Photography e-book

I know it's been a long time since I last posted here but I've been way too busy... I am also busy compiling a photography e-book that I will make available as soon as I'm done.

But first see what knowledge David Peterson has to share with you. Here's just some of what he has to share:

21+ outstanding foundation secrets for taking better photographs

over 125 glorious full-color images explaining the secrets and technique

4 alternate ways to shoot an object to make a much more interesting photo

2 sneaky places to look to find fantastic shooting locations

3 unusual subjects that make great night-time shots

4 simple ways to save on battery power

2 additional parts of your digital camera you should also keep clean - but most people never do

9 advantages of digital cameras over film cameras

6 reasons people still use film camera.

4 ways to ensure you use the correct white balance when taking your shots

You can read more about his book Digital Photography Secrets
all you have to do is Click Here! and David will tell you the rest.

Lesson 5 - Program Modes

Program modes to the rescue

Let’s assume that you actually do not want to be bothered with setting the exposure yourself. We’re only human and we’re bound to make mistakes in our (manual) exposure setting. Which is why camera manufacturers invented program modes.

These are automatic exposure control settings that allow you to basically point and shoot while the camera selects the appropriate setting to correctly expose for the particular lighting situation.

In short, the program modes tell the camera how to expose in a given lighting situation. Usually, modern digitals have a number of modes, which you will see on a dial typically placed on the top left of your camera.

The symbols or letters P, AV, TV on Canon and Pentax cameras, and P, A and S on Nikon cameras indicates these modes.

Why the different types? They each have their uses. Some control the exposure by setting both the camera shutter speed and aperture (P), some do so by only adjusting the shutter speed while you set the aperture (AV) while some allow you to set the shutter speed while the camera then adjusts the aperture accordingly (TV or S). Let’s look at each option in more detail:

Program Mode (P)
This allows you to quickly respond to any photo opportunity. In this mode, the camera automatically determines the optimum aperture settings and shutter speed according to the situation. It does so by instantly analyzing data such as the amount of zoom you’re using, the resulting magnification ratio of the lens and the auto-exposure sensors' brightness data.

Aperture Priority Mode (A or AV)
When you are shooting landscapes or close-ups, you need everything in your viewfinder to be sharp from back to front. And if you were shooting portraits, you’d want the background behind your subject to be out of focus. This area in focus is called your depth of field and you control it by changing the aperture on your camera. We’ll go into aperture settings in more detail later.

Shutter Priority Mode (S or TV)
When shooting moving objects such as runners or rally cars, you frequently get blurred images because the object you’re shooting moves faster than the camera shutter opens and closes. To "freeze" the action, you need to be able to select a shutter speed that is fast enough.

We'll stop there for today, I will get into other program modes next time... until then, mess around a little with aperture and shutter priority settings...

Lesson 4 - Manual exposure setting

How to set exposure – manually

It’s all good and well to proclaim the virtues of a great exposure, but how do you actually expose? How do you know that your image is properly exposed? And what do you physically do on your camera to increase or decrease the exposure? Nothing, if your camera is set to auto-exposure – in other words, on one of the programmed exposure modes we’ll discuss in a minute. Your camera will take care of it – all you need to do is to point the beast at the scene you wish to record, compose, and push the shutter release.

However, for those who want to
• have more exposure control,
• be creative with their use of apertures and shutter speeds, or
• just plain don’t trust the programmed exposure modes,
you will probably be trying to figure out now how to set and work your camera on Manual mode.

Keep your manual handy for this:
Compact (fixed-lens) digital cameras
If you own a compact digital (i.e. you can’t remove the lens), you will in all probability have very little manual functions. Typically, this camera is geared towards the casual user, not the hobbyist, so the design favours point-and-shoot.

Still, the camera may have some manual functions such as aperture or shutter speed settings. Check your manual for this if there is no indication on the command dial of an "M" mode. If you can switch the command dial to manual, do so.

Typically, you now would have control over your aperture settings with the express purpose of forcing a particular depth of field through using a particular aperture – small depth of field through a wide aperture (f4) or a large depth of field through a small aperture (f16). Typically as well on compact digitals is that you would only have 3 or so pre-set apertures to work with on manual mode – a wide aperture, a middle-of-the-range aperture and a small aperture. This is frustrating, but better than nothing, I guess.

