If you are a sports fan, you know what it means when a team goes into a “rebuilding year”. It is just when the owners or coaches decide its time to train new members and correct bad habits in others. And invariably, what team leadership says when they go into such a time is that they are going “back to basics.”
Sometimes it’s good for us as photographers to go back to digital photography basics .The basics are the place to start if you want to learn the ropes especially if you are just getting started in the world of photography.You need to know the basics that all the professionals know about the craft of photograghy.
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.
Obviously, the cornerstone of photography basics is the camera. 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 let fancy terms bother you.The camera lens lets lgiht into the camera and how wide open it is set to is called the aperture.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 need to learn about flash photography and lenses in order to learn how to control the lighting in a shot.Make sure that one of your core photography skills is the desire to never stop learning. The better and more sophisticated you get in your ability to work with the equipment, the more you will learn and the more you will want to learn.
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. So they give you some basic settings like landscape, portrait and sports settings.You learn best what settings work in different situations by switching to manual.
We now come to the concept of practice which is the most important photography basics to becoming a great photographer.Learn your equipment by taking time to play with it. Take it to situations and take photos with different aperture and shutter speed settings, in outdoor and indoor settings and different orientations to light. Don’t get upset when some shots don’t work. That’s part of the learning curve.
By learning by doing, you will build your confidence in your work and eventually become a great photographer.Never become cocky, you can always learn more.Isn't that one of the fun things about photography?
