Photography Basics: What You Need To Know

If you are a sports fan, you know what it means when a team goes into a “rebuilding year”.This is when coaches and owners decide it is time to correct bad habits in people and train new ones as well.Any leadership of every team will say in this situation that they are going back to the basics.”

Sometimes it’s good for us as photographers to go back to basics of digital photography .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.  But you want the basics of what the professionals know about the craft of photography.

Anybody can take a picture.  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.

It goes without saying that the camera is the conerstone of basics of digital photography .  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.If you watch you’ll notice that professionals use relatively easy to operate and portable cameras.  That is because the basics of running a camera come down to aperture and shutter speed.

Don’t be bothered by fancy terms.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 can and will get learn a lot about lenses and flash photography and other ways to turn the control over the lighting of a shot to you.Make sure that one of your core photography skills is the desire to never stop learning.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 about some basic settings such as portrait, landscape and sports settings.Different situations require different settings and you learn which works best when you switch to manual.

And that takes us to the most important basic of digital photography about becoming a great photographer and that is practice.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 quite come out like you want them to, don’t get upset.Everything has a learning curve and that’s part of it.

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.This one of the fun things with photography?