To select any of these apertures, you would need to turn a thumb dial to do so after setting "M" on your command dial. Let’s say you wanted to select the smallest aperture for the maximum depth of field you can get out of your camera: you’d select Manual, then turn the appropriate dial to turn to select the aperture. Now you are set for your first exposure, but you have no idea of what shutter speed you should use to correctly expose for the lighting situation you find yourself in.

Assume you are outside, and it’s broad daylight. Check through your viewfinder or LCD if you can see any exposure scale: a bar with a "0" in the middle, and a "+" and "-" icon on the left and right hand sides of the bar, respectively.

There should also be a little arrow or dot somewhere along the bar, either on the plus or minus side, telling you what your current exposure setting will result in: if the arrow is anywhere between the 0 and the plus sign, it means you are over-exposing. Consequently, an arrow on the minus side means underexposure.

Practice it, play around with different exposure settings see what happens with the various options available on your camera... The best way to learn is to practice, play, play and practice...

Lesson 3 - Aperture and Shutter Speed

I've been bad with updating my blogs... But the good thing is, I have some more free time now, so I have more time to update my blogs... stick me on this one and you WILL learn all about photography...

Shutter speed and apertures work together to ensure that the correct amount of light falls onto the SENSOR. In other words, your camera, through its automatic exposure settings, will make all these decisions for you. However, for you to intelligently use these automated functions, you need to understand what they mean and how they are inter-dependent, so here’s a brief overview of the relationship between shutter speeds and aperture settings:

Apertures
This refers to the variable-sized hole in the center of your lens with which you control the amount of light falling onto the sensor.

Since the start of photography, camera manufacturers have indicated the size of these apertures by using the term "f-stops". All lenses had the following standard f-stops, f1.8, f2, f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11, f16 and f22 – f1.8 being "wide open" or a large aperture, and f22 being "closed down", or a small aperture.

Each stop allows twice as much light onto your sensor as the next stop due to the quadratic relationship between diameter and the area of aperture (which you don’t have to remember!), so f4 would allow twice as much light through as f5.6.
By setting a large aperture on your lens (around f2 or f4) you allow a large amount of light through onto the sensor.

Setting a large aperture also:
1. throws the background out of focus (ideal for portraiture), and
2. forces a higher shutter speed to compensate for the amount of light and to freeze the action.
If light is in abundance, you’re likely to select a small aperture (around f16), allowing only a speck of light through.

Setting a small aperture also:
1. makes both the foreground and background pin-sharp but
2. forces a low shutter speed, which could induce camera shake.
In photographic terms we talk about "closing down a stop", meaning that if the light is too bright and your image is over-exposed (by one stop), you should close the aperture by one stop to halve the light falling onto the sensor. If you were shooting at an aperture setting of f11, for instance, you would then change it to f16 (smaller, therefore less light comes through).

You can find these apertures – or the electronic versions thereof – by setting the camera to manual exposure mode. You will also note that while the camera shows the "classic" apertures of f4, f5.6 and so forth, it also shows "half stops" of f5 for finer adjustments to your exposure.

Shutter speed
A shutter is, in simple terms, a black curtain with a square opening in it situated between your lens and the sensor behind it. When you press the shutter release, the curtain zips across the sensor in a wink of an eye, allowing light through the hole and onto the sensor. We measure the speed with which it zips across the sensor in parts of a second, again a relic of the earliest times of photography. Some of these units are 1/8th of a second, a 16th, a 25th, a 60th, a 125th, and so on all the way up to an 8000th of a second and down to 30 seconds, on some cameras.

Each shutter speed is roughly half the duration of the next, just like apertures. In other words, a shutter fired at a 250th would whip past the sensor at double the speed than if set to a 125th. It follows then that it being open for only half the time, it would only allow half the light through onto the sensor. Again, modern camera manufacturers have added an in-between shutter speed to fine-tune exposures, as you will see on your camera if you set it to manual exposure.

Why should you know all this? Aperture and shutter speeds are inextricably linked. Try and understand it by using this analogy: let’s say that if you poured water through a pipe one cm in diameter for one minute, you will have one liter of water in the bucket below. If, however, your pipe is half a cm in diameter, and you still want one liter of water in the bucket, you will have to pour for double the length of time – 2 minutes.

