Many people want to know how to take photographs in Black and White, take pictures using a tripod or in manual mode, take long exposure or wildlife photos, to advance, frame and improve their creativity, and ability, basically to learn photography. Photography is not innate: some people prefer to take photography courses and classes. Others, like you and I, prefer to learn photography on their own, through trial and error, to master their digital camera and to completely understand all the technical terms. I must admit that depth of field, exposure time, HDR and post production are not common words in everyday life!
Learn photography
Some personal advice
Beyond the information mentioned in the paragraph below, I wanted to add my personal thoughts on this subject. There are many sites on the net already which can help you learn photography. Photography has been a passion of mine for quite some time now and I really wanted to contribute to this field, even though there is already a lot of information out there.
The aim of this page is to gather all of the most useful information in order to give you a good introduction to photography. As a general rule, if you are only reading these few lines, my advice to you is to start with the basics of photography, the technical terms which will your understanding so that you progress quickly. No matter what camera you have, understanding the basics is, in my opinion, and absolute must. The best photographers know this only too well. Here I’m basically providing a theoretical course in which I explain the different techniques as simply as possible, often using my own travel photographs as case studies. We could consider it a kind of “photography course for dummies“, you probably know these famous books, right?!
When you have a good understanding of the basics, you can then turn to the section discussing techniques where I give advice on taking pictures under different conditions and in different ways. For example, macro photography and landscape photography are not that simple to master when you first get started. Little by little, I will guide you with a set of articles on techniques and advice. That is the best way to tackle this subject. For example, you won’t at first be able to take long exposures without knowing how to use shutter speed to compensate for the exposure time.
Some of you will prefer to go to an introductory course or go to general photography classes, which is also a very good idea. You can of course combine the two! I haven’t taken an introductory course myself, but I have read many books and practiced at lot, especially at the beginning, in order to understand and master all the technical terms and, more importantly, put them into practice in the field. Understanding things in theory is all well and good, but in the long run, you need to be able to apply what you’ve learned in real situations, on the ground as it were. Finally, I usually tell people that once you have understood the why and when you should change your ‘beginner’ camera, it’s now time to move up to the next level. We will come back to this in other articles.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your online photographic learning experience,
See you soon in other articles,
Sylvain
