Introduction to photography
“For me, photography is an art and science in one.” - Grant Ball
Photography is essentially the capturing of light through a lens, this light is then distributed across a sensor inside the camera that contains millions of pixels, when the light strikes these pixels they register the brightness and colour which then renders the image. Also, as part of the image rendering process an EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) is stored for the image, don’t worry too much about this, for now, we will touch on this later.
Controlling light is possibly the most important and largest challenge of photography. Too much, or too little light is generally deemed a bad thing, and in most cases it is. However, there are times when you may want to restrict light or force an image to be lighter which can give the resulting photo a more dramatic effect.
Once you start to understand how to control light, you will then be ready for everything else.
Most photographers who use their first DSLR will be tempted to use Auto mode on the camera, and this is quite simply because a DSLR camera can be daunting and intimidating straight off the bat. That said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using Auto mode there are times when professional photographers will use Auto due to circumstances. I will say it is a good idea to start using Auto mode so you can concentrate on everything else around you. Have a day out taking photos, and when you get home to take a look at your images inside photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom, or Adobe Photoshop (I will mention these more later).
When you check your images in your chosen editing software it may, or may not already display the EXIF information of your image. If it doesn’t then take a quick look in your book or Google on how to turn it on. The EXIF will display important information on how your image was captured and can help you understand how the image was rendered in such a way. Later on, we will learn the meaning of the values inside the EXIF, you will then be able to critically assess why your image turned out the way it did, this is a really useful tool to understand and has personally helped me understand and improve my photography in my early days.
Below is an example of an unedited image I took back in 2015, with a Nikon D7100 using an 18.0-55.0mm f3.5-5.6 kit lens during a visit to White sheet hills in Wiltshire. In the left Grey area of the image you will see some EXIF data;
Filename: consists of the date and photo number.
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec
Aperture: f/11
ISO: 100
Focal length shot at 22mm (18.0-55.0mm f/3.5-5.6) The bracketed segment is the available focal length range of the lens on the camera, in other words, this is the minimum and maximum zoom distance of the lens.
When assessing the image it is dark, which wasn’t my intention. This is an under-exposed image, there is not enough light being gathered by the lens and distributed onto the sensor to render a correctly exposed image. As stated in this article, once you start to understand how to control light, you will then be ready for everything else. I failed on this attempt, and there will be plenty of times I, and you will fail due to many factors. However, the information from the EXIF is very useful to understand where I went wrong. This brings us nicely onto the next segment ‘Exposure control’ where I will explain these values in more detail, and how to control them to better expose the image. Press next below when ready.