Conversely, if you used a cm-wide pipe but only wanted half a liter of water in the bucket, you should only pour for 30 seconds. That inverse relationship is the same in photography: your pipe’s diameter is nothing but the aperture, and the duration of pouring is the duration of exposure. Now take this slightly further – if you want to fill a one-liter bucket to the brim, that filled bucket is a properly exposed image. Too much water, and it overflows (overexposes), and vice versa.

That is the inverse relationship between aperture and shutter speed, one that your camera takes care of automatically if you’re shooting in the auto exposure modes (TV, AV or S and A).

So why would you need to know how the relationship works? Let’s take a practical example: say you want to take a picture of a stream of water and to make the water look like a white, continuous stream of foam, almost like a bridal veil.

The only way in which you can get it to look like that is to shoot at such a slow shutter speed that the water becomes blurred into that wonderfully white stream. So you have to force the camera to select a slow enough shutter speed.

So now you have to play around with these settings and put the theory into practice.. Now.. go play! and check back next week for lesson 4

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Digital Photography Lesson 2

So what do they mean when they talk about 3.2 or 4 or 5 or 6 megapixels? Well it's calculated by multiplying the phyical dimensions of the camera sensor's long and short sides. So a 3.3MP camera would have a sensor that has 2200 pixels along the long side and 1500 pixels along the short side. Remember though that a picture taken at a higher resolution is a bigger file but this would allow you to make larger prints so keep that in mind when taking pictures.

I'm sure you heard the term exposure. All this is means is mow much light you allow to fall onto your sensor. Exposure is a very important part of good photography so this is something you wanna get right... My camera has 3 setting and I think most cameras have the same 3 settings... Whole screen metering is when the picture that is projected onto the camera's focal plane is divided int sections and a light reading is taken off these sections. Then your camera works out an average reading to find a single exposure value.

Then there's the Centred-weighted average. This method reads the bottom of the screen and part of the rest of the screen in a pyramid shape up to the centre of the screen. This method is biased towards exposing for the light off the ground.

And last but not least, Spot metering. With this system a certain spot in the viewfinder is sensitive to light(usually the centre)

This exposure information is shown on your camera as being under or over exposed. It would be indicated by either a + or - symbol. You will need to adjust some controls to deal with the light intensity. You can alter both the aperture and shutter speed or you can select an automatic exposure control to set the aperture and shutter speed for you. I prefer to use the manual setting to adjust these levels myself. It takes a bit of getting used to.. but you have so much more control over your images...

Keep in mind that shutter speed and aperture work together to ensure that the right amount of light falls onto the sensor. But to use these setting effectively you need to know what they are and how they work together...

So check in tomorrow when I explain it... or alternatively, visit Digital Photography Secrets and if you looking for books on digital photography check out Amazon .

Until tomorrow then, happy snapping...

Digital Photography Lesson 1

Ok so it's time for our first lesson in digital photography. I'll start with "how your camera works". It's quite simple really, your digital camera has an image sensor inside that does pretty much the same thing that your flatbed scanner would do when it captures an image. Except of course that the camera's sensor is a whole lot smaller... Some cameras use a CCD (Charge Coupled Device) sensor and others use a CMOS. So when an image is projected onto the sensor the image is scanned and then saved or stored onto the camera's storage device. The image information is stored in the form of tiny pixels and bigger sensors record more pixels. Most cameras allow you to control the picture size (it allows you to control the number of pixels you use to record your image). Ideally you want to take your pictures at the largest image size but that just depends on the size of your memory card...

Most cameras take pictures as a JPEG file format which is a compressed format. Some cameras allow you to choose a file format though. So you able to choose either JPEG or TIFF which is an uncompressed format. Most high-end digital cameras allow you to set your camera to take RAW format images which are much bigger in file size and produces the best image quality. Most times JPEG will give you good enough print quality but if you want really good quality prints then you should use TIFF. Remember though that TIFF is uncompressed therefore a larger file size which means less pictures on you memory card. RAW format images will give you even better print quality and is really most useful when you want professional quality pictures or poster size pictures... so most times JPEG is just fine...

OK so we'll end lesson 1 there... tomorrow we will touch on image size. If you can't wait till then then check this link: Digital Photography Secrets and if you looking for books on digital photography check out Amazon

Check in tomorrow for the updates... until then, happy snapping.