Digital Photography Lessons

Transcript It has been my favorite form of photography and is usually rock ‘n’ roll photography. I’ve been fortunate enough to shoot for a couple of big magazines and newspapers and have had access to really awesome concerts. The reason I like it so much is because A) it’s extremely challenging. It’s generally crazy lighting …

Transcript Nearly every digital camera out there has an on board pop up flash. This camera is no exception. Truthfully though, it’s kind of a little dirty so you go to the camera industry and these flashes are really God awful for lighting your subject well. It’s just straight on, blinding light that generally washes …

Transcript What is digital photography? Photography literally means painting with light. Digital photography is essentially the act of painting with light onto a digital sensor. It is essentially the same thing as traditional film photography, except for the fact that, instead of having a piece of side film in the back of your camera, it’s …

Transcript We recently did a really popular story on PopPhoto.com about great household items to keep in your camera bag. One you’re going to hear me mention a lot is a trash bag. I always keep a trash bag in every camera bag, with me at all times. Why do I do that? It’s not …

Transcript Next to food photography, I’d say one of the most popular forms of photography out there is pet photography. Everybody loves their pets. We have a very close bond to them, and just like shooting a human, you want to bring out the natural glow of your pet. A really good way to do …

Transcript There’s a couple of different kinds of lenses out there. The two specific distinctions are zoom lenses and prime lenses. The difference between them is really simple. Prime lens is just one focal length. In this lens’s case this is an 85mm portrait lens. This is a zoom lens and its focal length is …

Transcript If you ever spend any time on the popular photo sharing site app Instagram, you’ve probably seen a lot of really mediocre food photographs. It’s kind of a craze right now to be like, “Hey, I’m having a pizza bagel. Let me take a picture and send it to everybody I know.” And that’s …

Transcript The staple of any good wedding photography album is the classic posed portraits. Bride and groom, bride and groom with Aunt Josephine, Uncle Henry. It can be kinda challenging, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, doing all these portraits at once. There’s a couple really simple ways you can ensure that you’re going to get …

Transcript Hi. I’m Dan Bracaglia. I’m a New York City commercial photographer and Web Editor at “Popular Photography” and “American Photo Magazine.” I began shooting photography on a daily basis somewhere around the freshman year of high school. Over the past ten years, I’ve really dipped my toes into every form of photography, everything from …

Transcript Another question I often get is from beginner photographers regarding what gear they should buy and how to get started in photography. Thankfully all the big manufacturers have really well priced DSLRs that a lot of times will come with a kit lens for a pretty good bargain. Canon for instance has the T2I, …

Transcript Good group photography can be challenging because the more people you put into a frame, the harder it’s going to be to get everybody to smile, everybody to loosen up, everybody to have their eyes open. So the trick I always use is I’ll rattle off a bunch of frames. For example, this image …

Transcript A lot of people, when looking for a good wedding photographer, will look for photographers that not only shoot great post photos but also shoot really great candid photographs. The first tip I would give you is be observant. Notice the subtle nuances, the relationship between the bride and the groom, and hone in …

Transcript One thing I always recommend to anybody shooting anything with any kind of camera, is to have extra batteries. Some cameras, the lower end compacts, will use double As, making it simple. You buy some rechargeables and keep on you at all times. You’re good to go. For something like a DSLR, it is …

Transcript Sports photography is certainly one of the most interesting forms of photography out there. And certainly a form of photography that a lot of people start shooting because that’s what they want to capture. Aside from fast shutter speeds, there are a lot of things you can do to ensure you’re going to get …

Transcript A question I get from a lot of our readers of popular photography is how can I take better nighttime photos without using a flash? There are a couple of different ways you can do that. The easiest way would be to put your camera on a tripod, and just keep it steady. That …

Transcript Within every single lens, whether it be a DSLR lens or a point and shoot lens, like the one on this camera, there is something that is called an aperture. Now what the aperture is, is essentially a circle that controls how much light comes through the glass and passes through into the sensor …

Transcript One of the most popular styles of photography is outdoor nature photography for obvious reasons – beautiful landscapes and just a really great way to go out and bond with your camera and bond with nature. However, there’s a couple of really important things to remember if this is something you’re interested in. One …

Transcript Another question we get at Popular Photography Magazine is how to take great wildlife photographs. And obviously with great wildlife photographs the key is great locations where there is great wildlife. You can always go to your local zoo and get some great wildlife photographs there. If you’re gonna do that or if you’re …

Transcript There’s a huge market right now for really good wedding photography, and for obvious reasons. It’s a really special moment in people’s lives and they want it documented. So another question we get a lot at Popular Photography is, “How can I take better wedding photographs?” The best tip I could give would be …

