PictureCorrect.com: Interesting Photo of the Day: Tokyo Street Scene

This photograph taken by Masashi Wakui of a rainy street scene in Tokyo is somewhat ethereal. While cityscapes shot from a distance tend to give a broad perspective and those shot from the air givesa birds-eye view, the real action is undoubtedly down at the street level:

A rainy night in Tokyo. (Via Imgur. Click image to see full size.)

Wakui seems to have captured that beautifully in this image of a rain-soaked evening in Tokyo.

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PictureCorrect.com: Storytelling Tips as a Street Photographer

A photograph is a story compressed in a single image. Photographers need to be good storytellers in order to make interesting photographs. The difficulty lies in telling the story in a single frame instead of being able to develop a story through time. On the other hand, this characteristic leaves more room for the viewer’s imagination. It is the photographer’s duty to build a foundation that the viewer can build on without forcing his or her own vision upon the viewer. There are narrow nuances between spoiling the story by telling everything through the image and leaving out too much so the image is too confusing to interpret.

Selective Composition

Only show what is relevant to the story. Robert Capa’s famous quote, “If your picture isn’t good enough you are not close enough,” is a good summary of this point. For example, when shooting a street scene, don’t fall to the fallacy to show as much as possible in a single frame. By stuffing the image with lots of elements, you will compulsorily capture details that are totally irrelevant for the image. Instead, focus on the important parts. If you see objects near the edge of the frame that aren’t necessary for your story then get so close that you can’t get nearer without cropping out parts that are important to you. That way you assure to show only what is relevant to the story.

Structure

Every story follows the typical structure of a beginning, mid and end. A photograph should ideally cover all these three story arcs. Of course this conflicts with the characteristic that a single image has no time span where a story can be built up over time, but there is one tip to get a structure flowing. That is embracing triangles in your images. Triangles are not only popular due to their geometrical shape, but they also give the viewer an easy structure he can follow. Simplified, every angle can be a turning point for the story. It doesn’t really matter where the beginning or ending is; that is not up to the photographer but to the viewer.

Conflict

Harmony and balance are important in life, but they makes for boring images. Street images that are completely harmonic may be beautiful to look at, but they seldom tell a good story. Good stories don’t go straight from A to B; they embrace twists and turns that catch the viewer by surprise. Conflict and harmony are abstract terms in relation to images. As an example, gestures often help to create some kind of tension between subjects. Although it might not be clear what a person is pointing at, it encourages the viewer’s imagination to continue the story.

Simplicity

Keep it simple. Now that you read about integrating triangles, gestures and subjects into your story, you might be tempted to do it all at once. The truth is, it’s nearly impossible to create such stories from scratch. Rather, search for one of these elements and try to integrate the others as well as you can without forcing it too much.

Are you seeing a gesture? Try to search for two other people who are close and are somehow related to the gesture, and then try to frame it to its best potential. While you’re out on the street shooting, don’t try to come up with a complex story on the spot. Rather, focus on one element and go on from there. Under real conditions, a lot of trial error is required to create a compelling story in a candid genre like street photography.

Closed vs. Open Stories

Another big part about storytelling is the nature of closed versus open stories. While the former tells a story from beginning to end and leaves very little space for the viewer, the latter is less strict about its structure. For the viewer it’s in general more interesting when the story isn’t displayed completely, but when they can be involved in the development of the story itself.

In photography this means that it can be helpful to leave out subjects that might be important to the story. While I already emphasized that there shouldn’t be any elements left that aren’t relevant because they cause more confusion than adding to the image, we can even go one step further and leave out a detail that might reveal the full scene.

USA. NYC. Coney Island. 1982. Woman on beach pointing at a man near her.  –Bruce Gilden

Imagine the triangle with a gesture pointing at a person, where we can clearly see where person A is pointing at and the scene is fully explained by a photo. It’s an easy story to follow for the viewer, but it might also feel like they have been taken by the hand.

Remind yourself of the famous shower movie scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho. The true horror infiltrates your mind because you’re forced to think about it. It is not what is clearly visible to you that triggers the fear; it starts in your head and the movie is only a small guide without revealing too much.

