To take engaging photos, you need to be engaged with what you’re doing. Don’t just fly by on autopilot. Instead, put thought into your composition and try to make your photos as good as possible.
That starts with knowing the basics of how to compose good photos. Don’t cut off important parts of your subject with the edge of your frame. Keep your horizons level, and try to eliminate any distractions in your photo by adjusting your composition. See if your photo has a sense of balance and simplicity.
If the photo doesn’t look good on your first try, keep experimenting until you get it right. It is so easy to depress the shutter when something looks good and then stop, but if you consider a few alternative compositions, chances are one of them will be better than the first.
Use the Camera You Already Have
Camera gear is not all that important.
There are countless cameras, lenses, and other accessories on the market today. We spend a lot of time reviewing them at Photography Life, and it’s true that some are better than others (or better suited for a given job). But once you’ve tested enough of them, the real takeaway is that pretty much everything today is excellent. The differences are almost always minor, especially at a given price.
So, use the camera you already have, and don’t look back. In almost every way, today’s entry-level mirrorless cameras are better than the top-of-the-line film SLRs or even the DSLRs of ten years ago. Yet, somehow those film photographers managed to capture beautiful, iconic photos that still look great today.
Much more important are your creative skills and knowledge of camera settings. Focus your effort on those, not on collecting camera equipment.
Learn Which Settings Matter
There are a lot of camera settings, and it takes some practice to get them right, especially as a beginner. Even advanced photographers won’t always do everything perfectly. But it’s worth learning how to set your camera properly, and which camera settings matter the most, so you have the best chance to take the photos you want.
First, try practicing with camera modes other than full Auto. You won’t learn anything if your camera is making all the decisions for you. It might be confusing at first, but hopefully our articles on aperture, shutter speed, and ISO will give you a good head start. Those are the three most important settings in all of photography.
Aside from aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, learn how to focus properly by practicing with the different autofocus modes. You’ll probably prefer single-servo autofocus (also known as One-Shot AF) for stationary subjects, and continuous-servo autofocus (also known as AI Servo) for moving subjects. Don’t use manual focus unless it’s so dark that autofocus isn’t working.
Lastly, shoot in Raw if you want to edit your photos, or think there’s any chance you’ll edit them in the future. JPEGs look good out of camera, but the files have much less latitude for post-processing. (If you aren’t sure, shoot RAW+JPEG, and keep the RAWs for later just in case.) See RAW vs JPEG for more.
Pay Attention to the Light
Probably the single most important part of photography is light. If you take a photo with good light, you’ve taken a huge step toward getting a good picture. But what counts as good light? It’s not all about sunsets.
Often, the goal here is to balance the light’s intensity between your subject and background. Even if you’re photographing an amazing sunset, the photo could be ruined by a completely dark and silhouetted foreground.
The easiest way to solve this is to pay attention to the direction and softness of the light. If the light is too harsh, you could get bad shadows going across your subject, which is especially a problem for portrait photography. If the light is coming from an unflattering angle, see what you can do to move the light source (in a studio) or move the subject (outdoors) – or wait until the light is better (landscape photography).
Also, if you’re taking handheld pictures, make sure there is enough light. If not, use a flash or move where it’s brighter. The easiest way to get bland, discolored photos is to shoot in environments without enough light.
Move Your Feet
It’s easy to get stuck in one place while you’re taking pictures. Don’t fall into that trap. Instead, move your feet (or your tripod) as much as possible. Climb on top of things, change the height of your camera, walk forward and backward, do whatever you need to do – but keep moving.
If you take a dozen photos from the same height, facing the same direction, without moving your feet or tripod at all, guess what? They won’t be very different. If your entire portfolio is taken from the same height and without any experimentation, you’re missing out on some great photos.
Moving around is the only way to change the relative sizes and positions of the objects in your photo. Don’t like that your subject is too big and the landscape in the background is too small? Stand back and zoom in. Want to fix a rock that looks distracting? Move around until it’s out of your composition, or too small to be a nuisance.
For wildlife photography, pay very close attention to the angle and height of your shot. Animals usually look better when you are at eye level with them, and it also tends to give backgrounds that are farther away, giving more subject isolation.
