Hello there, and welcome to H3XAntiStyle's basic guide to basic photography! Featuring lots of pictures (I mean seriously it's a photography guide there should be lots of pictures. Your ISP can go suck it for all I care)!
In this tutorial, you'll get some basic advice, basic instruction, and some basic trains of thought, but not learn how to program in the Basic coding language! Ask someone else for that!
Here's what we'll cover:
Equipment!
Thought processes!
Framing!
More framing! It's the gud stuff!
Controlling light!
Aperture
Exposure
ISO
And some Flash! (I hate my life)
But first and most importantly, a disclaimer!
I am not a professional photographer, and do not consider myself to be of any particular skill. I do, however, know a lot of the knowledge, and learning the basics is the most daunting part of photography! The more people that learn how to make that jump from a festering spud covered potato to a photo they are proud to have as their computer/phone wallpaper, the better!
And here we go! I'd put it in nice little fold out chapters, but that's not how this forum works. Too bad.
First off,
Composition/Framing
Now you're probably thinking to yourself, "But Hex! All I have is a potato! I can't take good pictures!" and while on some level I agree with you, there's one other very important part of photography that doesn't give a rat's ass what camera you have: Composition. Essentially, where the things in your photo are.
Things you want to consider with your framing and composition are numerous, but the biggest one is,
how does this make my subject look? A full body, profile framing that goes from just below the feet to above the head is very good for showing something off, but isn't particularly exciting. In fact, most of the times it's kind of boring. It isn't particularly dynamic.
How do you make a photo more dynamic? Easy!
Move things around. Move your subject from dead center. Have them standing at an angle. Do not capture the feet in the photo. How many portraits have you ever seen where the feet were visible? None? There's a reason for that. Zoom in some. People want to see the face, the chest, the hands (if they are doing something), but usually the feet are boring, and having the framing cover the feet takes focus away from everything else.
The go to guideline for better framing is the rule of thirds. Essentially, your phone or camera should have a setting on it where you can have gridlines show up on your screen/viewfinder, cutting the screen into 9 rectangles.
You typically want the focus of your camera to be on one of the corners of the rectangles.
Let's see some examples.
Sweet, got that taken care of. Now you have some ideas on ways to frame your shots, you've immediately improved your picture taking capabilities! Whoo! But wait, what's that? You hate your potato? It's taking root into your desk and you can't remove it? Well now you have a tripod for it!
No good? Okay, let's talk about the next thing:
Equipment.
Now, if all of this is new to you, you might want to go sit in a corner and let it all sink in for a bit. But if you already know some composition, and you already have your gear, and you're ready to learn more about taking control of your photos, we can start delving into
The Hard Shit.
Photography is the art of taking all those billions of photons called light and trapping them forever into a tiny little pixel cage where we can mock and jeer at them for all eternity. Or something like that. Because of this nature,
light and how to use it is the single most important part of photography. It's essential. It's what lets you do the big boy stuff after you've mastered it (I'm still learning myself, really). Unfortunately, it's also really complicated, but thankfully any time that you're able to take your time, once you know the basics of it, you can easily adjust everything, taking practice shot after practice shot, till everything's perfect.
You really don't need to just "know" the perfect settings, the first time. So let's dive in!
First things first:
Always shoot in RAW format. I don't care. Just do it. You'll thank me later. Buy a bigger SD card if you have to, those are the cheapest component you'll have.
THE HOLY TRINITY OF LIGHT
Aperture, Exposure, and ISO. These three things are the primary features of your shiny new camera that you need to learn. How well your photo is lit, or how dark it is, is entirely dependent on the balance of these three factors. But, as I'm sure you've figured out,
all three have different side effects as you adjust them. First, we'll talk about Aperture.
CLOSING THOUGHTS:
Photography is an immense hobby! It's one you can do anywhere! With anything! You can literally take a really good photo of a piece of trash if you know what you're doing. The important thing is to always experiment, always practice.
If there's one piece of advice that I would say supersedes all of this, it's this:
Take 100 photos, and only show off 10 of them." You'll rarely get the *perfect* shot on your first snap -- take as many as you can stand, and then pick only the very best of them to show off. Composition is the most important -- you can post process to clean anything else up or work around it, but composition is what will ultimately determine your "best" from your "good". Only show the best.
AND THAT'S ALL FOR NOW! I may edit this with a new flash tutorial, but for now,
use this old guide I wrote, focusing on using the pop up flash. Most of the techniques in there at least apply to larger flashes.
edit: lrn2closetags