Try to embrace the same logic in your photos. Build a story by photographing little details that combine to produce a great story. Don’t show everything to viewer or reveal the full scene; instead, leave a detail or two out and the viewer is able to create their own little story. This way they’re more bound to your picture and it will generate a lot more interest than telling a complete story from start to finish.

Don’t be too complex or force a story too much. Story telling is probably the hardest part of taking an outstanding picture in street photography. It takes a lot of trial and error to get a genuine, candid and interesting story that is well composed and draws the attention of the viewer.

About the Author
Sebastian Jacobitz is a hobby street photographer from Berlin who captures the everyday life in his city.

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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day: Approaching the Bubble Nebula

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PictureCorrect.com: Does Gear Matter in Photography?

One of the most fundamental questions in photography is does gear matter? This question, unfortunately, doesn’t have a clear and concise answer. Ask this question to as many photographers as you can and you’re bound to get split opinions. Mark from Analog Process elaborates:

For some, this might seem like a direct video response to a recent video from The Art of Photography on why gear doesn’t matter. Mark clarifies that this is in no way a direct response to that video.

Gear Doesn’t Matter

The common argument for those who don’t believe that gear matters is that when you look at an image you don’t look for the megapixel count, or what camera it was shot with, or which lens, or for that matter what paper was used to print it. What you look is whether the image is interesting or not. In other words, the medium and the means do not matter. What matters is the final image.

Gear Does Matter

An image such as Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (1992) would seemingly not have the same effect had it been shot on the 35mm format.

On the other hand, images such as those shot by Chinese photographer Ren Hung, which are mostly shot on a Contax G2 (35mm rangefinder), wouldn’t necessarily have the same effect had they been shot on a medium or large format camera.

A cheap camera is not even relevant. What’s relevant is that the medium is what makes the image possible. In that sense, yes, gear does matter.

An image’s impact is influenced by the equipment and the format used to create the image. The wrong gear can easily result in unsuccessful creations. Here, the medium itself is the message. As such, an image that could have had a striking impact, had it been shot on an iPhone, doesn’t have nearly the same impact if it is shot on a medium format camera. Again, there are images which could never be possible without a medium format camera or thousands of dollars’ worth of lighting equipment.

So, the fundamental truth is, yes, there are situations when gear matters. You need specific gear to shoot specific photos. As a photographer, it’s your job to evaluate the situation and then make the decision to use particular gear.

What’s your take on this topic?

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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day: A Kalahari Sky

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PictureCorrect.com: Tips For Successful Lighting in Photography

In photography, it’s all about lighting. The most successful photographers are the ones most able to control, manipulate, and use it to capture what they see in their mind’s eye. There are generally 2 approaches when it comes to lighting:

Photo by Peter McConnochie; ISO 400, f/1.4, 1/500-second exposure.

1. Use what’s there, modify and adapt to it— this is primarily where most photographers start out.
2. Come up with a totally staged pre-conceived vision and light the scene starting from scratch like working in a controlled environment of a studio–like an artist illustrating on a blank canvas.

In both instances the photographer must understand light well to “predict”, not only what the camera will capture, but also whether the image will reproduce faithfully in print.

The 1st approach requires subtlety. This means you may or may not choose to supplement the light already in the scene. This is usually how photojournalist work.

They often meter their scene after deciding where their subject will be, determine the number of f-stops between highlight and shadow. Then they boost the shadow area if there are important details there.

The key is to preserve the “mood” and “feel” of the scene. This approach usually requires little equipment since the photojournalist works mostly on location.

The second approach resembles how an artist “paints.” He paints his scene by lighting every element.

If he’s outdoors, and if he wants to create a picture that is natural, then his scene will have to appear to have just one dominant light source–like how our one sun lights our natural world.

The operative word here is “appear to have one dominant light source.” He will most likely use more than one light source because of the contrast, but his shadows are carefully controlled.

Photo by USFWS Mountain-Prairie; ISO 800, f/16.0, 1/1600-second exposure.

The ambient light is not a factor at all. It’s almost as if the photographer is working in a dimly lit room and he has to light everything in the scene.

