Photography Basics for Beginner Photographers

Starting with professional photography seems a little overwhelming sometimes. Taking your first DSLR and trying to understand it feels difficult, but trust me that is not a thing you should worry the most.

The struggle for me was not to learn using the camera as a beginner photographer, it started later. My photographs never looked professional and I use to wonder why. And I found out that there are some basic technicalities that need to learn. So in this article, I am going to help you understand the basics of photography that every aspiring professional photographer should know.

 

 

Exposure Triangle 

Exposer triangle has 2 words ‘Exposer’ and ‘Triangle.’ Exposer means how much light is reaching your camera sensor and the triangle shows us the 3 camera settings which we can use to control the amount of light reaching there.

Only 2 of the 3 camera settings can control the actual light which are Shutter Speed and Aperture. The third camera setting I called ISO. Continue to read below to understand more about these camera settings.

Shutter Speed determines the time for which you camera sensor should be exposed

 

Shutter Speed 

Shutter Speed determines the time for which your camera sensor should be exposed to light. Imagine it as the upper eyelid of your which opens and closes the eyes. In-camera this eyelid opens when you click the shutter button.

How can someone control the time of the amount of light getting in? You can set the time for which this eyelid will stay open and expose the sensor to the light. For more time you keep it open the brighter image you will get. It goes from 30 seconds to 1/4000 seconds generally in an average camera that means the sensor will be exposed only for 4000^th part of a second.

 

Aperture

Aperture is basically like the pupil of your eyes, as the pupil controls the amount of light reaching your retina the aperture ring controls it to reach the sensor of the camera. The aperture ring I in the lens not in the camera.

 

You can control the light by opening or closing the aperture ring. When the ring is wide open then you get the most amount of light to the sensor and vice versa. Now the catch here is that the smallest F-number means the ring is wide open.

 The aperture also controls the depth of field of your photograph. Which we will discuss later.

 

ISO

ISO is not the part of actual exposure because it has nothing to do with light coming in and it cannot control it. It is the artificial brightness the camera adds to the photograph after it is taken.

Even though it has nothing to do with actual Exposer, it is a very handy tool to have and a very essential one. When you are at the widest aperture and you cannot decrease the shutter speed because it will blur your image because of handshake the ISO comes in handy you can increase it and can make the Photograph Brighter artificially.

 

But it is not all good news, when you add this artificial brightness you add grains/noise to your images and this results in downgrading the quality of the photograph. And it is up to you to find out the sweet spot for ISO in your camera model.

 

Composition

Image source- Google | image by - Barry O Carroll

Composition Techniques comes in when you have learned to control the Exposer Triangle. It is basically deciding where your subject is going to be in the frame. These are the techniques you need to learn for converting your snapshot looking images into Professional-looking photographs.

Composing an image properly helps the viewer to identify the subject. And it is very important if you want to give the Photograph a certain vibe or mood.

 

Metering

Metering is a very crucial part of photography. It helps you to set the values of Shutter speed, Aperture, and ISO. When you see in the viewfinder you can see a scale going from negative to positive with a zero in the center, it is called light meter. It is seen when you are using manual mode on your camera

Metering can be varied by Metering Modes and these modes are used to focus on the exposer of a certain part of the frame. And these are if 3 types as follows

A.    Matrix/Evaluative Metering

B.    Center-weighted Metering

C.     Spot Metering

  

Histogram

The histogram is the part of Photography Basics which is overlooked by many beginner photographers. The image is made by a number of pixels, the histogram is a graph that shows us the distribution of light in a photograph. 

The X-axis of the graph represents Brightness from complete black pixels to complete white pixels. And the Y-axis represents the number of pixels.

 

  

Depth of field

Depth of Field is the area in your Photograph which is in focus. It is one of the most important things you should know as a beginner, learning the basics of photography. It can be influenced by many factors like aperture, the distance of your camera from the subject and focal length of your lens

 

 

White Balance

Every professional try to get things right while they are shooting and try to avoid mistakes so that they don’t have to post-process it in editing software. And the first thing they check is the White Balance.

Most of the Beginner photographers make the mistake of neglecting the importance of setting the white balance. It is the thing you should check first while shooting because shooting the colors right is the goal for most of us. And if you fail to do it then you have to give extra time color correcting it in the software.

 

Conclusion

So to sum it up these are some photography basics you should understand and practice when you are starting photography. All these techniques are really important but there is a lot more in the field of photography. As you grow as a photographer you will know that you can never learn everything in this field, every day will come with new lessons.