The Camerazzi Community

Discovering Digital Photography

Authored by Pikkie Wolmarans – addressing the heart and mind of the beginner digital photographer.
Part 1

Requirements for playing the DP-game

A timeless tip for the novice photographer

Mastering the art of photography and developing your photographic skills firstly require developing the mind and the eye of a photographer and then the technical skills.

Approach and attitude, ‘seeing’ and composing great pictures come first – so by the time you get to camera technique, you should already be a very able photographer who only has to learn how to apply the camera settings to round off your skill to perfection.

You and your camera
The approach of this series is not about cameras, what the camera can do and how to set your camera for the best results; it is about YOU, what you can do and how to set your mind and eye for the best results.

Like the brush and palette of the fine artist and the hammer and chisel of the sculptor, the camera is nothing but a tool to help you create those special masterpieces that already exist in your mind.
Since you can hardly take photos without a camera, we have to deal with it, but will for now stick with the very basics – just enough to understand what the camera does, so you can force it to do what you want it to do!

So let’s get settled with the bare basics you need to know about the camera – quickly so we can proceed with the stuff that really matters – shooting great pictures!

Basic requirements
There are only two basic requirements for entering the wonderful world of digital photography

• A mobile body and an open mind

practicing your hobby often requires you to move the old bones around – walk, run, sit, stand, kneel, lie down, climb and all the rest while frantically trying to safeguard your camera against bumps, water, sand, fire children and dogs…and keep it still while taking pictures in awkward positions. Meanwhile you still have to think creatively, make sound decisions and keep an open mind to alternative visual interpretations of whatever crosses your field of view.

• A digital camera

at this stage anyone will do, from a point-and-shoot to highly sophisticated SLR. If you don’t have a camera and plan to buy one soon – get yourself a black one; the most expensive black one you can afford – they just look more professional. Don’t worry about megapixels, not yet.

To be continued…

Part 2

Demystifying the camera

Notwithstanding what the manufacturers and professional photographers tell you about cameras, a camera is still a very simple tool, consisting of a hollow box with a small hole in the one side and a flat screen on the opposite side. Because the hole is so small, it only allow some light that reflects from objects outside the camera to shine through it and fall on the screen, thus projecting an image of what it “sees” on the outside onto the screen inside.



And that is really all there is to any camera (well…almost all)

• Put a piece of shaped glass inside the hole, and you have a lens.
• Put the glass inside a pipe and make it move away further from the screen and you have a zoom lens
• Put a curtain that can open and close either over the hole or over the screen, and you have a shutter
• Put a couple of million tiny light switches in the screen area and you have an image sensor that picks up the light dots and sends a description of it to a storage device (like a memory card)

If it is really that simple, why do cameras have so many settings?
Good question, but the truth is that there are only 4 or 5 real settings on a camera
You (or the camera) can set the following:
1. The amount of light that falls on the sensor – we call it exposure
2. The sharpness of the projected image – we call it focus
3. The size of the image on the screen – we call it zoom
4. The light sensitivity of the sensor – we call it ISO
5. The colour sensitivity of the sensor – we call it white balance

Exposure:
The amount of light that falls on the screen. This is controlled in two ways: 1) By making the hole (lens opening) bigger or smaller – the smaller it is, the less light will enter the camera and the bigger it is, the more light will enter and 2) By opening the curtain for a shorter or longer time – the shorter the time it is open, the less light will enter, and the longer it stays open, the more light will enter – rocket science!

Focus:
Focus almost works like the human eye, just a bit different…To focus (get the picture sharper) your eye will change the shape of its lens – if you look at something close by, the lens becomes rounder and when you look at something far away, the lens becomes flatter. A camera lens is made out of glass and cannot change its shape, so it focuses by moving the lens slightly forward or backward to make the picture as sharp as possible.

Zoom:
Simply put, the zoom setting makes the projected picture larger or smaller like a telescope – by making the lens “longer” or “shorter”. It simply means that on most cameras the lens actually moves forward and backward to increase or decrease the distance between the lens and the screen.

ISO:
The ISO-setting changes the sensitivity of the sensor. The higher the ISO-setting the more sensitive the sensor is to the light that is projected on it, and the lower the ISO-setting, the less sensitive it is to the light.

White balance:
Setting the white balance means changing the colour of the light as the sensor ‘sees’ it. Different light sources have different colours ranging from blueish (blue skies) to reddish (candle light). Balancing the whites simply means setting the camera to change the colour of the image to keep the whites white (instead of making them blue-white or yellow/red-white). Sometimes we choose the ‘wrong’ setting on purpose because we want to make the photo bluer or yellower.