By careful positioning of his lights and varying their intensity, he creates shadows and highlights selectively. How realistic or natural the scene looks depends his skill in execution and his conceptualized image.

Even though photography is a two-dimensional art form, good control of light creates 3-dimensions by giving pictures depth. The good use of shadow and highlights in a picture is what conveys depth.

A common misconception about “good lighting” is that there has to be a ton of it. Well, maybe not a ton, but an eye-squinting-tear-producing amount.

A scene that is so bright like at high noon tends to be problematic. Light levels with such intensity require small apertures so that invariably the photographer has to deal with too much depth-of-field.

So good light doesn’t necessarily mean an exposure of 1/2000 sec, at f/11, and ISO 100. It all depends on what you’re photographing. There is such a thing as too much depth-of-field.

If you’re photographing something that’s moving fast, and if your aim is to “freeze” the moving object, then in that particular instance, that suits your purposes, so it is good light. You’re able to use high shutter speeds to arrest that motion.

Photo by Roberto Saltori; ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/60-second exposure.

That high noon light is probably only good for gunfights. There are very few instances when a photographer will choose that time of the day to schedule a shoot.

Well-lit photographs don’t usually happen by accident. If shooting in available light, you can bet the photographer planned to be at that very spot at that time, after doing some reconnaissance beforehand.

Possible places with good directional light which can give you a nice ambiance or mood are:

• Doorways and windows
• Reflected light e.g sunlight bouncing off the water in late evening or early morning
• Incandescent light in homes.
• Candlelight and campfire light

About the Author:
A Riverside-based freelance photographer, Peter Phun, who also teaches photography at Riverside City College. He does portraits, weddings and editorial work. He writes about photography, Macs and the internet. He also designs websites and is a stay-at-home dad.

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PictureCorrect.com: Interesting Photo of the Day: Milky Way Over Australia

An incredible amount of time and effort goes into planning and executing astrophotography. For images such as this one, multiple exposures need to be stitched together in post processing to create such a large, high definition photograph. Before setting out late at night, you must study the meteorological and geographical conditions to ensure that the stars will be out and the weather will be desirable. The foreground can be as important as the Milky Way, so you also have to choose an appealing location. Next, make sure your settings and focus are on point or the whole process could be ruined! In the end, if everything goes right and your editing achieves the desired end result, you will end up with a beautiful image like this one:

“Milky Way over Harvey Dam in Western Australia” by Trevor Dobson (Via Reddit. Click image to see full size.)

Photographer Trevor Dobson captured this stunning image of the Milky Way over the Harvey Dam in Western Australia. He used a Nikon D5100 camera with a 35mm prime lens. His settings were 10 second exposures at ISO 5000 and an f/1.8 aperture. In order to compile this massive image, he used 53 shots stitched together with photo editing software designed to do so, such as Microsoft Image Composite Editor and PTGui. Other editing was done in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to make adjustments including contrast, white balance, and noise reduction for each individual shot. The end work is the great payoff. Just look at that detail and color!

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PictureCorrect.com: Breaking Rules of Composition in Photography

Chances are, you’re familiar with the old adage that “rules are meant to be broken.” Photography is no exception to the saying. As David Bergman explains, although many of the rules and conventions photographers stick to are tried and true, often the most striking images ignore them entirely:

Here are a few instances in which breaking the rules can actually benefit your images.

Ignore the Rule of Thirds

One of the first compositional guides most photographers are provided with is to follow the rule of thirds. That is, if you were to separate your image into thirds horizontally and vertically, you’d want the most powerful aspects of the photo to meet at one or more of the crosshairs. However, in some circumstances, placing a subject directly in the center of a frame can command attention—especially if there is surrounding symmetry to emphasize the image’s focal point.

Shoot Toward the Sun

Generally, you’ll want your subject to be as evenly lit as possible. This means shooting with your back toward the sun or a light source so that the person or object being photographed can soak up as much of the light as possible. However, there are situations in which switching positions can be incredibly beneficial. Shooting toward the light may shroud your subject in darkness, but in some instances a mysterious silhouette can really add to the overall mood and feel of a photograph.

