With my trip to Brazil coming up, I wanted to make sure I could get some great photos of all the wildlife. So after investing in a new (second hand) Sony HX200V camera, I decided to enrol in a four week foundation course for photography. The course run by Live Academy covers the majority of the key terms and aspects of cameras and photography, in two live webinars a week.
By beginning with an explanation of each camera type, including Smartphone’s, DSLR, Bridge and Mirrorless, the course is taught so that all the webinars are relevant to all cameras. From this the first theory focuses on the relationships between Exposure, Shutter speed and ISO, and begins to work on getting you to be confident with fully manual mode. Once this can be achieved full creative control can be achieved with the camera.
One are really focused on is the ability to influence motion and depth. The range of motion is affected by Shutter speed with a faster Shutter speed freezing motion, whist decreasing the speed allows for blur, displaying movement. Shutter speed is measured in seconds and is commonly seen as a fraction eg. 1/500. This is a fraction of a second, so in this case one five hundredth of a second. However shutter speeds can be longer than a second if required, such as when capturing moving light. In this case the speed is shown with double quotation marks eg. 1” is one second.
Shown above (not the most exciting subject) photo one has a slow shutters peed so the movement of the blind appears blurred. Photo 2, right, has a much faster shutter speed so the image is frozen.
Opposingly, depth is affected by aperture. Whilst it is focus which defines the subject, aperture can affect the span of this. Having a higher aperture creates a shallower depth of field, whilst a lower aperture creates a larger depth of field. To understand this clearer, a shallow depth will show one object with a blur behind whereas a greater depth of field has the whole image in focus, such as a landscape. Aperture is measured in F stops eg. F/16, the larger the F stop the smaller the aperture, eg the smaller the space allowing light in.
Above image 1, to the left, has a shallower depth of field. In image to the subject remains the same but a greater aperture brings the back roses in to focus.
However other factors can also go up or down a stop. Every time you go up or down a stop, the amount of light entering the camera is doubled or halved. The aperture priority, AV uses a light meter, normally from -2 to +2, to display if too much or too little light reaching the sensor. To get this correct shutter speed and ISO can also increase or decrease by a stop. So on fully manual mode, adjusting shutter speed can be used to adjust light if you require a specific aperture. By increasing the shutter speed more light is let in, by decreasing it, less is. This is the same with ISO, however ISO comes with a cost, higher ISO will reduce resolution and image quality, increasing noise.
At the end of the course, photo editing and the differences between Jpeg and RAW files are touched upon. Within this the importance of photo size and resolution are explained, describing how to decide which settings best fit the function of your photo. For example, whilst a higher resolution image may seem better, they take much longer to load so if too big may not be best for websites, but one too small will appear grainy. This is because photos are made up of pixels, single solid colour blocks that in large numbers appear to make a smooth image. More pixels makes a smoother image with more detail, where as less pixels will have larger pixels unable to display smaller details.
As well as technical details some rules of placement are outlined, such as the rule of thirds. This focuses on the idea of an invisible grid over the image, with key focus points being placed on to the points where the lines cross such as shown below. This allows the viewer to focus on the entire photo, not just one section or part.
Throughout the course I have learnt a lot, being a complete beginner at the start I had no knowledge on how to use a camera. Despite still having a lot to learn, I feel the course has provided me a great place to start improving my photography and can’t wait to take lots of photos in Brazil.
Comments