The numbers game
If you ever played the lotto, you’ll understand that five or six basic settings really have thousands of combinations and trying to set them to the exact “right” combination every time you take a picture, can be much of a guessing game. So, most of us simply play the quickpick and let the machine choose the numbers for us… Great news, we can do the same with a camera – set it on “Auto” and let the camera select the settings for us. Though (pretty much like the lotto machine) the camera’s choice is often close, but seldom spot-on! Luckily you can overrule the machine’s choices and make your own.

At the beginning you’d prabably find it difficult to make better choices than the camera but it will come soon enough – there are four ways to get yourself there:
1. Play and guess and figure out whats happening – longest route.
2. Practice, practice, practice – the more you practice the luckier you get – the most fun route.
3. Learn – from books, manuals and websites – the hardest route.
4. Follow a course – the most expensive route.

Or simply stick with us at the Camerazzi Website where we combine all of the above and have fun while developing your photographic skills.

Part 3

Shooting in Auto Mode

All digital cameras – even the more sophisticated ones – come with an “auto mode” which implies that when the camera is set to this mode it will be more or less automatic and supposedly give you ‘good’ pictures most of the time.

The above assumption is to a great extent true as modern digital cameras’ auto modes are quite sophisticated and works well in many cases. Before putting all your trust in the camera’s auto mode however, understand two things: 1) Cameras do not take ‘good’ or ‘bad’ photos – people do! And 2) Cameras can at best set the ‘correct exposure’ for a given situation to give you a picture that is not overexposed (too light) or underexposed (too dark).

But when is a picture ‘too light’ or ‘too dark?’
It is too light when it does not show detail in some lighter areas (the highlights) and it is too dark when it does not show detail in some darker areas (shadows.)

What does ‘setting the exposure’ mean?
It means to set the amount of light that falls on the sensor and gets registered by the camera as a picture. The more light that falls on the sensor, the lighter the picture will be and if the light is too much, the picture will be overexposed, and vice versa with less light making the picture darker and too little rendering it underexposed – no rocket science again!

Two controls
The amount of light that falls on the sensor is controlled by only two settings on the camera: the aperture (size of the lens opening) and the shutter speed (The time that the camera lets in the light until it closes the opening to shut the light out again).

Setting the camera to auto mode simply means that you ask the camera to decide on the right combination of aperture (lens opening) and shutter speed to give the best exposure for a specific shot (in other words to control the amount of light that falls on the sensor) in the such a way that your picture will not be over- or underexposed.

But how does the camera know?
The camera “knows” how to set the exposure by measuring the light. All modern digital cameras have a built-in light meter that measures the incoming light and according to how much or how little that is, will try to set the aperture and shutter speed to a combination that will give the ‘best exposure’ on the sensor.

Unfortunately the camera only measures ‘average’ light – what sort of happens is that it mixes all incoming light to ‘grey’ for measuring purposes and then set the controls to register the ‘mixture’ as 18% grey (standard). This unfortunately means that the settings will be more accurate when you shoot pictures within an ‘average’ colour range without very bright highlights or very dark shadows. The more extremes there are within the scene, the more likely that the camera will make a ‘mistake.’

The third factor
There is a third factor (aside from aperture and shutter speed) that influences the brightness or darkness of the picture – it is called ISO. (International Organization for Standardization). The ISO sets the sensitivity of the sensor – the more sensitive we set it, the lighter it will make a picture shot with the same aperture and shutter speed. The ISO is expressed in numbers like 50, 100, 160, 200, 400, 800 etc. and then of course there is the ‘auto’ ISO setting in which case the camera again decides on what number ISO to use.

Now what is the sense of all this?
If you are a newcomer to the game of digital photography , got your first camera and want to get out there and shoot the world…grab the camera manual and start reading….oops these guys are using some heavy technical lingo and the Japenglish and Chinenglish does not clarify a thing… do just two things: 1) set the camera dial to “auto” and 2) look for the ISO-setting (in point-and-shoot cams it is usually in the menus and slr cams on a button or a dial) and make sure that is set to “auto” also. (most cases it the default setting)
Then take your camera and start shooting – shoot, shoot, shoot – all sorts of subjects in all sorts of lighting conditions. Some will be correctly exposed, some will be too light and others will be dark and some will be blurry – good, that’s how you learn!
Then come back here and read these two very informative articles by Janco on what happens in auto mode and in the “almost auto modes”
Camera Basics and Shutter and Aperture Priority modes

Part 4

Solving auto mode exposure problems

If you’ve taken enough shots of different subjects in different lighting conditions using auto mode, chances are almost 100% that you have encountered all of the above problems.

