I first started dabbling in photography about two years ago. I told no one, published not a single photo and continued to use other people’s credited images on my blog. I was curating rather than creating and hugely frustrated by my lack of ability to create the same amazing images that I took such pleasure…
Photography for beginners | How to DIY a product or food photography shoot
Being able to write an irresistible story is vital for building an audience for your blog, but there is no denying that it is the way your blog looks that provides the critical first impression and photography plays a big part of that. Photography will draw your audience in and it is on your images that they will click to…
Photography for beginners | Using artificial light
If there is one thing that doing a proper photography course has taught me, it is this. I am definitely a natural light photographer. The times that I have tried to use artificial lighting have been nothing short of a disaster. I can’t seem to ‘see’ artificial light the way I can ‘see’ natural light. This…
Photography for beginners | Tips for natural light
Photography is light – capturing it, blending it, manipulating it and marvelling at it. Light changes every minute of every day and there is no such thing as “bad” natural light. Sure, that light right at sunrise and sunset (“the golden hour”) creates long shadows and casts a beautiful glow across everything, but who’s to say…
Photography for beginners | How to take great children’s portraits
One of the best photography tips I have so far from the online digital photography course I’m doing, is ‘get comfortable’. As far as I can gather, this is true of all things photography, especially portrait photography. To take a good shot: you need to feel physically comfortable yourself you need to make your subject feel…
Photography for beginners | Getting composition right
Which brings us to composition. Oh, I’m sorry, if that seems and abrupt beginning, we have some catching up to do. So far we’ve looked at DSLR versus point-n-shoot. Then we talked about the importance of keeping a visual journal before getting to grips with the three faces of exposure using my free exposure cheat sheet. We organised our images so…
Photography for beginners | How to edit your digital photos
Calling a post “how to edit your digital photos” is like taking a can of worms and opening it. See there, look at all those worms, wiggling and jiggling around all over my post… A bit like last week when we tackled the awesome-hugeness that is “how to organise your digital photos” – there were…
Photography for beginners | How to organise your digital photos
When photography went digital I had a feeling akin to elation. No more sticking photos into albums (or not, as the case most definitely was). I saw a future where my entire library of images was all contained on a single USB stick (which it is) and searchable by year, month, subject… just searchable (which…
Photography for beginners | Understanding exposure
There’s something wrong with me. I can’t say the word ‘exposure’ without my mind adding a few ‘tee hee hee’s. I mean, how old am I? Now, quite apart from my immature giggling, the exposure we’re currently learning about is the way light meets and greets our camera. If you get the basics right, the…
Photography for beginners | Create a visual journal
While we start to learn the basics of our DSLR camera operation (I started to cover this last week), we’re also interested in turning our eye into our camera’s lens. This means looking at the world as light, colour, texture, shade, composition and, ultimately, creating interesting, meaningful pictures. This will come naturally to some of us and…