Transcript So as cameras have gotten more and more complex, they’ve added a whole list of features that really should be avoided at all costs. One of those features is cropping in-camera. While it can be nice if you’re on the fly and you just want to get a photo cropped in quickly, it’s again …

Transcript A question I get a lot from photographers is, “When is an appropriate time to shoot vertical and when is an appropriate time to shoot horizontal?” The thing about landscape versus portrait photography is it’s really again about a matter of preference. However, there are certain things that will work much better as vertical …

Transcript Along with light, the other basic principle of photography is composition and framing. Photography literally means painting with light, so you want to paint with the light in such a way that fills the frame really well. I have a couple of examples here of photographs I picked that I think demonstrate that well, …

Transcript Another popular form of photography that you’ll see especially on Flickr is HDR photography, and what HDR stands for IS ” High Dynamic Range,” and what that literally means is on a camera like this or a DSLR. Essentially, what you’re going to do is you’re going to take multiple exposures, let’s just say …

Transcript ISO is another way that you can control the overall exposure of your image. And like F-stop or aperture and like shutter speed, it’s just a series of numbers. Traditionally ISO, or as it used to be called by some camera manufacturers, ASA, is a standard that relates to the quality of the image. …

Transcript One thing you’ll hear a lot of photographers talk about and a term that gets thrown around a lot is something called the rule of thirds. Now, I just want to make a point and emphasis this, that it’s not so much a set of rules as it is more a guideline of thirds. …

Transcript If you’re new to digital photography, you probably have a lot of questions about lighting, and it’s a really great place to start because most great photos are made up of great light. So in first starting out, a really good thing to keep in mind is to look for single light sources to …

Transcript The term telephoto generally refers to a lens with a focal length of well over about 120, 150 millimeters in length. The lens doesn’t have to start at 120, 150, but the maximum range should be somewhere around there. So this is, again, a 70 to 200 millimeter lens. This is sort of a …

Transcript High speed photography is certainly one of the more challenging forms of photography out there because you literally have a split second to nail that exposure. One really important thing to remember when shooting high speed subjects is you’re going to need a really quick shutter speed. Something like a 500th of a second …

Transcript One really important thing to remember, especially when shooting outdoors, is to factor in the time of day that you’re shooting. A lot of people will caution you against shooting early in the afternoon or around noontime, just because the sun is directly up in the sky and you’re going to get very harsh …

Transcript Another question we get from our readers a lot at Popular Photography is, “How can I shoot great underwater photos?” There’s a couple different ways you can do that. You can go out and buy an underwater camera. Pentax makes a whole line of rugged cameras that do really, really well under water, that …

Transcript Another option all digital cameras offer is the ability to change a white balance. What a white balance physically is, is the color temperature of the white areas in your image. By selecting the appropriate color temperature of the whites, keeping them true to white, it will mean the rest of the colors in …

Transcript This compact camera has something called digital zoom. Now what digital zoom physically is, it’s not the zoom that’s actually happening when I’m using this lever here, which is physically moving the elements in the lens. Digital zoom literally just takes the sensor within the camera and zooms in on that sensor. So basically, …

Transcript So every great photograph, or every photograph in general, have a proper exposure. And the proper exposure is pretty obvious. It’s just making sure everything, whatever your subject is, is lit well. There are three ways you can control your exposure. It’s basically a balance of these three equations. It’s your ISO, which is …

Transcript Most high end compact cameras and all DSLRs give you the option to select image quality. Now, there’s generally three levels of jpeg image quality. Something along the lines of fine, normal, and basic. Fine being the best and basic being the lowest. Which are different compression levels of how big that file will …

Transcript A DSLR is a pretty big investment for just about anybody. It is important to remember that when you’re going out shooting with your DSLR is to be prepared for really anything. So some tips for shooting with a digital single lens reflex camera include making sure you have plenty of memory cards, always …

Transcript Another really popular form of photography is macro photography, which is essentially close up photography. It’s kind of a confusing term because it’s really in theory very similar to what a microscope does and that is bring something very small in to much larger focus. When shooting macro images it’s important to remember that …

Transcript Time-lapse photography is very similar in context to stop-motion photography except for a couple major differences. Time-lapse is generally longer time intervals, whereas stop-action is generally a little bit quicker. An example of good time-lapse might be setting your camera to shoot every minute for six hours while the sun rises, or while a …

Transcript The standard in digital photography editing, as most people know, is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop’s a really powerful program that can do everything from the simple basics, cropping, brightening, and sharpening your photos, to much, much more complex things like high end portrait editing, dropping out backgrounds, silhouetting images. There’s a whole lot of other …