Pay Attention to the Edges of Your Composition
When you’re composing a photo, it helps to pay careful attention to the edges of the frame. Simply put, the edges have an exaggerated impact on the “feel” of your photo!
For starters, make sure that your subject has enough breathing room so that it’s not bunching up against the edge of a photo. And certainly don’t cut off an important element, like the top of a mountain, unless you have a very good reason.
Along the same lines, any distractions in your photo will draw more attention if they’re close to the edge, because they’re dragging a viewer’s attention further from the main subject of the photo. If you only think about the main subject and don’t pay attention to the rest of the frame, you might end up with a sloppy composition.
Don’t Use a Cheap Filter
The second easiest way to get blurry photos 100% of the time is to use a cheap filter on the front of your lens.
Personally, when I just started out in photography, my grandfather gave me an old, clear filter from his film camera. It fit my lens perfectly; I was so surprised that I kept it on my lens all the time, never worrying if the glass was up to today’s standards or not. Turns out that it wasn’t. The corners of all my photos were blurry, and any mild bright area in the photo (like the sky or a lamp at night) turned into wicked flare. Here’s a photo I took with this filter, followed by a crop:
Learn Basic Post-Processing
Post-processing isn’t very high on the typical photographer’s priority list, but it definitely should be. Although postprocessing cannot fix a bad photo, it can turn a good photo can turn into something truly exceptional.
It’s easy to overdo it when you’re post-processing, so the most important thing is to make sure none of your edits are permanent (AKA “destructive editing”). Either use the Save As command to preserve your original files or, better yet, edit in software like Adobe Lightroom or Capture One Pro that stores your edits in a separate file rather than baking them into the image.
Post-processing is about imparting a mood and guiding your viewer’s eye in an image. You’ll get better and better at this over time. My top recommendation? Be subtle. You don’t want your photos to look over-processed.
Setting up Your First Camera
When you unpack your first camera you may be intimidated with the various menus, settings, and options for customization. The camera user manual, while it does contain valuable information, is often dry and technical which only compounds the issues of learning this new technology.
While you could embrace the good old “play with it” method of learning it can lead to frustration if your early results don’t live up to expectations. This method can also lead to learning less than optimal ways of using your camera making it more difficult to fix bad habits later on.
Each camera manufacturer has its own design, terminology, and specifications. So, it’s difficult to provide you with an exact guide for setting up your specific camera. As a result, for detailed instructions about your camera, I suggest searching YouTube or specific guides found on the internet. Just Google the brand and model of your camera to find more specific help.
Regardless of manufacturer, there are a few important steps you should take to make sure your camera is set up to your liking. Let’s go through those individually.
Understanding How Your Camera Works
Now that your camera is set up, it’s time to understand a bit about how it actually works. When you take a photograph, what exactly is happening inside the camera that allows the scene to be saved to your SD card?
A camera is a simple device which is really only comprised of a few key parts. For standard DSLRs, there is the camera body with a lens attached. Your camera body contains everything needed to capture and process an image, while the lens is what focuses your image onto the sensor inside the camera.
The way these two components (the camera and the lens) work together is as follows. Light comes through the opening in your lens. When you are not shooting there is a mirror inside that reflects that light up through a prism (think periscope) and through the eyepiece, so you can view the image as seen exactly by the lens. When you press the shutter button to take a picture, the mirror flips up out of the way, and the lens adjusts to the chosen aperture (opening in the lens, more on that later). The shutter in the back of the camera then opens, allowing light to hit the sensor, creating your image. The camera saves the image to your memory card, the mirror returns to its original place and it’s all reset ready for you to shoot again. This all happens in less than the blink of an eye.
Shutter Speed
Shutter speed, also known as exposure, is the amount of time the shutter lens opens, exposing the camera’s sensor to light. Cameras determine these settings by slashes and quotations. A shutter speed of 1/125 means the lens opens for 1/125th of a second. A shutter speed of 2” means the shutter is opened for 2 seconds. The longer the shutter speed, the more light gets into the photo. The photo below was taken with three different shutter speeds, but with all other settings identical. Too much light will come out overexposed, too little light will come out underexposed.