Basic Photography Article

Welcome to the Basic Photography Knowledge article.

The Basic Photography article consists of 2 Parts, Information About Different Brands , Basic Knowledge Of Shooting. The article uses a straight forward approach to make newbies to understand what their cameras can do and how to do it.

First thing that you got to have before you start reading this article is that you will have to get your camera somewhere near you for easy access to grab on it and do some experiment with it as you read this article.


1. Information About Different Brands

As you know there are lots of brands that make cameras. In this article we will focus on the DSLR types. However even if you do not have a DSLR, there is no need to find another book or article about it as the content here still applies to other kinds of camera.

As we know the Top 3 brands for cameras are Nikon, Canon and Sony. There is no saying which one is the best as each has it's own advantage.

For Nikon, they are good at processing JPG images, their noise reduction is considered the best amongst the 3 brands and Nikon is the first brand to have the video function on a DSLR itself. Just a side note for Nikon bought their sensor from Sony.

For Canon, They are most well known for their wide variety of lenses. Their Auto Focus speed is considered the best. Canon is also the first brand to have ISO sensitivity up to 25600.

For Sony, as they are consider newbie in the industry, consumers regard them as lousy. The famous brand Konica Minolta was bought over by Sony. Sony has the best Liveview amongst the 3 brands. They have Carl Zesis lenses for their Pro series lenses. What i would say is that Sony is the Black horse in the industry.


You might be wondering if the article is going to talk about all the buttons on your camera and how it works? What I would say is that you will have to read your manual that comes with your camera. It provides all the information that you need in order to function the camera.

So after reading the manual what to do next?..

What's next is to learn the Basic knowledge and Techniques on shooting.


2. Basic Knowledge Of Shooting


So Before you start snapping off your camera. You would have know that there is this knob that has quite an amount of letters and on it. What you are going to learn now is how to use the mode M, A, S and P. For Canon users it would be M, Av, Tv, P.
M --> Manual Mode. What you can do here is change aperture and shutterspeed manually the camera will not interfere with your settings.

A or Av --> Aperture Priority mode . You choose the aperture, the camera decide the shutter speed.

S or Tv --> Shutter Speed Priority mode. You choose the shutter speed, the camera decide the aperture.

P --> Program mode. The camera decides everything for you, however you can change aperture or shutter speed to suit your needs the camera will decide to that settings.


For newbies I would suggest to you that you play around with Program mode for a while after that move on to other modes. As the Program mode is to cater people upgrading from compact to DSLR. It helps a lot for them to adapt to the DSLR system.

You must be wondering what is Shutter Speed and Aperture right?

To say is frankly both Shutter speed and aperture allows a adjust the amount of light going into the sensor itself.

What is the difference then?

The difference is that the Aperture has this extra thing call the Depth-Of-Field. What the depth-of-field does is it makes the background blurred.

Example;



Do you see the Blur background behind? Yup that is what the Depth-of-field does. the thinner the depth-of-field the more "blur" the background is.

How does the depth-of-field related to Aperture?

The answer is simple, The smaller the F-number the thinner the depth-of-field is. The common misunderstanding about Aperture is the F-number and the aperture hole. The Bigger the aperture hole, the smaller the F-number.

What special feature can the shutter speed do then?

What people usually play with shutter speed is to do the silky water effect.


Example;




Do you see that the water isn't droplets in the picture itself ? Instead it looks very long and silky. thats one of the effects that you can do using shutter speed. Of course there are other factors that will do this effect too.


What do I need to do in order to shoot nicely?

What you need is to be able to coordinate ISO, shutter speed and aperture, As different settings is used in different surroundings.

There are 2 kinds off surroundings. Indoors and Outdoors.

For indoors usually the lightings stays the same. However for Outdoors the lighting is the sun itself, so you might need to change the settings to suit the surroundings.

Thats the reason why I suggest for newbies to use Program mode for awhile before going into A/Av mode or S/Tv mode. As you will be able to know roughly what settings to use in what kind of surroundings.


And thats the end of the Basic Photography Knowledge article. The next article will be more on the practical part about how to shoot different kinds of photos.