This series is for the new joiners in the field of photography; Experts you may want to ignore this blog or in case you want to add anything for improvisation you are more than welcome.
I am not the best in the line but have tried to put what whatever best I can for you all to learn. There would be many photographers out there who would come up and say I know much more than this guy knows but the question isn’t that how much you know, it is about how much have you shared. This is an attempt from my side to help new comers learn a few basic things about photography. This is not a tutorial but a few basic guidelines about photography so as to know what all lies in this field besides picking up an SLR and pressing the Click button. What I may state here might not be even equivalent to an iota of what lies in the technical side of photography so please don’t only resort to this and do your own research and practice. What inspired me to write this series was when I started off I realized there were many a people to criticize my pics but no one came up to help me and improvise. I did try to approach quite a few photographers but many of them didn’t even respond back, a couple of them summarized whole of photography in 5 minutes while as some quoted exorbitant fees as high as 40,000 per month so had to resort on self learning and thanks to few important people in my life who have always been there to share their learning’s with me and help me grow.
World of Photography – 1
The word photography by itself mean creations with light so I would say that the most important thing in photography is LIGHT which most of us I have seen seem to ignore big time. When I started off with photography one of my teachers said “try to understand light” and I used to think what is there to understand in light and now after spending couple of years in photography I have started to learn the meaning of this sentence and realized that there is whole new world of light that I need to understand. Like every new comer even I used to click anything and everything under the sun without thinking about the light or how It can be improvised and as I started gaining experience I started realizing how light plays a very important role in photography. One needs to understand the different types of light whether it is soft light, Hard light, Diffused light and what impact It would have on object and how it can be manipulated to bring in the desired or improvised result.
Besides the types of light another important aspect is that light has a temperature as well which plays an very important role in the way your pics will turn out. The Morning light is always cold and evening light is always warm and you will see bluish tinge in morning light and yellowness in evening light and the best time you will always find to shoot a subject under the sun is from morning 6 – 8:30 A.M and evening 4-6 or 5-6:30 this is mostly when objects won’t BURN or OVEREXPOSE.( This is an approx time and may vary) Post these timings you would need to have a diffused light or a shadow under which you can place your subject to shoot. You would have seen big frames having white clothes for ad shoots called skimmers they are used to diffused the harsh light and prevent picture from getting Overexposed.
The various types of lights are :
Hard light: The basic characteristic of hard light is that it creates clearly defined shadows. A hard light won’t change its characteristics with distance but it will definitely change it power and become weak light source. Hard lights are used to increase the contrast of subject. The areas directly lit might be burnt and the shadows would be dark.
Soft light: The shadows are clearly visible but they are not as sharply defined as they are in Hard Light. The contrast in this type of light is much lower than the hard light
Diffused light: In this case the light source is huge and there is no contrast being seen. The object looks flat without any light direction.
Now that we have talked about the basics of types of light we also need to understand whether the light is strong or weak and what contrast light has. I am not talking about the contrast light produces but the color contrast light has which changes significantly from morning to evening and how that contrast can be used to your added advantage is something again you might want to think before shooting a picture.
One of most commonly faced problems with every new photographer is that they suffer from vision problems. This is usually called shortsightedness and it is seen to get cured only if a photographer spends some serious time in learning the technicalities otherwise to every photographer his picture seems to be nothing less than a Master Art which should be kept in an Art Museum in Paris . Well I don’t blame others, I too have suffered from this as well when I started off even when I used to click pics on Auto mode and when I started learning I started realizing that the pic I had clicked was a complete crap.
Mentioned below are some of the things that if you think of before clicking a picture would definitely change your output significantly.
1) Light
2) Background
3) Object
4) Colors ( Foreground and background)
5) Lens
6) Focal length
7) Aperture
8) Shutter speed
9) White balance
10) ISO
11) Angle of shooting
12) Perspective
13) Composition
14) Metering
15) Correct Exposure( Whether to underexpose, Overexpose or have Exposure of Camera)
16) Picture balancing
17) Leading lines in a pic
18) Geometrical objects
Note : Picture is always created one feet behind the lens: Camera is just an equipment to capture it
