"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 the box: a camera that you spent hundreds on. I don’t blame you if the first thing that you do is test out that bad boy by taking photos of that 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 a hundred and twelve photos. Now it's 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 one-hundred-twelve photos you've taken. I guess that it’s time to just tell yourself that you wasted six hundred bucks and any attempt at being called a good photographer, 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 forty thousand followers on Instagram and so many doors opened up due to photography. I figure that I should share my tips on how to become a better photographer for anyone 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 the technicalities and jargon, there is no way 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, your photos 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, which 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 can’t take a photo at all if it weren’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," aka the camera’s shutter speed, the aperture, and the ISO. While there are many other factors of 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 quickly the camera takes the photo. You can usually see this as a fraction in your camera. These numbers actually represent fractions of a second, so 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 1/250th of a second, which is much quicker, therefore there’s less time for light to come into the camera. However, setting it quicker will allow for action shots to be much crisper, as opposed to having it set slower which will have them come out as a blur. So, remember this: the slower the shot, the blurrier and lighter the photo will be, while the quicker the shot, the crispier and darker 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. The smaller the number, the more light will be let in. 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 the number of your ISO, the lighter your photo will be. You would think that this would make for 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.
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 with each other and owning them is key to becoming a great photographer.
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. It may not seem like that when you go through our portfolios or websites and see all that 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 this form of black magic named Lightroom.
Adobe Lightroom is a program that I suggest any aspiring photographer downloads 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. 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 to your parents. At that point, if you could show those photos to your parents, 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 a great app, you can’t go wrong with this.
500px
This online portfolio hooks you up with some awesome features, such as getting your own domain name, allowing an unlimited number of photos for upload, and the ability to sell your photos to anyone who is 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 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), plus 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 online website. One last tip, 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 of the remote control that you have and only put that one up.
5. Don’t Stop
This is important. 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 that you took so long ago, the photo that you made your phone background and showed to your parents, that one photo that you were so eager to edit and make even better, that one photo that was the highlight of your portfolio. It will always be the one photo that made you realize that choosing photography was worth it.
