Photography Basics: What You Need To Know

You know what it means for a team to go into what is called a rebuiling year.This is when coaches and owners decide it is time to correct bad habits in people and train new ones as well.All teams leadership say when they go to such a circumstance is they are going back to the basics.”

Sometimes it’s good for us as photographers to go back to basics of digital photography .If you are just beginning in the world of photography and you want to learn the ropes, the basics are the place to start.  But you want the basics of what the professionals know about the craft of photography.

Taking pictures is easy anybody can do it.  I attended a wedding reception where the wedding party left a disposable digital camera on each table at the reception for guests to snap photos.  Before the evening was over, it was the children who were running around taking pictures of everything from the dirty dishes to their own underwear.  These were not photographers and while those pictures will no doubt get a few chuckles, these are not the kind of professional pictures people want for their long-term memories.

The cornerstone of digital photography basics is the camera obviously.  When you see a camera geek walking around with enough equipment on his neck to launch a space shuttle, you get the impression that cameras are phenomenally complex, more than mere mortals can grasp.  But look at the professionals and you see them working with portable, relatively easy to operate cameras.The basics of running a camera comes down to two things, aperture and shutter speed.

Don’t be bothered by fancy terms.  Aperture is just a term for how wide your camera lens is open to let in light.The length of time you allow light to come in and affect the picture is called the shutter speed.  For getting a shot of a fast moving event, you want a wide aperture to let in a lot of light but a short shutter speed so you capture the event quickly and close the window so the picture is caught before more light hurts the quality.

Photography is simply all about light.You will learn about ways to control the of lighting of a shot by learning about lenses and flash photography.Make a willingness to never stop learning a major core skill in your photography efforts.You will learn more as your ability to work with the equipment becomes better and more sophisticated and you will want to learn more.

You can get a greater control over these basic controls of the camera such as aperture and shutter speed by learning how to switch from automatic settings to manual settings.Automatic settings were created only because the general public who are really not interested in learning the basics need them.You will learn some basic setting like sports settings, portait and landscape settings as well.  By switching to manual, you can learn what settings work best in different situations.

We now come to the concept of practice which is the most important photography basics to becoming a great photographer.Take the time to play with and learn your equipment.  Take it to situations and take photos with different aperture and shutter speed settings, in outdoor and indoor settings and different orientations to light.When some shots don’t work, don’t get upset.  That’s part of the learning curve.

You learn best by doing and you build your confidence along to way to becoming a great photographer.Never become cocky, you can always learn more.Isn’t that one of the fun things about photography?