Bring in Negative Space

Photographers just getting their footing are often encouraged to fill their frames as much as possible to avoid including information that might detract from the purpose of the photograph. However, a plentitude of negative space can sometimes have an opposite effect, immediately directing the eye to the photo’s subject. Conversely, making your subject “small” can sometimes add to the story that you’re trying to tell through your photograph.

“All rules are meant to be broken.”

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PictureCorrect.com: Retouching RAW Format Photos with Histograms

Histograms are like road maps. You need them in order to see where you’re going. Without them, you’re just guessing.

OK, I suppose with some experience you can get a pretty accurate guess. But if you’re a perfectionist like me, you’d feel way more comfortable if you knew you nailed the shot with the perfect exposure. Shooting RAW does give the photographer more latitude in making exposure errors, but let’s not use that as an excuse for sloppy exposure judgment.

Camera RAW Histogram Adjustments

What’s a Histogram?

When we shoot in RAW format, we should be even more critical of our exposure choices, in order to bring out the maximum quality possible from the RAW file. Histograms allow you to just do that. Histograms are usually found in DSLR cameras. You can also get a histogram reading of your photo in Adobe Camera RAW or other RAW conversion software. What it shows you is a distribution of values from the lightest to the darkest. It tells you whether you captured enough image information in the areas that matter most.

But, don’t they all matter? In most cases, yes, you’d like to have a lot of image information throughout the sweet spots of the image. This is usually from around the lightest highlight areas on the right-hand side to just before the darkest shadow areas on the left-hand side). For many types of images, this is a nice histogram shape to have, with the peaks taking up most of the center area. This indicates a well-exposed image, as there is plenty of image information in the midtones. Usually for these types of images, the shadows and highlights have relatively less image information.

Nevertheless, a nice shape is subjective. If you’re shooting a high-key image, you would like to have most of the image data bunched up on the right-hand side of the histogram. This is because the right-hand side represents the lightest shades within the image.

Exposing to the Right

A high-key image is only so because the image consists of mostly light tones. When I take a photograph, I aim for the “foot of the hill” to just touch the right-hand side edge of the histogram. This is called “exposing to the right.” This will give you an image with the best “signal-to-noise” ratio, meaning you get the maximum quality and the minimum noise.

The danger with letting the peaks go this close to the right-hand side is that the image might have some highlight portions burnt out. When this happens, there will be a thin vertical line (or a spike) that appears at the right-hand side edge. This indicates that some portions are burnt out. No need to fret, because this is not a problem when you shoot in RAW format. In Adobe Camera RAW software, you can bring the Exposure slider a bit to the left so that you gradually lower the vertical line until it totally disappears. If you had shot it in JPEG format, you would not be able to eliminate that vertical line because the highlight information on the right-most edge would have been thrown away during JPEG compression.The ability to correct slight exposure judgment errors is one of the strengths of the RAW format.

By looking at the histogram, an experienced digital photographer will be able to tell if the image has been properly exposed. In certain images, some spikes may appear near or on the right-hand side edge itself, but is that a badly exposed image? It depends. If the image has a background that contains bright lights or very light-coloured portions, that could be the reason for the right-hand side spikes. If that same image also has got peaks in the middle which are generally more substantial than the right-hand side peaks, those peaks represent the main subject.

Adjusting Exposure

Using the Adobe Camera RAW dialog box, we can open up all our images from one folder, evaluate the exposure of each image based on the histogram, and make quick exposure adjustments to each image if necessary by moving the Exposure slider to a point where the histogram looks just right.Within Adobe Camera RAW, there are three separate histograms, one for each color channel, i.e., Red, Green and Blue. This enables you to check to see if a particular channel is burnt out, which means that the highlights have been clipped. This detailed overview enables the photographer to quickly adjust exposure to bring back the clipped highlights. We can then either decide to save these settings in each RAW image (actually Photoshop saves the settings in the Sidecar XMP file, a companion file to each RAW image) by clicking on the Done button, or we can also convert them all into JPEG or TIFF files with the Save button.