Do I now move on to the other mode settings?
No, you don’t – not yet

Most mentors will at this stage advise that you move on to the other setting on your camera’s dial to allow the camera to make ‘better’ decisions for the specific lighting conditions. I am however of the opinion that you should first learn to understand and address these problems in AUTO MODE. Understanding what causes the problems and how to correct it in auto mode, will simply make it so much easier to make the correct decisions when you start using the other mode settings, as the principles remain the same throughout.

So what causes these problems and how do I correct them?

Overexposed or underexposed photos (too light or too dark)
These are very common problems encountered with auto mode and is caused by the camera setting the incorrect combination of aperture and shutter speed that either allowed too much or too little light on the sensor. You can deal with this by either avoiding the conditions that cause it, or by forcing the camera into making a better decision.

1. Avoiding the issue

To avoid overexposure:

• Avoid very harsh conditions like bright sunlight combined with dark shadows – rather go for everything in the shade or everything in the sun (shade is usually better)
• Avoid very white or very shiny or reflective objects, especially in bright sunlight.

To avoid underexposure:

• Do not shoot with your subject against the sky or another light source like a window or against a white or very light background.
• Avoid shooting in too dark conditions like indoors at dusk or dawn or inside poorly lit rooms or on stage with normal stage lighting only.

2. Forcing the camera

Of course we don’t want to keep on avoiding issues, so let’s go for the alternative and ‘force’ the camera to make a better exposure decision – yes you can, for you are in control, even if the camera is set on Auto!

A camera is not half as intelligent as you may think and it is fairly easy to force it into making a better decision by cleverly tricking it! You do that by simply ‘showing’ the camera what part of the picture you want to expose correctly and it will simply believe you and set itself accordingly.

The camera’s light meter does not actually measure all the light coming through the lens – it really measures the light coming from a small area around the centre of the lens. This means that by moving the centre of the lens to different areas of the scene, the camera will get different light readings and set the exposure differently.

Now look at the following four pictures of the flap of a water colours book:

Camera mode: Auto; ISO: Auto; Lighting: Energy savings fluorescent bulb and a few ordinary 60W bulbs in a roof light.

The only difference in taking these four pictures was the spot on the cover where I measured the light – (aimed the centre of the lens). These spots are indicated with the black crosslines – note how the picture is lighter where I measured in a darker area, and darker where I measured in a lighter area.



Now figure it for yourself: when you aim the centre of the lens at a lighter part of the scene, the camera will set the exposure to make the entire picture darker and vice versa if you aim the centre at a darker area, it will make the entire picture lighter. So there is our answer – if your picture is overexposed, just ‘aim’ at a lighter part of the scene to darken it and if it is underexposed, ‘aim’ at a darker part of the scene to lighten it.

The Catch
So far so good, but there is a catch (or two)

Firstly you have to ‘lock’ the exposure or else the reading will change again as soon as you move the camera to ‘frame’ the shot correctly. You lock it by pressing the shutter button halfway down. So, find the spot where you want the camera to measure the light, press the shutter halfway, then turn the camera to frame the shot and then press the shutter all the way to capture the photo.

But there is a bigger catch – your camera does not only lock the exposure settings when you press the shutter halfway, it also locks the focus at the same point. This is fine when you want the focus point and the point of reading the light to be the same – which is often the case. However if you want these points to be different, you need to measure the light at a point that is the same distance from the lens than the point you want in focus.

[Note: The more advanced camera models and most DSLR’s have an option to separate the ‘exposure lock’ from the ‘focus lock’, which makes it easy to read the light in one place, lock the exposure settings with a separate button and then focus on another spot and lock only the focus with the half-down shutter button – we will deal with this in another tutorial. Meanwhile it will be good to scan your camera manual for “Exposure lock” or “AE-lock” and see if it will make you any wiser now that you understand the basics of exposure locking.]

Like with most things in life this is also a matter of “the more you practice, the luckier you get!”

VERY IMPORTANT
With this topic we have touched on the very essence of great photography. You will often read and hear that photography is all about ‘capturing the light.’ In order to become a great ‘light capturer’ it is essential to practice your eye to see the ‘best light areas’ in the scene you want to capture AND to master the camera controls to capture it correctly (get the right exposure).
Practice, practice, practice – shoot the same scene or subject (in auto mode) over and over, every time moving and locking the exposure/focus at another point and compare the results – it is the only way to get real good at it!

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