A Place for New Photographers and Those Wanting to Learn the Basics

I bought my first and only DSLR in September 2007 and have been a very keen enthusiast ever since. I usually go out walking and taking photographs at least once a week and try to post regularly on my blog 'Let Me Show You What I See'. I feel that I need a new project so I decided to start this new blog to pass on what I have learnt in the last three years to anyone just starting out in photography or wanting to know a bit more about how to use their photography equipment. I still consider myself to be little more than a practiced beginner so it's going to be at a fairly basic level but hopefully understandable to anyone who is starting out with thir first camera or struggling with their equipment or technique.

I have been contemplating what strategy to follow with the order of topics to cover because I'm wanting to keep each post quite short and gradually build up into a useful resource. In the end I decided to start with a post about taking your first photos and then see where the subsequent posts take me. I will number the posts based on the order I first write then and I might go back and update them with extra information or links to other posts as I progress through the subject matter. I will try to make the content generic so the make and model of you camera isn't relevant and hopefully useful for either DSLR, compact or point and shoot cameras.

If anyone has any specific questions they would like me to answer, please send me an email or put the questions in a comment. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the answers I provide or anything else I post as I only know what I know. I may express opinions with which people may disagree but they are just my opinions and I am happy for people to disagree. I am hoping to learn from this blog myself as I expect to have a need to read things from my camera manual and search for information on the internet as I cover subjects. I am also hoping that the experience will improve my own photography technique as I produce images for inclusion in the blog to illustrate the specific subject.

Friday 22 October 2010

001- Your First Photos

So where to begin? When you first unpack your new camera it's exciting but it's also very confusing. Lots of buttons, dials, menus and lots of technical terms that mean nothing to you. That is certainly how I felt when I got my first DSLR three years ago. What does Digital Single Lens Reflex mean, F stops, ISO, white balance? I've read the manual but I've still no idea where to set all these control to take my first photos. Then comes the realisation that I've spent several hundred pounds on a fancy looking piece of metal, plastic and glass.

However there's no need to worry, today's cameras are amazing, they are highly sophisticated and very capable of making your decisions for you. If you are completely new to photography the camera is in a much better position than you are to determine the settings you need to get a decent image in most circumstances.  If you have some previous experience with photography you may know about some of the settings but others may still be bewildering.

I know that it goes completely against all the advice that I was ever given but what you need to do is set everything to automatic and accept the settings that the camera makes for you. Then get up and find something to photograph, something interesting, something you find beautiful or even something horrible. I can assure you the camera will make better decisions than you will until you get to understand what you are trying to do and how to achieve your aims.  You may need to look in your manual to see how to set everything to automatic and don't forget to check that if you are using a DSLR to set the lens to auto-focus too.

By setting everything to automatic that means you can concentrate on capturing the image that you are after and getting to feel comfortable with holding the camera and pressing the shutter button.  You need to be able to hold the camera steady and be gentle when pressing the shutter button to avoid getting blurred images. You need to know where the shutter button is and be able to zoom in and out without taking your eye away from the eyepiece or view-screen to look around the camera (I am assuming here that your camera came with a zoom lens or a zoom control).

By default the camera will generally focus on the nearest object it can find using the focus points and will attempt to keep in focus anything else it can see.  The camera will also attempt to maximise the quality of the image taken including making the shutter speed sufficiently fast for the scene being capture. Modern cameras will attempt to identify the image type you are taken and then use a database of image types to optimise the settings for the image type.   The camera is very dependent on the amount of light available so if there is little light it may struggle to attain the optimal settings but it will try its best.

As a quick example I've set my camera to fully automatic and tried out my camera in a very poorly lit room.  It automatically popped up the camera flash and made all the setting to be able to get this shot. The image is straight out of the camera with no post processing whatsoever and I'm quite happy with how it has turned out.


In the next post I will put forward a few more thoughts about using the camera in fully automatic mode, then on subsequent posts I'll move onto using picture styles
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