White Balance

Modifying the White Balance can also affect the histogram. If an image was shot in Daylight White Balance and the photographer carelessly overexposed certain highlight portions, they may still be able to be recovered using a different White Balance setting, for example, Tungsten. Dragging the Temperature slider (which determines the White Balance setting) to recover lost highlights is one the strengths of the RAW format. Once the spikes on the right-hand side of the histogram disappear, you will have safely recovered your highlights.

About the Author:
Andy Lim (SimpleSLR) runs a profitable photography business that spans wedding photography, commercial photography and conducting photography workshops.

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PictureCorrect.com: Interesting Photo of the Day: Why You Need an ND Filter

Neutral density filters can transform your photography in ways you’d never imagine. Check out this side by side comparison of a photo taken at the same location with and without a long exposure:

What a sunset and a long exposure time does for your picture. (Via Imgur. Click image to see full size.)

The photographer used a 10-stop solid ND filter to capture the details in the shadow area while retaining a lot of details in the sky. The long exposure helped him to capture motion blur both in the water and the clouds. Along with the filter, his camera settings were f/11, 141 seconds, and ISO 100.

Though some post-processing may have been involved, this is still some transformation, isn’t it? It really goes to show what a ND filter and waiting for the golden hour can do for your imagery.

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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day: Beneath Jupiter

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PictureCorrect.com: Creative Portrait Tips for Awesome People Pictures

Everyone loves a good picture of themselves. In an increasingly visual world, having a few on hand is practically crucial. Luckily, the folks at the COOPH have compiled a few guidelines on what it takes to tackle portraiture for any occasion:

If you’re like most people, the version of yourself that you bring to a job interview isn’t necessarily the version of yourself that you portray on Twitter or Instagram. Therefore, it makes sense to consider the purpose or destination of a portrait ahead of time.

Portraits for Social Media

Social media often serves as a venue for loosening up and being playful. Don’t be afraid to bring in that spirit when crafting a profile picture. Utilizing a Lensbaby can be a great way to add neat visual effects to an image in camera, and playing with perspective can often make for an interesting image.

By maxing out your camera’s aperture, you can completely obscure background elements and direct the eyes of digital passersby to you. To make the most successful image possible, you’ll also want to be sure that backdrops, outfits, and props don’t clash with one another—otherwise, they can quickly become the image’s focal point.

Portraits for Job Applications

Naturally, you’ll want to portray the most professional version of yourself possible when taking a photograph for a job application. Opt for basic lighting and plain backgrounds—the simpler and more straightforward you can be with production and setup, the better.

With that being said, don’t be afraid to show onlookers a little bit of yourself in the images you forward. Think about the way the colors, tones, and lighting within an image can evoke certain moods and auras. Don’t be afraid to be a little creative; after all, you want an image that will stand out and grab the attention of potential employers.

Portraits for Creative Gifts

Few things hold the sentimental value of a photograph. For that reason, they make excellent gifts. The most important thing to consider when creating a photo gift is the multitude of available possibilities. Think outside the box—instead of gifting a framed print, it’s possible to create personalized bookmarks, gift cards, and coasters.

Because there are so many ways to gift a photograph, they’re great for elaborately planned scenes and detailed experimentation. Bring in elements or techniques that maybe you wouldn’t normally incorporate in a portrait. Bokeh, long exposure light painting, and reflections are a few options that are easy to start off with.

For further training: The Art of Portrait Photography

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Martin Bailey Photography: Soft Proofing for Print in Capture One Pro and Photoshop (Podcast 575)

This week I’ve created a video to explain soft-proofing for print in Capture One Pro and Photoshop, in response to a question from Chris Moore. I’d been meaning to do a video on soft-proofing in Capture One Pro for a while, so thanks for the question Chris!

Soft proofing in Capture One Pro isn’t as useful as it could be, due to the lack of gamut warnings. But, I find that with modern printers doing such a good job of reproducing colors that the human eye perceives to be very close to the original colors in the photograph, even without being able to actually print some of those colors, means that the gamut warning has become a little too harsh.

