How to Take Better Photos

Transcript Hi, my name is Luke Ballard, I’m the owner and founder of Remember Forever. I’ve been a photographer for over 20 years, it’s always something I’ve wanted to be, it’s always something I’ve enjoyed doing, and the fact that it’s my career makes me probably one of the luckiest people in the world. I’ve …

Transcript Greenscreen photography can be a really technical, complex procedure. Having said that, it can also be quite simple. Firstly, it doesn’t need to be green. Any solid color with contrast will allow you to select the subjects in your photograph to transport them to something else. It’s also really important to try and pick …

Transcript When buying a camera, keep one thing very firmly in your mind. Cameras are like a girlfriend; they’re replaceable. You’ll spend some money on them for awhile, but eventually a better one’s going to come along. It’s your lenses that you commit to. Your lenses are your wife. They’re where you spend a lot …

Transcript One of the biggest questions I often get from the students is what one lens can I buy that does everything. You’ve got to keep in mind that no lens is designed to be efficient and wonderful at absolutely every stall of photography. Different lenses have different uses. The way I like to explain …

Transcript One of the greatest functions on your camera is the continuous shoot. By switching it to continuous shoot rather than thinking about every image, you can hold down your shutter and take multiple exposures. Doing this sometimes allows us to create a bit of a story in our photos. You’ve all seen it, just …

Transcript Live photography on its own is probably my favorite style. It’s almost impossible to leave a photo shoot at night and not have a good photograph. Those long exposures, that slow shutter speed creating the mirror and reflective effect on our river and it gives us an immaculate photo to start with. If slowing …

Transcript Animal photography and pet photography is actually one of the more fun styles. i know a lot of people that all they do these days is take photos of their pet. Let’s talk a bit about how to go about it. The first thing I like to keep in mind is that pets are …

Transcript One of the things that happens a lot when I’m photographing families is I’ll send the kids out to run around a little bit to get better photos. In my right ear, I suddenly hear mum and dad screaming “Hey, get back here; Don’t do that; Stop doing that.” The problem with this is …

Transcript One of the most powerful relationships in the world is that of a mother and newborn child, and every father with a camera, is going to be spending thousands of dollars on camera equipment, to get better photos. So let’s talk about how to do that. Step one: Remember it’s a relationship, let’s photograph …

Transcript Portrait photography isn’t just taking a photo of a person, it’s trying to tell a story, whether it be in the emotion or the pose of the person in the image. You can see, for example, in this image here in Africa, little girl is a bit scared. You can also see the little …

Transcript These days, you don’t need to have to have an SLR with you everywhere in order to take a photograph. In our pockets, we have phones and the phone quality has improved so much that the cameras in your phone often rival those of a point and click camera. Three things to keep in …

Transcript Selfies, unfortunately, have become a fact of life. Everywhere you go now you will see people standing in front of every icon in the world holding out a camera or a phone and taking their own photograph. I would prefer not to, however my wife is a huge, huge, huge fan. First rule for …

Transcript Someone once told me that filters are cheating. Filters in photography are not cheating; they’re just a tool like your camera to hep take better photographs. There are three filters I want to talk about today. The first one, probably the most common, in the circular polarizing filter. The circular polarizing filter screws onto …

Transcript Your camera has a feature called automatic white balance. For the most part, it’s pretty good, it can tell the difference between different sorts of light. What white balance is, is color determined in degrees Kelvin. The higher the white balance, the warmer the photograph. For example, this photograph here. The white balance was …

Transcript Everyone seems to think when you say “Macrophotography” that it means flowers, or leaves or petals, but that’s not entirely true. There is a theory that everything in the world has already been photographed. So I like to work on the theory “let’s push that”. Macro, as far as photography is concerned, would have …

Transcript It always amazes me when I go to a restaurant now, how many phones I see coming out and snapping above a plate of the food they’re eating. That’s not to say I don’t do it. I take photos of almost everything I eat, but just certain tips and certain techniques allow me to …

Transcript So we all know that we can use our shutter speed really fast to freeze motion and action, to capture that moment in time, and generally we know that when we’re shooting at nighttime, we can use a slow shutter speed to let in more light and get these beautiful reflections coming down here …

Transcript One of the coolest things about sports in action photography is that sense of blur that you can get from anything that isn’t moving. It can be the crowd, it can be the street int he situation of this streetcar, unfortunately no named to desire in New Orleans. I took that photo screaming “Stella!” …

Transcript Picking an aperture for sports and action photography really comes down to several different details. One, how important is the crowd and the ambiance in the photograph? And two, what sort of environment are you shooting in? For example, Here at Madison Square Garden, shooting the Harlem Globe Trotters, the crowd weren’t too important. …

