people seem to think that the computer can fix most problems, but there’s actually a very real limit to what you can do. The photo below was a 30 second exposure and the only light source was a £3 torch – if you would like to see more photos like this, then come check out our Facebook.

Is the Color Accurate?

When people take photos indoors without the flash on, the white balance almost always comes out wrong as the camera struggles to recognise the tungsten light. This makes the photo appear orange and unnatural, and if you’re not shooting in RAW, then you’ll want to fix it in the camera or you’ll be a bit stuck with options for fixing it later on. On top of this, you should consider whether the photo would suit being in black and white or whether you’ve turned it black and white for the sake of making it look arty?

When I’m shooting in black and white, I’m actually shooting in colour with the intention to turn it black and white later, but the difference is it changes the way I’m shooting. Black and white relies heavily on shape, form and texture to work as these are brought out in the desaturation of colour. Ask yourself if your B+W photo has this or whether you’re doing it to try and make it look good. This is another example of misguided visual weight.

Does the Depth of Field Suit the Photo?

I recommend the 50mm f/1.8 to people because of the wide aperture and overall quality, but the problem that often occurs afterwards is that you start to see a lot of photos with the aperture wide open. Shallow DoF for shallow DoF’s sake doesn’t do you any favours and while you may look at it now and think it looks good, you’ll look back in a year’s time and cringe.

If you know what you’re doing with it, it can work really well like in the photo below. This was set to f/1.4 (the widest aperture I have), but I focused on the model’s eyes so the whole photo appeared to be in much better focus. If you’re stuck with a wide aperture in a low light condition, but the DoF doesn’t suit your photo, then raise your ISO or use an off camera flash.

Is The Photo Cliche?

We all see a lot of cliche photography out there, and we’ve probably all been guilty of it at some point in our lives, but it’s best to try and avoid it. I find that the majority of cliche photos come about from a lack of photographic inspiration, which leads us to taking photos of our pets, flowers or sunsets, or putting a garish border on our photos.

If you have to implement ’cool’ photo effects from your computer, then chances are that you’re not trying hard enough with your photography. Often when I’m meeting with a model, I wonder where I’m going to shoot, but if you put your mind to it, it’s not that hard to come up with somewhere more interesting than your garden. The sooner you challenge your photography, the better it will become.

I hope you’ve learned a thing or two, and as always, come on over to our Facebook page for discussions, photos and advice.

How to Create Colorful Water Drop Photos

Introduction

In this tutorial I’m showing you how to create a cool effect of using waterdrops to magnify the objects beneath, creating a colorful water drop photo. There’s plenty of different ways that you can customise this to come up with your own original and creative results.

What You’ll Need

A bowl of coloured sweets or stones
A pane of glass (table, picture frame, etc.)
Water
Water dropper or sandwich bag with a golf tee
Flash (optional)

The Concept

OK, first thing’s first, I need to set up my glass above the coloured sweets and place some water drops on the glass. I was fortunate that I have a glass coffee table in my house that I could use, but if you’re struggling to find something to use, I recommend the glass from a large picture frame rested on some books or folders – it will do basically the same thing. I don’t have a water dropper so I used a sandwich bag with a small hole in the corner that I could drop the water out of. I thought that this would work fine, but it turns out that the shape of the water drop has a lot to do with the overall result. Here’s an image comparison of my first try at creating these waterdrops.After a little bit of research, I found a way to make a much more effective water dropper, using a golf tee. The idea is that you need to find a way of controlling the amount of water that you’re using and give it a path to form a droplet in. I widened the hole in my bag by pushing a golf tee through it and then widened the hole again to allow more water through. With a little bit of trial and error, I was able to make much more uniform water drops which reflected the shapes and colour of the sweets below, much more accurately.Once I had the droplets set up the way that I wanted them, I started to experiment with the focus. I knew the effect that I wanted to achieve was for the drop to act like little magnifying glasses, but it wasn’t always that easy. The autofocus on my camera would get confused about what I was trying to take a photo of and would, more often then not, fail and produce images like the one below, or photos of the sweets in the bowl. To counteract this, I could either try and use the focal lock, or switch to manual focus. I chose manual focus because the focal lock was stil unreliable and I could just start snapping away with manual focus and I was bound to get at least a few decent photos.Once I’d sorted out the focusing problem, it was time to play with the light and positioning of my sweets. As you can see from the photo above, you can see the shape of the bowl in the photo which wasn’t what I was looking for, so, I raised my bowl closer to the glass with the aid of some photo frames and a large book. Then, to make sure that I was only including the sweets in my background, I used the longest focal length available in my lens as longer focal lengths force the perspective of the scene to appear closer together, allowing less of the wider angles into the photo. Adding to this, I decided to experiment with lighting my waterdrops from the side with an off camera flash. This lightened the colours that appeared in my photo and ultimately resulted in some loss in the shape of the waterdrops, which wasn’t ideal. Believe it or not, I actually started with a flash before trying it without because this is one of the occasions where I thought it would work the best, but I was wrong. This is really a matter of taste though, you may in fact prefer it to the photo that I end up choosing as my final image. Having played around with my settings a little bit, I found that so long as the camera was steady and the shutter speed was long enough (1/200), the photos would come out fine. I did however want a strong contrast between the water drops and the sweets in the background so I chose a wide aperture of f/2.8 to maximise the background blur. I’ve mentioned it before, but the most important factor involved in taking good photos of these water drops was to take good care of their shape. To get the best results, I found that taking the camera a few inches further away from the glass, while still using the longest focal lengths, worked best. The photo below was shot without a flash.As you can see, the shape of the bokeh in the background is really quite nice, largly due to the wide open aperture, and the droplets were an excellent shape. The main problem is that it looks a little bit dull and includes too much space around the edges where my bowl wasn’t big enough to stretch. To come to my final image, I just needed to do a small amount of post production. Firstly, I cropped the image so that you can only really see the colour, and then I used the repair tool to fix a few blemishes which were scratches on the old coffee table. I boosted the exposure slightly, added a very small amount of contrast and raised the black point to make the colours appear richer. These were the only adjustments I made and even though it looks like I may have, I didn’t adjust the saturation at all. Here’s the final image.

If you like this sort of tutorial then I would encourage you to come and join the Facebook page where I regularly share these sorts of photos before I teach people how to create them themselves. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment either on here or at Facebook or Twitter and ask away. Enjoy - Josh.