Articles by Wayne Turner27 articles

We all want to improve our photography and create those great images seen the travel and natural history books and magazines. Yet, one of the things we lack in getting there is discipline. No hobby or career is ever easy and achieved through laziness. Practice makes perfect. If you aren’t shooting enough images the chances of great images diminish. Here’s how you can become more disciplined. Shoot one image a day every day for 365 days. And, the time and place to start is now. What this whole exercise does over the space of a year is to get you shooting a series of tasks in a disciplined way thereby helping you learn digital photography.

Every one of us needs to be inspired to shoot photos at some time in our photographic journeys. Sometimes inspiration comes naturally while on other occasions it is just like writer’s block. So how can you get inspired? Can you create inspiration or must you just wait? Let’s take a look at some sources of inspiration. Before we look at the sources of inspiration you need to understand that inspiration can be created if you don’t take the time and allow it to develop. The idea of shooting away until something happens just doesn’t work. You have to create the atmosphere. These 10 sources are just some of many. If you want be inspired then look for inspiration and allow yourself time for it to happen. Inspiration cannot be rushed.

I was asked the question the other day of how someone who has started photography with a great new camera can begin learning how to take great images and become a better photographer. This is a question that will pop up everywhere in forums and discussion groups across the internet. It’s probably the reason you have arrived here at Picture Correct, looking for advice on how to become more proficient with your photography.

When in your kitchen take a look at the ideas and subjects for an afternoon of photography. Here you have everything I have mentioned in the previous four points. I love utensils shot individually and in groups or just in a pile standing in a drying rack. I took up a challenge, a real challenge and took one item, a kitchen fork, and tried to shoot it close-up in a hundred different ways. I didn’t get near to that number but was able to shoot some great shots I never would normally have tried. You can spend hours here without exhausting your possibilities.

This should be one of the most obvious things in an image yet many people have absolutely no idea as to where it should go. Early in my career as a photographer I only had one place for a subject, in the middle of the image. And, my images never seemed to contain that dynamic punch. Most people take their subject and place it slap bang in the middle thinking that is the right place to go. How wrong can you get? This article will help you place your subject properly.

Many of us have heard of bracketing and then discard it as something too difficult or impractical. But, this little technique can almost guarantee you the perfect exposure of an image every time. Let’s take a look at a few simple steps to great images. In the old days of film photography it was difficult to bracket if you didn’t want to spend a lot of money in processing and printing costs. But now in the digital age where it costs nothing to shoot an image and nothing to review it on your PC monitor, we can all do it. I suppose you could call bracketing an insurance policy against badly exposed images. I must emphasise that it’s against bad exposure and not bad images.

Close-up photography, or macro photography as it is sometimes incorrectly called, is a genre of photography that many want to try as they learn digital photography. Close-up photography can be very expensive but there is a way of starting on a budget. Most people love the world of close-up as subjects are magnified and we see features that are not usually viewed with the naked eye. And, if you are a photographer this is where you want to get involved soon after your first camera purchase. But, unfortunately it can be quite expensive and this puts people off. So how does one start?

Photography is all about composition. If you can’t compose an image you can’t take photos. That’s the bottom line. This is where your photography journey starts as a beginner. Learning to place the elements in the photo is natural for some but for the rest of us we have to learn. So what is composition? The dictionary definition defines it as “the act of combining parts or elements to form a whole”. What you are looking to do in composing an image is to take the important parts of the scene and combine them in such a way, so as to create a photo very pleasing to the eye.

Depending on how bright the light conditions you are photographing will determine how much light needs to reach the sensor to create a perfect exposure. If for example you have your aperture set to wide open on say, f2.8, then you are allowing in a large quantity of light. The bucket will fill quickly so the tap can only be open for a short time, i.e. you will set a very fast shutter speed. As you close down and make it smaller so you will need to increase your shutter speed or leave the tap on for longer until your tap is just dripping. This will mean in order to get a full bucket the tap will have to be left on for a very long time. Aperture and shutter speed affect each other. Change the one and you’ll need to change the other. Each setting halves or doubles the amount of light each time your change it.

The world we live in is three dimensional, we see in three dimensions yet when we photograph we see only two dimensions. In order to create images that add a third dimension we need to add some perspective or depth. The big question is what is perspective and how do we add it? Because we can’t see a third dimension in our images we need to create an impression that there is depth to the photograph. This is created by the relationship between elements in the image showing the space between them and giving a sense of depth.