This technical guide is to give you support in understanding the basic principals of photography.
This is an open sourced learning resource for flipped learning with photography skills. These videos when studyied give you the bedrock of knowledge to putting your skills into practice. From getting the camera out of auto and into manual to identifying the different type of photography styles and putting these into practice, this handout covers the foundational knowledge.
Some of the areas of photography.
Photography is wide not only in the field of practice, but also in technique and method. These open sourced videos are designed to give out an outline of some of these areas, practices and ethics that you will need to have.
Art Photography.
Art photography is creative visually and soulfully. It is an expression of movement, transient states and fluidity. Photography is a medium to express to your artistic vision.
Photojournalism.- is capturing in the moment so you need to grasp the aspect of play and shoot. Never miss the moment, so you really need to understand how your camera works. The story is about the place, so you need to have understanding of the culture & space. You need to have a solid network of people in the places you are working. It is about capturing the story the moment is happens.
Ethnography & Anthropology.
Visual anthropology is a form of collecting artistic side of anthropology away from the normal contextual methods of collective and reflective research. Imagery allows an anthropologist to place a visual context to the environment, people and other topics that anthropologist research.
Fashion.
A hybrid of art and expression, fashion photography is a medium to exhibit styles away from drawn or made fashion. Location scouting, thought and process is taken here. Adaptability in a studio place or a location setting is needed. Therefore technical knowledge and understanding outside of the visual capacity is needed.
Sports.
Sport photography is physically demanding as well as collaborative. Working in high powered teams with specific objectives a sports photographer has to be adaptive to their environment. The photographer has to have a wide knowledge of lenses and shutter speeds.
How do I develop my own style?
One of the hardest challenges of finding out what type of photographer you are is deciding or discovering your own style. This is a process that can takes a while to evolve, but if I am honest you might have several outlets. You may have your commercial value and then your creative. When you first start out, its very much a process of understanding how the camera operates and most importantly playing.
What is composition and how to get your viewer immersed in the scene.
When framing an image you need to consider how all the objects fall within the scene. How are you filling the frame? How are you using the your subject and space within the shot. There are some 'rules' with composition as the 9 photo composition video, however there are some photographers & cinematographers who believe these rules can be broken, which the second video describes in a master lecture.
This masterclass lecture follows & shows you how to break the rules in mastering the art of composition.
Exposure is controlling the amount of light that enters the camera. This is done through understanding mechanically how one setting effects another, but ultimately you need to learn the basic science of light and how you camera reacts to this.
Kino Eyes- the camera is a mechanical eye and you are the brain controlling how it works.
When light enters a camera though the lens, this is the first point of call where the light can be controlled. And that is by understanding aperture.
Shutter speed!!!!! Are you shooting sport and your pictures coming out blurry? Well you are probably using the wrong shutter speed and you need a faster one, plus a few other consideration. This video explains clearly how shutter speeds work and what you can do to start getting it right.
Get the ISO right!
The holy grain of ISO- Stop turning it up and getting grainy horrible work, this is a rule that you must start applying and understanding!! If you can understand this, you are well on your way!
Balancing colour = White balance.
White balancing- how the camera measures and sees colour in the environment you are working in.
How to use Historgrams
Never over or under expose your images again and get a faulty colour balanced image.
Lenses.
Lenses effect the way we see things, not only in the amount of light that is entering the camera, but also depth of field, frame scale and zoom. It's not that the camera is broken or limited, you just need to use the right lens for the right job and choosing this can be hard.
Wide Angle Lenses
Prime Lenses
Understanding Camera Lenses.
Get Creative Lenses
How to set up your tripod
BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY
Black and white photography has something very special about it. Whether you are doing this in analogue and or digitally, there is just something super special about it, specifically in analogue. Digitally you will need to alter your image in Lightroom or photoshop to convert it black white. These three videos explain the technique in the production process and also in photoshop.
Credits:
Created with images by Unsplash - "camera dslr lens" • WWW.MONTELIUS.INFO - "Photographer" • Peggy_Marco - "nautilus shell shimmer" • WikiImages - "moon landing apollo 11 nasa" • blickpixel - "lens photo photo studio" • nayukim - "Camera lens and aperture" • ImageDragon - "street shop city" • Joshua_Willson - "celluloid film 35mm" • Shanon - "the heart of old and new asterisks" • Hans - "spectrum light spectrum optics" • EME - "meter tape measure measure" • Skitterphoto - "yashica filter camera" • LeighMilwardRMIT - "histogram" • qiye - "lens nikon glass" • zAppledot - "Tripod" • sporkist - "Lights" • keijj44 - "mountain peak mountain range" • 1138601 - "women model beauty" • Leroy_Skalstad - "people portrait homeless"