You really like taking pictures, you just bought or received as a present a very nice camera, or a new cell phone that has a camera in it. It doesn’t matter what you use, it could be a DSLR, a small camera or a new cell phone, what matters the most is the person who holds it and if he knows how to use it.
So the first thing to do would be to read the manual. I know, you are eager to use your camera, to try all the functions and see what it can do, you think that you don’t need to read those instructions, you didn’t even read the new TV manual and it works fine… Trust me, your camera isn’t a TV or any other electronic device, in order to make the most of it you’ll need to know how it works, and by that I don’t mean to click that button that captures the image 🙂
At the start some of the things you’ll read about won’t mean a lot, it’s OK when you’ll read it again thing will be clearer, I have my current camera for about a year and a half, and I keep on reading the manual once in a while and discover some things I didn’t before.
Second most important thing is to take a lot of pictures, the more you’ll take the better you’ll get, the nice thing about digital cameras is that you can take a picture, look at it right after you took it and decide if you want to keep it or not, even better – don’t delete the pictures, wait until you’ll be at home and watch them on your monitor, see what you could have done better, learn from your mistakes.
Try to take your camera with you where ever you go, take pictures of everything you find interesting, remember – the more you’ll take the better you’ll get.
Now lets get technical, composition;
If your subject is a person you want to take your shoot at eye level (usually, you can take it otherwise to achieve all kinds of purposes, but usually that’s how you want to do it).
So if you take a picture of a kid for example you’ll need to crouch and be at the same eye level.
One more thing that will make your pictures looks better is called the rule of third, to make things simpler it means that each picture you take should be divided to 9 equals parts, see the example below. (more on the rule of thirds here)
So when taking a picture of someone you should place him on one of the vertical lines and the eyes on the upper vertical line.
Don’t forget that rules are meant to be broken, so don’t always act like that’s the only way of taking pictures, but it’s a good guideline.
Now go, grab your camera and take pictures, I’ll be happy to see your results at the comments bellow.
Have fun!