It’s often not necessary to bring all of the colors in your photographs within gamut, to still get a very pleasing print, but I explain how we can go about that in both Capture One Pro and Adobe Photoshop. I start the video by showing you the difference between a number of key color spaces too, to hopefully make it obvious that we really don’t want to cram our beautiful images, with many more colors, into these smaller color spaces.

Here’s the video, and I’ve outlined some of the key things to keep in mind below too, so I hope you find this useful.

When soft-proofing in Capture One Pro, here are the things you need to check. I don’t go through all of these in the video, so I thought I’d list them here for your reference.

1. Make sure you have the Viewer Color set to White under the Preferences > Appearance tab, to simulate a white paper border.
2. Show the Proof Margin, and make sure it’s relatively large so that you can see your image surrounded by white.
3. Install the ICC profile for your media and printer combination, or the profile that a third party lab uses if you will be sending the photos out for printing.
4. If you are going to outsource your printing, create a Process Recipe for the required file format, TIFF or JPEG for example, and select the ICC profile for your media – Note that this is only for reference most of the time. You use it for the Soft-Proofing, and will generally export your actual files for printing with a third party printer in either JPEG or TIFF. If they accept TIFF, it’s always going to be better than JPEG.
5. If you are printing yourself at home, there is no need to export the image at all, unless you will print from a different application than Capture One Pro – Note that I now do all of my printing from Capture One Pro, and I used to print from Lightroom when I was a Lightroom user. This enables me to print directly from my raw files.
6. To soft proof all the time in Capture One Pro, based on the ICC profile for the selected Process Recipe, select View > Proof Profile > Selected Recipe.
7. To only show the proof simulation when you want to, select View > Proof Profile > No Profile, and then click on the Spectacles icon in the toolbar, or press P to Show Recipe Proofing. (If P selects the next Process Recipe, click the image thumbnail and try again)
8. If the image looks very different when you turn on Soft Proofing, consider changing the image using the Saturation, Clarity or other sliders, or adjusting specific colors using the Color Editor.
9. Be sure to make a Clone Variant of your image before making these changes. You don’t want to change your original for the purpose of printing. Also, don’t try to adjust the image to look exactly the same as when Proofing is not turned on. The simulation is always a harsher than the reality of what will come out of the printer.
10. If you have various choices of media, consider changing media for one with a wider gamut if possible. I often prefer matte, but gloss media generally has a wider gamut if gloss is an acceptible choice

Capture One Pro soft proofing doesn’t show you a gamut warning when the printer can physically not reproduce certain colors, so it’s sometimes difficult to spot issues or modify the image for print.

To actually see gamut warnings, open the image in Photoshop and go to View > Proof Setup > Custom and select your ICC profile as the Device to Simulate. I generally turn off Black Point Compensation as I usually don’t print with that turned on. Using Simulate Black Ink and also Simulate Paper Color can show the results too harshly, but it’s good to check to see the effects and get used to the difference.

To toggle Soft Proofing on and off, hit CMD + Y, and to view the gamut warnings hit SHIFT + CMD + Y. If there are large areas out of gamut, consider using the Saturation and Brightness filter as an Adjustment layer, and perhaps also create a mask for the areas that are out of gamut, rather than applying the changes to the entire image.

Something else to keep in mind though is that even with colors that are difficult to print, I often do a test print to see how bad things really are before changing the image specifically for print. With the printers I’ve used for the last few years, I’ve found more and more that we can just print the image, and it will look great. If you don’t see anything absolutely horrible in the Proof view, print it and see.

Unless you have specific instructions from a third party printing company to output your image with a certain ICC profile embedded, you don’t need to export or save the image with the ICC profile embedded. Most print services will specify a file format, such as JPEG or TIFF, and a profile to use, such as Adobe RGB or sRGB. When there’s a choice, always use Adobe RGB over sRGB for files to send to a printer.

Anyway, take a look at the video, and if you have any question, leave a comment below.

Capture One Pro 10% Discount

If you are thinking of buying Capture One Pro, you can get a 10% discount using our Ambassador code AMBP when you checkout. If you are not sure it’s for you, download Capture One Pro here and give it a try for a full 30 days to see if it’s for you before you take the plunge.

