Let’s talk about photography. Not iPhone photography or your mom’s point and shoot, but DSLR photography that will make all of your Instagram followers insta-jealous. The fact of the matter is that photography has never been more popular. So whether you are learning to shoot your cousins wedding next summer or you are wanting those likes online, let’s get to the basics.
BASICS
The button on the top that takes a picture is called your shutter release. Your shutter is a little mechanism that turns to let light in through your lens and shines on your sensor. That is what takes a picture. How you control that light, is the difference between the helicopter mom at your kid’s soccer game and the cover of NatGeo.
The spot where your eye goes is called the view finder. There’s also a nifty little knob next to it that should help if you wear glasses (like all the cool kids). There’s a lot of helpful information displayed there that we will get to in a bit.
CAMERAS AND LENSES
First off, DSLR stands for Digital Single-Lens Reflex. It takes the optics of a single-lens reflex (like that of film cameras) and adds a digital imaging sensor. Basically it’s almost any camera that has interchangeable lenses and requires a memory card.
The camera lens is the glass part on the front. The camera body is the bulky part that you hold on to.
Lenses are measured a few different ways. Focal length is measured in millimeters. A lens with a wide area in the viewfinder will have a smaller number and a telephoto lens will have a higher number.
Lenses are divided into two categories; Zoom and Prime (or fixed). Zoom lenses will have focal lengths measured 24-70mm, 55-200mm or any combination with the widest number first and the largest, second. Prime lenses have a fixed length. They are measured like 35mm, 50mm, or 85mm. Prime lenses can generally be a great option for early photographers as they can have comparably lower price points and lower f-stops. (We will talk about this later.) They also force out your creativity. Buy a nifty fifty and you’ll understand.
For the sake of this post, I’m not going to dive in to types of cameras or pros/cons at all.
FOCUS
Photos in focus look crisp, clear, and detailed. Photos out of focus look blurry and fuzzy.
To focus your camera, press half way down on the shutter release.
Take pictures in focus. Until you are good enough to intentionally take photos out of focus for a reason, don’t do it.
There’s a small button on the side of most lenses that switches between AF and MF (Auto Focus, Manual Focus). It may also say M/A – M. It means the same thing. Neither one is better or worse just useful at different times. If I am shooting a lot of photos at a high pressure moment, like a bride walking down the aisle, I will use AF. It’s easier and I don’t have to worry about keeping her in focus as she moves so I can concentrate on composition and creeping stealthily past weird family members. Manual focus is helpful for fine details, landscape, or for low light. Most cameras auto focus systems require some amount of light to work. So if it’s getting dark and your camera won’t take photos for some weird reason- try turning on manual focus. For most photos, AF will work just fine.
There are also tools built into the camera so that you can nail every shot in AF exactly how you want it. The best tool in my opinion is focus points. When you focus your camera, there may be red dots/squares/brackets that light up in the viewfinder. Those are focus points. They are your friend. Wherever those focus points are, are where your camera will focus. There are several variations but I use a manual selection so that I can select the focus point over the part of the image I want in focus without having to use MF.
EXPOSURE
Exposure is the amount of light let into a photo. Over-exposed photos can look white washed or even just a bit shiny if you are taking portraits. Under-exposed is the opposite. They look dark and unrecognizable. Properly exposed photos bring out clarity and give greater color saturation.
Every DSLR should have a few different exposure settings on the wheel on the top of the camera. Here is a quick breakdown of two:
Auto: Automatic- Camera does the work for you to achieve proper exposure. Using this setting works but isn’t going to take breathtaking photos. If this is what you want to do skip straight to Photography Social Skills.
M: Manual – This is what you should be shooting in. You have total control of your camera. It will shoot exactly what you tell it to.
There’s a crazy concept in photography called the exposure pyramid. It is made up of the three elements of exposure.
Aperture– also known as F-stop or depth of field. This is the amount of the photo you have in focus and is measured by numbers from 1 to 22. An f-stop of 1.2 may be called fast, or wide open because your lens is letting a lot of light into the camera. This creates a very shallow depth of field so very little of your photo will be in focus. It’s an amazing effect to bring out unique details in a portrait with really creamy backgrounds. An f-stop of 7 would take a photo with a much larger focus area. Because it is letting much less light into the camera, the photo will also be much darker.
Shutter Speed– the length of time your shutter stays open during one photo. This is measured in seconds or fractions of seconds from like 1/4000 of a second to 30 seconds. The longer your shutter stays open, the more light is let into the camera which allows you to take great photos of the night sky or other stationary objects in a very dark environment. If you are taking photos of moving objects with a long shutter speed, you will get motion blu,r where the object will look smeared across the area it was moving. To take photos of very fast objects, jump your shutter speed up accordingly and you will regain some clarity that you lost from motion blur. Also, a helpful trick if you aren’t using a tripod, never use a shutter speed longer than the length of your lens. So if you are using a 200mm lens from the back of a church for a wedding’s first kiss, don’t use a shutter speed under 1/200 of a second otherwise all your photos will be blurry. Let me make that mistake for you.
ISO– the sensitivity of the sensor. They measure ISO in numbers starting at 100 and going up. This one is a bit complicated so let me give you a brief history of photography. ISO was used back in the day to measure the sensitivity of film. You needed special film if the area you were going to shoot in was dark. You would use film with an ISO of 3200 or so and the whole roll of film would be the same ISO. Taking a photo in dark areas would require more from the film and would produce a side effect called grain. Grain is best described almost as a texture. It looks like small grains of color on the photo. The higher the ISO the more responsive to light your photo will be. It will also produce more grain.
Now that you have the gist, here’s the exposure pyramid.
Every one of these elements has a pro and a con. Aperture can give detail or make you out of focus. Shutter speed can add light and make your photos crisp or make your photos blurry or dark. ISO can let you take photos in the near dark at the price of noise in the photo. This may seem ridiculous and unnecessary but once you commit this pyramid to memory, you will have complete control of your exposure and be on the road to crushing your next session or capturing the perfect vacation moments.
SO NOW WHAT?
That was a lot of information. There’s really no substitute to time spent with your camera in your hand. Go outside and take a few hundred photos. Out of those 400, you may only get 50 you like, or that are even useable. See what works and what doesn’t. You will get the hang of it. Then the next time you are out and you see the shot you want in your head, you’ll know what you need to do to get it.