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Tips for better photography First of all: Before you start to fill your film in incredible speed, get
aware of what you will photograph. Choose your object carefully and then try to imagine
how you want it banned on film. When you look at the object, keep in mind that you can
move and that the image in your brain changes with every movement you make, but the static
picture on the film doesn’t change. Try to use your camera to find the best detail,
change your position in small steps and try to compose your picture in order to your idea.
You must always have an idea of what your result should be like. If you’re a beginner and haven’t
much experience in photography yet, I recommend you not to use a zoom lens or a high tech
camera. Try to start with a solid manual camera without electronic features and many
gadgets you don’t exactly know what they are useful for. With a simple 50mm standard
lens you have to change your position in order to get the detail you want, you simply
can’t just “zoom” in or out. You have to deem the situation carefully. Take
your time and experiment a little bit with one object, shoot a series of pictures from the
same subject with little changed arrangements to learn what you really want and need,
don’t change the detail for every picture. Weather conditions and light The light is the first thing you have to
consider. Only certain light situations at specially defined times of the day can give you
the results you need. One general tip from me is: Soft light is best for your pictures,
and you can find it early in the morning and in the evening, let’s say 2 hours after
dawn and 2 hours before dusk. Noon has normally hard light with dark, short shadows which
are difficult to handle and offer less options than the soft light around sunrise and
sunset. Always try to embed actual light situation
conscientiously to your pictures. Changing light situations after heavy rain,
thunderstorms or snow can add dramatic points to your picture. And don’t be
narrow-minded: Not only sunshine can offer a good condition for photography, also try
situations in rain, in overcast clouds and, if you’re more experienced, at night or
during dawn and dusk. The “blue hour” can offer perfect backgrounds for project
photography such as colour portraits, cars, motorcycles, lighted houses etc. Lenses 1. Wide angle lenses cover a
range from around 17mm and go to about 50mm. They are most used for scenic photographs,
because they offer you a very wide angle of perspective. But be careful, wide angle
pictures have to be composed very carefully. A general mistake some beginners (and even
professionals) make: They don’t care enough about the horizon. Due to the wide
perspective, you see a lot of horizon in landscape photography, and that makes it
difficult to get the horizon exactly straight. Be careful with that! Lenses wider than 50mm exaggerate the distance between the objects in the fore- and in the backgrounds, the wider the lenses are, the more “space” seems to be in-between. Wide angle fix focal lenses start from 35mm and go down to extreme focal lengths such as 17mm. Special fish eye lenses offer extreme perspectives as they have ranges from almost 180°, but they distort heavily. Also notice that most wide angle lenses start distort in the margins of the pictures because it’s difficult to arrange the lenses in order to get the same amount of light everywhere. I recommend you to start with fix focal wide
angle lenses between 28 and 35mm. Practice in and around your house to get a feeling how
these lenses show the reality. Start with your room, your house and your garden and the
view you are used to see every day. When you are in the holidays, try to portrait the
country in every aspect. With the first experiences, you will learn that pictures taken
from normal positions with lenses wider than 35mm will be boring. Either you have to add a
lot of horizon with interesting structures (colour / clouds etc.) or to remove it. That
is, you have to use very low or very high positions and you should avoid to position the
horizon in the middle of the picture. 2. Normal lenses have almost
the same focal length as the human eyes. Experts are at each others throats to prove which
length the exact human focal length is, but I think the exact measure is not so important
for photography, because the subjective view of a human being can differ. If you want to
observe a moving child, you focus on a small detail in your view and thus seem to use a
tele length. In order to see all of the beauty of an unknown country, you widen your sight
to get all the impressions around you and we could say you use a wide angle lens.
Important only is your position and the fact what you add to or remove from your picture.
For these basic experiments, a fix focal length between 50mm and 85mm is perfect, it
represents more or less the human view. Another positive fact with these fix focal lenses
is their quality. Because they don’t need special arrays of lenses for zooming, they
can be corrected for optical purposes and have good image quality! Moreover, they are
normally fast lenses with f-stops from 1.8 or faster and offer good available light
qualities. 3. Tele |