Transcript There’s nothing worse than when you’re looking at one of your fantastic landscapes later on and finding a tourist just walking through, or a bit of garbage, or even a garbage bin–anything that doesn’t belong in the beautiful landscape. Three things I like to do when I’m taking a landscape photo to try to …

Transcript When taking a landscape, people seem to think that it’s the backdrop, that it’s the thing at the back of the view, kind of like those old Renaissance paintings that are hanging up in your grandmother’s living room. In truth, the landscape starts from where the lens ends. Everything from the lens to infinity …

Transcript Using reflection in your landscape photography can dramatically improve the outcome of your photograph. This photograph here at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. was taken from across the tidal basin and shot through at sunset. As a result of using that slow shutter speed and just that beautiful lighting that was coming in …

Transcript When taking a landscape photograph and incorporating people, you’ve got to keep in mind one thing. It needs to follow with part of the story. For the love of God, a tourist in a photograph does not a beautiful travel landscape make.  Notice here on this photograph, we have this lovely Peruvian woman who is …

Transcript When taking landscape photographs and discussing aperture, there’s an old expression that comes to mind, ‘F8, and be there’. Being Australian, we’ve put our version, which is, ‘F8 is your mate’. F8 gives us that nice in between aperture, it’s not too shallow, or the number’s not to small, the lens isn’t too wide, …

Transcript When picking a background for the formal photos at a wedding, it’s really important to remember one thing. The bride gets to pick. But if in her wisdom she allows you to have any sort of say in the decision, try and pick backgrounds that sort of complement the theme of the wedding. For …

Transcript When posing people, it’s important to try and use as much of the frame as relevant for the amount of the people you have in the photograph. For example, we have this photograph here of just one person. Notice I’ve used as much of the frame as possible, and I’m making sure that however …

Transcript When your at a wedding or an event sometimes you want to get a photo of everybody who’s there. When photographing a large group of people it’s important to elevate yourself a little bit, look for a staircase or look for a balcony that you can perhaps work off. I generally try not to …

Transcript When styling and posing a glamour model, you’ve got to think of two things. One is color and contrast, and the second one is shape and form. The easiest way to take care of the first one is look at your model. If you have a blonde model, use darker clothing to offset against …

Transcript When choosing your aperture for a portrait photograph, you’ve gotta ask yourself one major question: “How important is the background – or everything going on around the subject of your photo to you?” You’ll notice in this photo here of Haley, the background wasn’t important, it was busy, it was green, it wasn’t part …

Transcript When shading an event, it’s really important that we do light the people we’re photographing correctly. While most cameras these days come with a flash, you’ve got to keep in mind that the in-built flash on your camera has a range of maybe four to five feet. It’s not really going to power the …

Transcript When we’re at a party or event, we’re quite often wanting to take photos of people. But we don’t necessarily want that “Cheese!” sort of look when they’re posing in front of the camera. As you can see, at this recent event with 50 Cent, I took the official, you know, all cast photo …

Transcript Let’s talk a little bit about raw files versus jpeg files on your camera. Your camera has the ability to take a photo in jpeg, compress it, and have all this beautiful color, saturation, vibrancy information stored in the file. However, what we want to do is take the photo in raw. It’s the …

Transcript Let’s talk about manually exposing our aperture as part of the exposure triangle. We know that there are three elements to exposing a photograph. ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Aperture is the opening of the lens. Its the hole. The smaller the number, the bigger the hole in the lens, the more light comes …

Transcript So manually exposing our photographs, we use 3 things. The ISO, the aperture, and the shutter speed. Let’s just talk about how the shutter speed works. It’s what happens when you press your button and the camera takes it in. It’s how long it takes the camera to take that photograph. It generally ranges …

Transcript When we manually expose our photograph, we’ve got those three points: ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Let’s just talk about the ISO. ISO is sensitivity of light onto your camera’s image sensor. The higher the number, the more sensitive your camera is to light, the more you can take a photograph, or the faster …

Transcript Hi. Today we’re talking about the rule of thirds, when to follow it, and how to break it. As you can see here on the monitor we have got a grid that you’ve probably seen before if you’re playing with your point-and-click or you’re playing with the display settings on your camera. You are …

Transcript One of the questions I get quite often, is, is, where do I start when taking photos while I’m on vacation, like, whats the first thing I look for? It’s sometimes really easy to get lost in a new environment, you see so many things going on, there’s a sensory overload. You’re treating your …

Transcript When travelling, it’s always everyone’s goal to come home with photographs that just highlight the destination they;’ve gone to. There are several ways of doing that. You don’t need, firstly, to try and fit in the entire landmark to highlight that you were there. For example, the entire Eiffel tower to show you were …