Transcript So white balance is really the forth variable you control on your camera. Assuming you’re shooting in manual mode. It doesn’t effect the exposure. What it effects is the overall colors in your photograph. The idea being you want to select the whitest point in your frame and have that be corresponding to what …

Transcript All digital images have a certain resolution that the camera will save the photograph at. It’s the important thing to remember if want to make your photograph bigger, if you want to blow it up. A camera like this, a high-end DSLR, the pixel resolution is going to be somewhere around 7,000 pixels by …

Transcript So as you get more comfortable with your camera, chances are you’re going to want to start experimenting with flash photography. It’s a natural progression of any enthusiast, and that’s a great thing. So there’s a lot of different techniques you can use to get the image that you want, and the most basic …

Transcript A really popular form of photography is long exposure photography, which is really great for night scenes, for just kind of pulling out detail that the normal eye, your physical eye wouldn’t ordinarily see. This is something that you’re going to need a tripod for if you want to attempt. Here’s an example of …

Transcript So one advantage of digital photography that a lot of people overlook is the ability to make stopaction films with your digital camera. Whereas when shooting film, film is really expensive. You’re paying for each frame. You can bang out a ton of digital photographs and it doesn’t cost you anything. And the way …

Transcript Portrait photography is easily one of the most difficult forms of photography out there. Because in addition to having to control your exposure and the light, you also throw in the factor that you have a subject that you need to really bring out their natural emotion, at least if you want a good …

Transcript Working for Popular Photography Magazine and a couple other magazines, I end up shooting a lot of studio stuff, mainly product photography. So these are just a couple of examples of just really simple lighting setups that are just really effective. This was shot with three lights, one on one side, one on the …

Transcript You do not necessarily need an expensive DSLR or point-and-shoot to take great photographs. In fact, I personally think the best camera you have is the one that is on you. For a lot of people, for most people that is their cell phone, their iPhone, their Droid or whatever. The reason that it …

Transcript So really the best way to learn composition is to just go out and shoot. In my opinion, good composition at least the way I see it is the frame is going to be filled completely and the entirety of the frame is going to keep your interest and draw your interest. It might …

Transcript Have you ever seen a photograph where everybody’s eyes look really red? Well, that’s called red eye and it’s obnoxious. There’s a couple of ways to avoid getting red eye. If you’re shooting with a DSLR chances are it’s not going to be too much of a problem. Red eye happens when the flash …

Transcript So assuming you’ve already learned what aperture is, I’m going to talk a little bit about what F-stops are. F-stops a numerical scientific value assigned to various openings in a camera lens in the physical aperture. And they go like this, these are full stops. It starts at F1.4, goes to F2.8, F4, F5, …

Transcript Other than aperture, other things that control the final outcome of the exposure of your image are shutter speed and ISO. Shutter speed is a really simple concept and really easy to break down. And I’m going to show you first on this camera and then I’m going to write it out on the …

Transcript While it’s a good to photographs in RAW, the preferred method to save that image is as a TIFF. What a TIFF is physically is a layered file that, as you open an image in Photoshop or Lightroom or any editing program, you can save the individual adjustments you’ve made in the file. If …

Transcript Another nice feature of digital photography is having the LCD screen on the back of your camera. This allows you to instantly see the photo that you shot, corresponding exposure data relating to it; and in addition, as digital cameras have gotten more and more complex there are more and more options, more menus …

Transcript So if you’re shooting photos with a digital camera chances are you’re going to need a memory card. There are a lot of different kinds of memory cards out there but the two most popular formats are something called CF which stands for Contact Flash, looks something like this. Most DSLR’s and professional level …

Transcript The generic image file that most cameras create is called a JPEG. A JPEG is just a very simple file that has the exact exposure as recorded by your camera embedded with your metadata in the image. All computers can process JPEGs and can open JPEGs. It’s the standard for images on the internet. …

Transcript Embedded in every photograph you take with a digital camera is something called EXIF data. What EXIF data physically is a record of all the settings that your camera had when you made that image, things like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, color space. Some cameras will even geo-tag your location of where the image …

Transcript We’re going to talk a little bit about digital camera lenses or just camera lenses in general. Now, any DSLR camera, which stand for Digital Single Lens Reflex with the word lens in there, has a lens that affixes to the front of the camera. Something kind of like this. This happens to be …

Transcript Most high end cameras have the capability to shoot in RAW. Now, if you’ve never heard of RAW before it’s a really marvelous thing for photography. What a RAW file essentially is, it’s very similar to a JPEG file, but instead of just saving the single exposure that you shot it saves a full …