There’s a major problem with shooting at a high ISO. Increasing the exposure in post-production will alter the look of the grain.
Test your camera to see how far you can push the ISO before you destroy the quality of your images. Use a fast shutter speed and a smaller aperture like F8 or F11 so you get sharp images.
Take the same image at a variety of ISO settings. Start at 100 all the way to the max ISO of your camera and compare them in your editing software.
Manual focus is when you take complete control of where the camera focuses. You turn the ring on your lens until the area you want sharp comes into precise focus.
This is not the best approach if you have less than 20/20 vision. If you are even a bit off, you can miss focus. Blurry images are often the result of missed focus.
Autofocus is when the camera adjusts the lens to focus on your subject for you. But the AF system can end up focusing on the wrong part of a scene, or struggle to lock onto anything.
One way to make it easier to get that razor sharp focus is to calibrate each of your lenses to your camera body. You can have a professional do this for you or learn to do it yourself.
Straight out of the box, most lenses are either slightly front or back focusing. You need to make micro-adjustments to get accurate focusing.
This is a compositional principle that divides an image into nine equal sections. It does so by using two horizontal lines and two vertical lines.
The important elements in the scene fall along these lines. They can also fall at the points where the lines intersect.
There are other compositional principles that are even more powerful though. Check out the Phi Grid and Fibonacci Spiral.
Think about shooting outside on a cloudy day. The clouds act a giant diffuser, filtering the harsh rays of the sun as they hit your subject.
When it’s a hot, sunny day, the brightness of the sun can create harsh shadows in your images. A diffuser placed in appropriate relation to your subject will soften that light for a more even and appealing look.
There are a lot of professional diffusers on the market. Some have handles, which is very handy for doing portrait photography (pictured below).
You can also use translucent curtains or even shower curtains to make your own, if budget is a concern.
Fill light refers to the amount of light that is bounced back onto your subject. It is used to eliminate or soften shadows caused by the main light source. This is how you control contrast.
Professional reflector kits are foldable discs. They come in gold, silver, white or black. You can use them interchangeably, depending on your lighting scenario.
Use a grey card to determine the correct exposure and make sure that the whites in your images look white.
We’ve all taken winter scenes where the snow looks grey. This is because when metering, your camera looks for an average of 18% reflectance.
Sports Photographer LondonA scene that is very bright or very dark will not match this standard. A grey card will help you by providing a standardized reflectance target.
All you have to do is place it in your scene at the same angle as your lens and take a shot.
This will help you later when you are adjusting the white balance in Lightroom. You can click on the grey card with the eyedropper tool to get the correct white balance reading.
Light intensity varies with the distance from the light source. The closer you are to your light source, the brighter the light. And light intensity falls off as distance from the light source increases.
Inverse Square Law is a simple and straightforward principle of physics. And the best part about it is that it can help you learn how to take professional pictures.
This law states that the intensity of light is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source.
And now in English. If you double the distance from the light source, the intensity is reduced to 1/4, not to 1/2 as you might think.
And now in English. If you double the distance from the light source, the intensity is reduced to 1/4, not to 1/2 as you might think.
The distance times two is two, two squared is four, and the inverse of four is 1/4. The same formula works in the opposite direction.
To put this in photographic terms. Doubling the distance between the light source and your subject reduces the brightness by two stops.
So your images look different on your laptop screen than they do on your phone or your desktop computer. This has everything to do with monitor calibration.
Calibration ensures that your monitor is showing the real color, saturation, and brightness of your images. It does this by making a color profile, which you need to update often.
If you are editing or shooting in a room with a lot of daylight, you cannot see your monitor accurately. The reflection of light on your screen will make a huge difference.
The digital file is equal to a film negative in the sense that it needs to be processed. A RAW file in particular lacks contrast and will look flat without editing.
Learning the basics of Lightroom editing will improve your photography. And there are a lot of resources online that can help you with the ins-and-outs of the program. You can quickly learn how to edit photos like a professional.
If you’re serious about how to take professional pictures, you will start shooting in RAW as soon as possible.
RAW gives you so many more options when it comes to editing, and with that comes creative freedom.
