It’s easy to get complacent when shooting with a digital camera. It’s all so easy: line up the shot, press the button and move on.
Get back to base and you download your collection of shots, maybe send some to friends over the Web, perhaps make some prints for the album.
But take a good look at your work over the last year or so. How’s the colour? OK? So so? Or just plain brilliant?
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In this post Gary Cosby Jr. shares some great tips on shooting with available light.
Shooting available light can be both liberating and enslaving.
Sounds like a contradiction doesn’t it? In fact, shooting available light frees you from all the encumbrances of dragging strobe equipment around with its stands, modifiers, strobes and possibly even power packs. On the other hand, shooting available light chains you to whatever the light is willing to do at a given time of day. So you see now how it can free you or chain you up. There are a few tips and techniques you can use to tame available light and bend it to your will in many circumstances. Best of all, you don’t have to purchase a thing to use this technique.
Welcome to the fourth lesson in Photography – A Basic Course on the Camera. In this series, we cover all the basics of camera design and use. We talk about the ‘exposure triangle’: shutter speed, aperture and ISO. We talk about focus, depth of field and sharpness, as well as how lenses work, what focal lengths mean and how they put light on the sensor. We also look at the camera itself, how it works, what all the options mean and how they affect your photos.
Capturing movement in images is something that many photographers only think to do when they are photographing sports or other fast moving subjects.
While there is an obvious opportunity in sports photography to emphasize the movement of participants – almost every type of photography can benefit from the emphasis of movement in a shot – even when the movement is very small, slow and/or subtle.
Should I use my camera’s Portrait mode when shooting Portraits or would I be better off manually setting my camera up?
Unless you have a high end DSLR, most digital cameras these days come with an array of shooting modes (including portrait mode) for a photographer to choose from when out using their camera. These shooting modes are designed to help camera owners to quickly tell their camera what type of shot they are taking to give the camera a hint at what type of effect you want.
By ‘exposure’ we mean the amount of light that falls onto the film, or CCD if you are using a digital camera. In modern cameras the exposure is usually set to automatic by default and, most of the time, it can be left there and will produce beautiful pictures. There are times though, when the lighting conditions are difficult or we want to produce a particular effect and it would be nice to understand what is going on ‘under the hood’.
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