"Knock knock." "Who’s there?" Oh, it’s just the Amazon worker ready to deliver to you your brand new, humongous brown box. It's exciting, right? Well, what’s even more exciting is what’s inside of the box, a camera that you spend hundreds on. I don’t blame you if the first thing that you do is test out that bad boy by taking photos of the flower in your room or of your dog who wasn’t born thinking that he’d be a model. All right, it looks like you took about 112 photos. It’s now time to review! Now that you have a camera and have taken photos, you can call yourself a professional photographer ready to take on the entire world. That is, until you realize that you’re not satisfied with any of the 112 photos taken. I guess that it’s time to just tell yourself that you wasted $600 and any attempt at being thought of as good at photography, right?

You're completely wrong.

I can promise you that every single photographer has been through this exact same process, including myself. After a year or so of desperately wanting a camera, when I finally got one I felt so underwhelmed. None of the photos that I took of my remote control were good. What’s absolutely mind-boggling to me is that just two years later I found myself with over 40,000 followers on Instagram and so many doors had opened up due to my photography. So I figured that it would be a good idea share my tips on how to become a better photographer for anyone who is aspiring to be one.

1. Patience and Practice

Here’s the bad news: you are not going to be a good photographer as soon as you open up that box and hold that camera in your hands for the first time. No matter how much you studied all of the technicalities and jargon that there is to know with photography, it’s a completely different thing to actually put what you learned to practice. My advice to everyone is to use your free time to go out and take photos. Go anywhere. I don’t care. Just take photos and play around with your new bad boy. The quote “sometimes the journey is more important than the destination” can be applied to this. Chances are good that when you go out and practice taking photos, then they still won’t be that great, but you’ll soon begin to realize just how different a photo can come out when you change the shutter speed or the ISO. The more that you practice, the more that you learn. This will ultimately help you finally take that one photo that you can be proud of. Congratulations, you now have a new phone background that no one else has.

2. Study the Big Three

Taking a photo is all about lighting. In fact, you wouldn't be able to take a photo at all if it wasn’t for light. When you turn your bad boy on and you aim at that remote control, you need to focus on "The Big Three:" the camera’s shutter speed, the aperture, and the ISO. While there are many other factors involved in taking a great photo, knowing what these three things do will take you a long way. Let’s break down what each of these do.

Shutter Speed

This is how quick the camera takes the photo. You can usually see this as a fraction in your camera. These numbers actually represent fractions of a second. When you have your camera set to a shutter speed of ¼, the sensor inside of your camera will be exposed to light for ¼ of a second. Compare that to 1/250^th of a second, which is much quicker. There’s less time for light to come into the camera. However, setting it quicker will allow action shots to be much crisper. Having it set slower will have the photo come out as a blur. So, remember this: the slower the shot, the blurrier and lighter that the photo will be, while the quicker the shot, the crispier and darker that the photo will be.

Aperture

This is the hole in the camera through which light travels. You can modify this hole to be bigger or smaller, allowing more or less light. The opening of the aperture is measured by an f-number. A typical range of f-numbers would go from f/2.8-f/22. M ore light will be let in with smaller numbers. With this much light, the depth of field is greatly reduced–making for photos with a better focus on a subject. On the other hand, bigger numbers will let in less light and increase your depth of field–which will focus on everything in the photo.

ISO

This is how sensitive the sensor of your camera will be to light. Typically, the higher that the value of your ISO is set, the lighter that your photo will be. You would think that this would provide a great way to make those high-aperture and quick-shutter speed photos brighter, but there’s a consequence for choosing a high ISO: your photo will become grainy. Grain (otherwise known as image noise) is those small little specks that you can notice if you zoom in on a dark photo. I recommend never going higher than an ISO of 800, because past that point you will start to notice the grain. Alternatively, lower ISO values result in darker photos and less grain showing.

Taking a great photo is all about knowing what each member of The Big Three can do and how it can aid in your process of taking that photo of your remote control. Changing the settings of one category will probably force you to change the settings of another category. They all play along each other and owning them is key to becoming a great photographer one day.

3. Download Editing Programs

Here’s a secret that many photographers don’t really share: not all of our photos are good when we take them. However, it may not seem like that when you go through our portfolios or websites and see all we have to offer. Do you want to know how we turn those bad photos into something amazing? It’s a little something called black magic. Any trained photographer must be in contact with a witch in order to turn their bad photo into something great. I highly recommend this one witch named Adobe, who offers a form of black magic named Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom is a program that I suggest that any aspiring photographer should download as soon as possible. Everyone knows about Photoshop, however, that really specializes in changing a photo into something else. With Lightroom, you don’t add or subtract anything from the photo. Instead, you play around with the lights and colors of a photo. Is it too dark? Bump up the exposure. Is it too colorful? Turn down the saturation. Just like practicing with a camera, practice with Lightroom to see what each slider does to a photo and hopefully you can turn that D- photo into an A+ photo.

Along with Lightroom, there are a lot of mobile apps that you can use to edit photos on the go. My personal recommendations are VSCO, Afterlight, and Snapseed. Other than portable editing, one of the great things about these apps is that most of them are absolutely free.

4. Create a Portfolio

After a couple of months of practicing with both your camera and editing programs, you should have a handful of photos that you can hopefully be proud of enough to show your parents. At that point, if you could show your parents, then why not show the entire world? That seems like the logical next step. Open up a portfolio somewhere on the internet. Here are a couple of big name websites that you can trust.

Flickr

I personally use this, so you can trust me on this one (that is, if you usually tend to trust strangers online). The one disadvantage for using Flickr is the necessity of creating a Yahoo account, but once you get past that it's smooth sailing. Flickr is simple and is great for showcasing the best of what you’ve got to show. With a smooth interface and great app, you can’t go wrong with this.

500px

This online portfolio hooks you up with some awesome features like getting your own domain name, allowing an unlimited number of photos, and the ability to sell your photos to anyone interested.

Zenfolio

If you want to create a beautiful website quickly to showcase your amazing work, Zenfolio is for you. Like 500px, it also hooks you up with a way to sell your photography. There is a subscription fee of $30 per month, but you can try out the free premium account for trial to see if this is something that you really want to invest in.

SmugMug

While having a cool and funny rhyme thing going on with its name, SmugMug is also great for its online community. You are able to see the works of other SmugMuggers (I don’t think that’s the right word, but whatever) and share your work on any social media platforms that you may have.

It isn’t hard to create an online portfolio. If what these websites have to offer do not tickle your fancy, then you always have the option of creating your own free website. Here's one last tip for your portfolio: don’t upload ten photos of the same thing. Nobody wants to see ten photos in a row of your remote control. Instead, choose the best photo that you have and put that one up.

5. Don't Stop

This is the most important tip of them all. Photography is a lot more than just the process of taking nice and pretty pictures to share on Instagram. Photography gives you a reason to take a step outside that front door every day. It helps you meet so many great people and opens up so many doors for you down the road. It gives you something to do post-retirement and gives you a reason to explore the world for what it has to offer. Photography is a great life-changer and it only costs a couple of hundred bucks to start. One day, you’re going to look back and think about that one photo you took so long ago and realize that choosing photography was worth it.