Also, the software that I used to visualize the ICC profiles as color spaces is ColorThink Pro from Chromix, which you can get here:

http://ift.tt/1hwu8iI

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Show Notes

ColorThink Pro: http://ift.tt/1hwu8iI

You can download Capture One Pro here: http://ift.tt/2abiOuk

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Video

There isn’t much point in making the tiny iPhone format video available for direct download. If you want an offline copy of the video, you can download it from Vimeo.

Subscribe in iTunes for Enhanced Podcasts delivered automatically to your computer.

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PictureCorrect.com: Practical Photography Tips for Beginners

Is photography getting you down? Did you stretch your budget to buy the best camera you could, then realize you were in over your head? One look at that inch-thick manual, and many new photographers just switch their camera to ‘auto’ and that’s where it stays.

“Nikon Hands” captured by Jorge Quinteros

Does this sound like you? Don’t worry, you are not alone. Camera manuals reflect the technical power of modern cameras, but they are intimidating to any beginner who just wants to take a decent photo.

“Figuring It Out!!!” captured by Angela

Digital cameras are like most computer programs; you may find you can get by with about ten percent of the available functions. So don’t get tied up in knots trying to understand everything. Just learn what you need to know, and learn it well, and you will be well on the way to being a better photographer.

Here are a few tips that may just take the complexity out of photography for you:

Stick with the basics

In the days of film, good photographers used SLR cameras with two main settings: aperture and shutter speed. These were the ingredients of all great photography. Today, cameras come with hundreds of features, but guess which ones you really need to understand? That’s right, aperture and shutter speed.

“Lens Test” captured by Jitze Couperus

If you can understand these two settings, you are halfway to becoming a better photographer. Your manual (I never said you could throw it away) will tell you which buttons to press on your camera. However, to really understand what these settings are all about, don’t rely on the manual. There is plenty of information out there: workshops, websites, books, and ebooks can help.

Practice has never been easier than it is today. Most cameras have semi-automatic settings, called ‘aperture priority’ and ‘shutter priority,’ that allow you to operate one setting while the camera takes care of the other. This is a great way to practice a skill without fear of getting too many failed exposures.

Learn from your mistakes

If you just delete every photo you are not happy with, you are missing a golden opportunity to learn from your own experience. Photos you consider rejects actually contain useful information—you really can learn from your mistakes!

Let’s say you are experimenting with aperture. Try photographing a scene three times, with three different aperture settings, for three slightly different results. Instead of keeping your favorite and deleting the others immediately, you could transfer them to your computer and take the time to examine them properly. You can see how each setting changed the look of the picture, and which setting worked best for that subject. Now you can learn from your own results, not from some theory in a book.

Did you know that if you right-click your mouse over a photograph on your computer and select ‘properties’ you will find a lot of information embedded in the file? You don’t have to keep a note of the aperture/shutter speed information; your photo does it for you!

Of course, in the long term you don’t want to keep every single photo you take, but you might want to keep a folder of ‘learning photos’ to refer to later, with maybe two versions of each subject you experiment with. To make it even easier, rename the pictures with relevant titles, for example: Wildflowers/Small Aperture, Wildflowers/Wide Aperture; Waterfall/Fast Shutter, Waterfall/Slow Shutter.

“Teton Crest Wildflowers” captured by Sathish J

Learn the Art as Well as the Technique

Every problem in photography cannot be solved by the camera. Experienced photographers know that good lighting and creative composition is often more important than up-market technology. In fact, most photos fail not because of bad technique, but because they were taken at the wrong time of day, or the photographer did not put enough thought into the composition. Yet daily I meet people who think that all their problems would be solved by a better camera or some mysterious technique they are yet to learn.

Remember what I said in the first tip: aperture and shutter speed are the fundamental skills, and with a little practice, they are not hard to learn. Master them and you are halfway there. The key to becoming a really good photographer is a balance of technical knowledge and artistic skill. Practice both, and soon your friends will be coming to you for photography tips!

About the Author:
Andrew Goodall writes for http://ift.tt/SHTHe0 and is a nature photographer based in Australia. He manages a gallery in Montville full of landscape photography from throughout Australia.

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