If you are a sports fan, you know what it means when a team goes into a “rebuilding year”. It is just when the owners or coaches decide its time to train new members and correct bad habits in others. And invariably, what team leadership says when they go into such a time is that they are going “back to basics.”
Sometimes it’s good for us as photographers to go back to basics. And, of course, if you are just getting started in the world of photography and want to learn “the ropes”, the basics are a natural start. But you want the basics of what the professionals know about the craft of photography.
Anybody can take a picture. I went to a wedding where the wedding party left a disposable digital camera on each table at the reception for guests to snap photos. Before all was said and done, it was all those youngsters that were walking about taking pictures from the dirty dishes to their own underwear. Those were not photographers and while those pictures will undoubtably get a couple of laughs, these are not the kind of photography images potential photography clients want for their long-term memories.
Now don’t get too upset about confusing technical terms. Aperture is just a term for how wide your camera lens is open to let in light. And shutter speed is just how long you let the light come in to affect the picture. For getting a shot of a fast moving event, you want a wide aperture to let in a lot of light but a short shutter speed so you capture the event quickly and close the window so the picture is caught before more light hurts the quality.
Photography is really all about light. You can and will get learn a lot about lenses and flash photography and other ways to turn the control over the lighting of a shot to you. So add to your core skills of photography a willingness to never stop learning. The better and more sophisticated you get in your ability to work with the equipment, the more you will learn and the more you will want to learn.
You can get a greater control over these basic controls of the camera such as aperture and shutter speed by learning how to switch from automatic settings to manual settings. The program mode setting on any digital camera is there for any novice photographer who doesn’t care about really learning the basics of photography. So they give you some basic settings like landscape, portrait and sports settings. By switching to manual, you can learn what settings work best in different situations.
And that takes us to the most important basic about becoming a great photographer and that is practice. Take some time with your equipment and play with it. Take it to situations and take photos with different aperture and shutter speed settings, in outdoor and indoor settings and different orientations to light. Don’t get upset when some shots don’t work. That’s part of the learning curve.
By practicing and by doing, you will have more creative satisfaction in your photography work and eventually will turn into a wonderful photographer. Please don’t get a big head, there is always more to learn. And that is one of the great facts about photography, isn’t it?
Photography in San Antonio by Richard’s Photography- 2010 Senior Portraits
