Photography For Beginners

I’ve been writing on this site for a while now, and I’ve put together a lot of good content, but the trouble is that a lot of it can be hard to find, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. This post will walk you through everything that a beginner in photography should learn, and in the order that they’re supposed to learn it.

Whether it’s Halloween, a birthday or a night out with friends, there’s always a party to photograph. A post on party photography might seem like a weird idea, but it’s not as simple as you may think; that is, if you want to get good photos. I’m known amongst my friends for my photography at parties, because I regularly have my camera with me, and record the parts of the night that are often forgotten by morning.

When it comes down to quality for price, bang for buck, a 50mm 1.8 is one of the best lenses on the market, and an upgrade that I recommend to every new SLR user. For a very small investment of $105 for the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 or slightly more for Nikon, you can have one of the best upgrades that you can make to your camera.

I get asked to critique photos all the time now, and I’m happy to do it, but I often feel that people’s photography would dramatically improve if they could see for themselves where they’re going wrong. Small things that I would do differently can make a big difference to the end result. The sooner you learn to critique for yourself, the better, as it means that you’ll be able to study your photos as you’re taking them instead of getting home and wishing you could go back and retake them.

I’ve stated before on multiple occasions that I don’t use photoshop to process my images, but I do use simpler editing software to make some minor adjustments to them. It took me a while from when I first started out, to really understand how to fully utilise the software and to work out what all the major settings did. Hopefully, with the help of this tutorial, you should learn exactly what each step does and how to use them to your advantage.

When a frame is being divided by a single, dominant line, it’s more often than not, a Horizon, as they’re fairly common in outdoor photography, particularly landscapes. If the photo is of nothing particularly interesting, then usually this line becomes be the dominant part of the photo for the way in which it separates the frame.

Triangles are in almost everything we see, in one way or another, it’s just a case of distinguishing them and knowing what to do with them. They make great compositional tools as they’re easy to make, manipulate, and are remarkably common. Triangles are a great way of combining different compositional techniques such as lines and paths and using them to create a more interesting part of a photograph, but the best part about using a triangle is their ability to make a photo feel stable or unstable.

In the acting and modelling world, black and white headshots are commonplace in portfolios, and if you want to diversify your own photography portfolio then it would be a good idea to add this skill to it. Headshots are laid back and can be a lot of fun as you play around trying to come up with something creative.

The general idea is that you find a way of syncing you camera with your flash so that you can take it off of your camera and illuminate your subject for a different angle. You’ll need a separate, off camera flash, but there’s plenty of choice to suit your budget and needs. When you take your flash off your camera, you open up a whole load of different options when it comes to diffusing the light through various umbrellas, softboxes and beauty dishes.

Dynamic tension is a way of using the energy and movement available in various features of the frame to draw the eye out of the picture in contrasting directions. We’ve already looked at a variety of different lines that you can use in a photo to make it more interesting, but dynamic tension takes these lines and adds varying degrees of contrast between them, making them much more interesting.

The reason for writing this post was not to show you why you should never be a photographer, it’s to show you the pitfalls that await you when you decide to take it on, and what you should avoid when trying to start a professional photography career. Hope it helps.

If you’ve been following my basic composition technique tutorials, you’ll already know how effective the use of lines can be when composing a photo, and finishing off the lines section, we have perhaps the most useful; converging lines. There are various ways to use these lines with different degrees of effectiveness and that’s exactly what we’ll be looking at in this post.