Photography Tips Guide

Posts Tagged ‘Shutter Speed’

Beginners in digital photography all start with the same ambitions, and most run into the same big obstacle. After buying the best camera within their budget (possibly their first SLR), they promise themselves they will really learn how to use it, and rise above daggy snapshots. After all, practice is free and you can delete your mistakes. So how can you go wrong?

Then they try to read the manual.

After a brave effort of trying to wade through pages of poorly written jargon, most people find the task too demanding. They switch the camera to automatic, and that is where it stays.

Does this sound like you? Don’t worry, you are not alone. But it is worth perservering, because taking great photos is immensely satisfying, and allows you to get the most out of your digital camera investment. Maybe you just need to approach it a different way.

Why do I feel it is so important to use the manual settings on your digital camera? Because your camera does not always know how you want your photo to look. Let’s take a look at three examples.

Example #1. Often you can make your subject really stand out by shooting it in the sun, with the background in the shade. This is a great technique for flowers, people, wildlife…all types of subjects. However, with two different levels of light in the one picture, it can be tricky to get the exposure just right. If you leave the camera on automatic, it might set the exposure for the background, leaving the sunlit subject badly overexposed. So you get a perfectly exposed background (which you don’t care about) and a burnt-out subject.

Example #2. Some subjects can only be taken in very low levels of light. Sunsets and rainforests are two simple examples that come to mind. In these situations, the light is only a fraction of normal daylight brightness. With your camera on automatic, it could set a shutter speed so slow, your photos will be a complete blur. Of course you can counter this by using a tripod, but in my experience people who rely on automatic settings usually don’t keep track of what their camera is doing.

Example #3. Action photos, or any photo with a moving subject, can easily be ruined by using the wrong shutter speed. Whether you want to freeze a moving subject (kids at a school sports carnival) or slow the speed to create a motion effect (waterfalls), your camera does not know how you want your picture to look. When you know how to set your own shutter speeds, and balance them with the correct aperture and ISO settings, you will get the result you want almost every time.

Learning the essential skills of photography is not as difficult as it seems. The mistake people make is to rely on their camera manual to tell them everything, which is not really what it is designed to do. Your manual is there to tell you how to adjust the settings for your camera, but it is not so good at explaining what the settings are for. So it will tell you how to operate your camera, but not how to be a better photographer.

A much better approach is to find a good, basic beginner’s guide that explains the fundamentals of good photography. There are plenty of books, ebooks and workshops available. Don’t get too involved at first. It may seem that there are a million things to learn, but you don’t need to go that far. If you can understand aperture, shutter speed, depth of field and ISO, you will know almost everything you need.

After that, it all comes down to patience and practice. With the right approach, and less reliance on a poorly-written manual, your skills will improve in no time. Like I said at the beginning, it doesn’t cost anything to practice and you can delete your mistakes, so how can you fail?

It sounds easy doesn’t it? Well it is when you have practiced. But when you are starting out learning how to get better shots with more depth and clarity you can start focusing on the technical but perhaps start forgetting about the artistic side and visa versa.

Its common problem when we first start learning digital photography. We realise that we must drill the technical stuff into our heads so we can improve, and what tends to happen is that we get caught up for a bit. We can forget that photography is artistic. And the artistic side of your digital photo needs perfect composition. So here’s a handy technique that I discovered for myself to getting that perfect structure in my composition that I now want to share with you.

A great way, no a fabulous way to get perfect composition in your digital photos is to practice with your zoom. Start by picking your subject and focusing on it.

Let’s say it’s an apple on a bench. Usually what happens is that people take the angle too far away, getting the distracting background objects in the picture. This takes away the beautiful and freshness of the subject leaving us rather cold as far as an emotional response for the photo.

There are a couple of things you can do. You can remove the annoying background clutter and take the apple as a singular subject against a look of “nothingness”. This can be quite an effective shot. Or you can zoom in a little bit at a time and see what composition works well. This is what I can zooming in increments.

Zooming in on a subject in increments can be a very effective way to practice getting your composition just perfect. You can take several pictures of your apple using different “zoom lengths” to get the right angle.

Be aware that this may impact the light in your photo. Generally how it works is that the closer you zoom in the less light you have to work with because you’re closing in on your subject and reducing the physical space that light falls on an area. This really applies if the subject has no luminance of its own.

In order to compensate for this decrease in light you can change your aperture. This means altering the F stop on your camera if possible. You may start out from 1 meter away from your apple at F 16 for example. Then, the closer you get the more light loss you experience and you might just find that changing your F stop to F8 works well when you reduce the distance between you and the apple, ie instead of taking the photo from 1 meter away, you take it from 10 cm away.

Try this out and see what I mean. Playing around with the zoom can really help you kick start your mind into feeling where the best composition is. And soon enough, you won’t even have to think about it consciously because you’ll just know what works.

Happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey