Making Friends With Your Camera!

1. Introduction: A digital camera is one of the most powerful creative tools out there. It is all about making friends with your camera. And after you do that, any camera that you will pick and you'll see you immediately feel this confidence in pating them up and using them. You will also be able to understand all the terms in photography as well as able to understand the basics of photo editing as well. Hi. My name is Astra. I'm an Indian filmmaker, artist, and educator currently based in Vancouver, Canada. I teach film media and photography courses at college and university level. I've been able to take experiences working in film, media, and education industries to learn both creatively and technically about using a digital camera as an effective tool in all its glory. In this class, I want us to make friends with our digital cameras. We will learn to set up our camera. Easy, learn all about its various modes and terms, and most importantly, learn how to shoot in manual mode. My job here is to teach you the ideal balance between What I see is the three holy g of camera setting, one ISO, second aperture and third being shutter speed. The class is more about deals to find the camera and their modes. I found that with just a little effort in learning the artistic and technical language of a camera, You can be easily able to click and error photos like a pro. The class will motivate you to go out, use your camera to its pest and push away the stronger to use your iPhone or your smartphone cameras or just to put your DSLR in order mode. What we want in this class is through interesting classic sizes. To create these billing blocks, finally have all your work in our digital photography portfolio. All right, I'm excited to see you in the next class. Let's make friends with our camera. 2. Camera Setup: Setting up your camera. Hello, everyone. In this class video. I want to discuss all the basic camera stuff. We must get off on the right foot before we head out to shoot some great photos. First thing first, every camera is different in its set up interface physical buttons. I highly advise having your camera manuals at hand or you can easily find setup instruction online if you quickly search them with your specific camera model and manufacturer. Okay. All right. We want to go to our menus, find image quality and change it to raw. This file type literally means raw unprocessed data. We want to use this file type when we shoot on cameras. To get the most information out of the photo we are clicking. It is very helpful when we sit down to edit our photos as well. Next step would be to set up grid display on our cameras. We want to refer to our manuals or a quick online search with a model. In our menu settings, we should be able to get it up and running. I would advise to choose the option three by three. It is the most standard grid line settings used. Now, rotating your camera dials, you should be able to find the icon that says M. Navigate to that. It means that we want to shoot on manual mode rather the auto mode, which is denoted by A. We should be able to find the button for ISO on our cameras. You can use that to change your ISO settings. We will talk about ISO as we progress in our class. In your manual, please locate which pattern or dial. You can see or you can use on your particular model to change your aperture, which is the stop set on your camera. Typically, using a basic DSL and a kit lens, you will be able to see that the range you move. You can move in your camera 4-22. Again, each camera and lens you're using will decide what's the lowest stop number you can go to. And we will talk about it in upcoming classes as well. Now, look at the button or a dial similar to changing your shutter speed settings. You will see them typically going as high as even 2000 to as low as 30 with a quotation mark. Both these tells time and seconds. So if you see your shutter settings on your camera, say 100, it means one by 100 of a second or if you say CS two with otation mark, it means it is 2 seconds, more in on this later. Now, if you want to look at your lens, you should see a small launch like a butter, which typically is set on AF. You may want to change it to MF. It is changing from camera order focus to mammal focus. Now you have the ability to change focus on the subject by rotating smaller ring on your lens. If you have a zoom lens, you should be able to use the bigger ring by rotating it like this to able to change the focal lens. We will talk about it more soon. All right, a camera is set up. For shooting, you may want to use a tripod. Make sure also to have a SD card inserted in your camera, have your batteries charged. One step using the tripod is to make sure that the bubble level is at center. Different tripod manufacturer may have different ways of you moving the centerpiece of your trio to make sure to have the manual at hand. But do make sure that a tripod bubble level is at center to have the perfect desired balance as you start shooting. All right. Let's navigate to our next class video. A. 3. Projects: Hello, everyone. The class project is a combination of four exercises aimed to make you friends with your camera. Our aim is to create a portfolio that can become an amazing space for you to collect the photos you take in the class or generally in your photographic practice afterwards. The first exercise is designed to make you both creatively stimulated and learn how to use the camera to capture colors around you generally. It is understanding of complementary colors using a color wheel. It's like finding combinations that you like the best, for example, red and green orange and blue, such complimentary colors. Second exercise is all about learning about depth of feel in plain language. It is the sharpness of the subject or the background. We would be using our aperture settings on our cameras to achieve shallow depth of feel usually used for portrait photography and large depth of feels used for landscape. Third exercise would be playing around with our Shua speeds. It is all about learning how to capture motion, whether using it to capture these beautiful emotional images or still image of a fast moving object. Fourth exercise in our class project would be working to create this artistic and creative concept. It is producing photos that speaks to your ideas, creativity philosophy by finding inspiration motivations, applying all the technical skills learned to produce highly creative conceptualized photos of your choice. You're free to share your exercises on the class project and also learn how to include them all in your photographic portfolio as we will be seeing in our class videos. I'm excited to start the class now. All right, can't wait to meet you in our next class. 4. All About ISO: Okay. ISO is one of the crucial cornerstone of the exposure triangle. ISO setting determines quality and brightness of an image. A smaller ISO setting, let's say, between ISO 100400 guarantees high quality and sharp image. You won't really see any noise or gray in the picture. A higher ISO settings anywhere above 800 to let's say 32,000 means quality will deteriorate as you increase the ISO number. There is a prominent ISO buttons on most of the cameras for you to play around with and change these settings around. Generally, if it's daytime or just we have a lot of lights window. It means that it is quite safe to have our IS the lowest possible setting. Let's say 100. We are only interested in changing our stock settings and shutter setting after after we have set our ISO. We have to make sure that we have set our quality to its highest, then we build from there. Then we move on to thinking about depth of field and the motion of an object. All right. Let's say we are shooting at low light conditions indoors or let's say shooting at night under only street lights or just getting some light around us from shops, houses, restaurants, cafes, and cars around us. After setting our top and shutter speed settings to its best possible scenario, we check back with our ISO to see if it's still quite dark. Generally, then you have to make sacrifice. Just sacrificing the quality of the photo in order to get a photo, which is well exposed and visible. That's why a lot of night shots have grains and noise in them compared to if they're taken during the day. So we have to sort of navigate now 800-32 thousand ISO settings in the degree of light that is available around us. Let's say we are in a well busy street. Maybe ISO 800 with a low approaches setting, and optimum shorter speed setting, able to give us a well exposed photo. But as we move away to a darker alleyway, we have to then increase ISO to now let's say 16,000 just to barely see anything. You shouldn't move to a low ser speed setting because then you will start capturing images that are on Balan still, and we can see a lot of motion blow. Okay. In following videos, we will definitely talk about various scenarios. So it becomes really abundantly clear for us how to best use our exposure settings. Again, guys, All of this for the first time can seem a little overwhelming. But again, as you go and break down each common scenario that you as photographers beginning to explore their digital SLAs will face. I'm pretty sure you will be able to take away a lot from a following course videos and also implement them practically so that any ideas about exposure triangle, ISO, stop, aperto depth of field, ser speed, motion blow, will sink deeper into practicable and tangible ideas that you can access and really understand for yourself while you are experimenting with your cameras. Okay. 5. Depth of Field: Okay. Depth of feel is the acceptable sharpness of the subject and object in front of you. This is the most simple and plain language I can think of to have explained this to you. So it is in photography and videography. It is often classified as shallow and large depth of field. So we will break it down for you so you can understand it properly. Okay. So as we have learned that, to settings on a camera controls the aperture. To put it simply, it is always great to think in terms of this inverse relationship. So if your stop number on your camera is low, then it means a higher aperture. A higher aperto means your lens and camera, allowing more space or just a window that is open for the light to come in inside your camera and process image. That is why a lower stop number from 1.8 to let's say 5.6 on your camera means a greater aperture. It means you're allowing a lot of light to enter and make your subject really pop out. Hint portrait photography with the principal subject and focus utilizes a F stop number that is low. So it means that we are creating a shallow depth of field or you can say that the meaning that it is the acceptable sharpness is limited to only a subject. That's why we may see in a good portrait photo. It is all about the subject being in clear sharpness and focus while you see a background blur. This is very cinematic look in filmmaking and it's a principle aesthetic in portrait photography to have a background blur, shallow depth of field. Now, if you move our extra settings on our camera to a high number, let's say somewhere between nine to even as high to all the way to 22. It means that we are creating a lower virtue, a lower window, allowing less light to enter a camera. It is often the case that we care about creating a large depth of field, meaning creating sharpness and focus to a background rather than just focusing on the subject. Okay. High top setting and a low apojo is mainly utilized when we are taking landscape photos. So when we are interested in capturing a lot of subjects, their relationship to the background activities. Instead, in portrait photography, just one or two primary subjects. Thus, a high stop setting is used to create a larger depth of field. All right, guys, in my experiences, there is a sweet spot when we care about the sharpness of the Celts subject, as well as the background. This is generally the case for a lot of street photography. Where we want to possibly capture some elements of a subject as well as the near background around them. Medium depth of field, as I like to say, can be achieved by using a F stop that goes from the range of 5.6 to eight to line. In my experiences, an expensive lens would allow you to achieve a really low stop number. But DS its with primary lenses often can allow you to go on stop as low as three to four. They are good and great starting points to shoot with shallow depth of fields and also try shooting good landscape photos of a city of mountain ranges, of nature of hikes and trails with a higher stop number. A low stop number means you're allowing a lot of light in, a higher stop number means you're allowing a little bit of light in. But again, it depends upon if the subject is your hero, if the whole come passing background is your hero. Again, after that, we move on to our other exposure settings. Is insurers pees, all these three settings are interdependent of each other but depth of field is such an important concept for us as photographer still d. 6. Shutter Speed: One of the crucial settings on our DSLs shutter speeds. It is so amazing to have the ability to actually maneuver between our shutter speeds to either capture still images of a fast moving object or just to capture these trails of motire in a slow setting, which are known as motion blows. Show speed settings, in my experiences on our cameras can be seen as numbers like 30 or 60 or 100, or thousand, which means it is either 30th of a second or 68th of a second or so on. It is like blinking our eyes and capturing a stemgHw fast to bling is to your camera, is the show speed allowing light to enter the camera. So if the camera is, let's say, allowed only one by 1000th of a second when your camera reads 1,000, It means your camera will just instantly capture precise position of an object. One by 1,000 of a second. A high share of speed is used to capture still images of high speed moving objects like a racing car or athletes running during a football match. Now, using a very low she speed where your camera may read something like one or two or 30. The quotation mark here means seconds. It means your camera lens is open for one or two or even 30 seconds depending upon the settings you choose. You will hear the sheer sound in the camera only after let's say 2 seconds have passed or 30 seconds. If we choose to do that, we use low shear speeds to capture motion blurs. The beautiful traffic shots that you often see are result of the low sheer speed settings. Now, let's talk about optimum shuto speeds. The shuto speeds, which is comparable to a human eye and real life motion. In my experiences, the shuto speed settings of 30 or 50, which is one 38/second or one 50th second are the best optimum setting to capture daily scenarios. Daily scenarios are often not high speed moving objects or capturing motion blows. It is like street photography or still portraits of friends or family of flowers or trees. Anyways, I advise everyone to not go below one 38th of a second and not above 100th of a second. The sweet spot is between 1308 of a second 21100 of a second. As soon as you go below one by 38 of a second where your camera may reach 2010, 15, five, and then one with a quotation mark, it means you're going near slow so speeds, and you will start seeing as we talked about, appearance of motion blur, not ideal to capture still photos of real life scenarios. Similarly, if you start going above 100, that is maybe 128200 of a second, 500 of a second, you will start seeing real dark images. You have to really understand that a lower sho speed number means photos appearing more pride because our camera has more time to take in all the lights and more darkers for a sho speed number because it has really less time to get exposed to the subject in front of us. All right. Thank you for sticking with this class video. I'll see you in the next class. 7. Color Harmony: In this assignment, I want you to have a look at the color wheel and click two photos of two different pairings of color combinations readily available around you. You are encouraged to be creative and choose color pairings that will work. Okay. All right. So complimentary colors are so ever present in our lives, in our homes, in our wardrobes, architecture, art, spaces, and the food we eat. The color wheel, as you can see here, simply guides you into picking color combinations that can work really well for you. If you're free to be creative, choose odd parings of colors as well that you feel works really well, right? It is all about your creativity. You know what? Complimentary colors can also be black and white. If you think about it, you can be bold and also be experimental with black and white photography, if you may choose. Look at your camera manual and see how to switch your picture style to monochrome. Combining the technical ideas that we have covered in our videos. I want you to express yourself. Choose two unique color pairings from the color wheel that work for you. These are complimentary colors and show us here on class project what you're being able to convey. I also suggest highly to take some time and edit your photos on either light room, photoshop or free photo editing software like Canva or Photo P. Please refer to the photo editing made Easy video. Please make notes of your exposure readings on your camera and of your photos that you're clicking. That is your ISO, stop, and Sher speed settings. Now, make come up with a clever title of the photos that you're clicking and also mention the camera and the lens that you're using. And again, exposure readings, right? Thank you and see you in the next class cheers. 8. Lightroom Basics: Please open Lightroom classic on your computers or Max. Please make sure you're working on Lightroom classic, not light robe. There is a difference. Ideally, for computers and desktops, classic is preferred. As you can see here, I want to import a photo from my ED card, which is connected to my Mac mini here. I'm able to see all the photos here in my ED card folder. So make sure to click on and check all and just select the photo or photos we want to work on. So all right, let's click on port. Over here at the library, the primary information that you see is the exposure settings that you have used and the focal length you used as well. So, it is a histogram, which gives us the spread of darker and brighter areas of our photo. Leftmost area concerns with darker shades while the rightmost with more whiter and brighter parts of our photos. Let's head to develop. Here, the first tool you see is a crop or a re size one. Simple enough, you can omit the areas you may not like. Here, you can see the mask button. Click on this. You can see that light room will give you a bunch of options of creating a layer mask of subject or background or even sky. So let me click on subject mask layer. That tells me that the layer has been identified by light room. Perfect. Now you can see in this first layer panel, there is a plus sign. Click on that, and you should be able to now create a background layer as well. The red area color shows that light room has identified the background layer too. You can click written or just click and the mask layer would be created. If you feel that you may want to control of how you choose your background or the object layer, very specifically. You can select the brush tool here and a bunch of other options and just select the areas that you want to select instead of light room automatically doing that for you. Again, it would be again this sort of red area that you would be brushing or selecting. Perfect. Moving on, I'm making some changes on how I see my photo should be. You can see how my histogram is reacting. So any changes that you make is actually a direct response to the changes being seen in the photos histogram. If I make changes specifically using black or shadows, then the left part that concerns itself with black and darker parts would respond naturally. Similarly, if I interact with the whites or highlights, it's a right part of the histogram that would appear to change. Here you can see how you can compare the changes in your photos by using the compare feature in Lightroom classic quite easy. Make sure it reads y y. It is basically about comparison of before and after, and you can change the various ways you can preview it as well. In the second photo that I am choosing, I am looking to edit in an interesting fashion. I have this photo with a slow shad of speed with a bit of motion blow. I am making changes with my its, plaques, highlights and shadows, and also contrast to see how I can make this more inviting. It is relative of how you want to make changes to a specific photo. Now, here, as I can see with temperature, you may remember in our white balance course videos, when we use raw file format, opening files in light room, we can see the exact color temperature in Kelvin. So if we increase the dial, more hues of orange yellow and to the left, if we move our dial more shes of blue. Basically moving this dial temperature dial to the left means telling the software that the color temperature is pretty low, which is a lie in this case, because it was sort of bright and sunny outdoors. That's why such blue color can be seen on a light room to bring the color temperature up. Alright, you can see our collective history of the work that we have done. If you're not happy, you can also use to clear it out and you can just begin afresh. And also, you can see and track your journey. He said, there are a bunch of really cool filters and scenarios that light room has for you. You can also make your photo as black and white from here, as you can see. Now, I'm looking for something that has a lot of rainy effects. So I feel there are presets that might just work out for me. So after all our hard work, we want to export a photo so we can share it out or even just consider it for printing. All right, so to do that, go to file, export. You can see you can choose the folder, create a folder as well, to be more organized. Make sure to choose custom here so that you can name your file as you want. Then select the file format. I would go for JPEG here. You can also choose different file formats that you like. PSD and DNGs are usually prefer if you want to work on them over photoshop after this or open them with a similar photo editing software. All right. Thank you, guys. Hope this light room course basic tutorial has been helpful. See you in the next course videos. Cheers. 9. Shutter Speed Project: Hello, everyone. In this class exercise, we want to play with our shear speeds. So, all right, guys, as a refresher, if you need it, navigate back to my Sar speed video. All right. So I want you guys to one. Produce a picture with motion blur that to a mid range motion blur. A protip to use a slow motion blur setting. It's ranging anything from one by tenth of a second to say 2 seconds. If you're looking to get motion blur effect this still object around you, just move your camera. Just to move your camera, right? Now, the second problem here is to produce a picture with motion work. Now, working with the slowest speed possible. A pro tip here is to now move your so speed setting all the way down to 30 seconds. Now, my advice is to use a tripod here, then choose, I would say a nighttime or if inside, tin the lights around. Making sure that your S of settings are at the lowest and the s of speed and your top is really high to balance your exposure. Now, the third prompt is produce a picture with really high shuttle speed. Now, move your shuttle speed dial all the way to a high number like one by 1,000/second and try to snap a picture of fast moving object or maybe a running tab. Now, these two fun prompts, I also want to throw in here. Now, the first prompt here is, use your focus ring to completely defocus and create amazing looking bouquet shots of your choice. The second bonus prom is find a reflection or an amazing perspective to click amazing photos of your creative genius. Alright, guys, I'm looking forward to seeing your wonderful photos in the class project section. Please mention the specific prompt you are responding to and also find time to edit your photos before uploading always a good practice that I plan. I'm very helpful to the class. If you can also note down the exposure settings of your photos. Again, S everyone we'll see you in the next class. 10. White Balance: White balance is used to adjust colors to match the colors of the light source so that white objects appear white. Subjects may lit by a number of different light sources, including sunlight, in Candacent verbs and fluorescent lighting. You can see on your camera there should be a WB button, or you can see your camera manuals to search online for your particular camera model and how to navigate into changing the white balance. There are presets built in your camera which are auto incandescent, fluorescent, direct sunlight, flowery, shade, and then in some camera models. You can also see custom set, standing for Kelvin. Okay. All right. As you can see here in this image, how different white balance settings respond to temperature outside. So if you're shooting outdoors, then you are telling your camera that hey, it is warm outside. So when we change our white balance settings from the WB button or the WB icon to daylight or shade or manually put in at a higher temperature. It means that we're communicating the temperature that we think our surrounding is. So increasing the temperature on our camera or even light room or any photo editing software means adding amber or red or to cool the bluer tones. Now, for indoors, when the light temperature is really low, it means that we are lowering our ties in camera or light room settings. Incandescent or white fluorescent white balance sing means we are telling our camera that we are add a lower temperature sex. Thus, camera will add more blues to balance the reds and the ambos. So in real life, when you see a fire, blue color means more warmth naturally in terms of Kelvin or Celsius. But in simpler terms in photography, it is more like that blue means more cool and red as more warmer. By nature, blue skies means more light available to us. But for our simple understanding, if we are increasing our camera values of Kelvin or Celsius, it means that we are putting in the temperature we think outside should be. To break it down in simple language. When it is nice and sunny outside with clear blue skies, we choose presets, which is daylight, telling our camera the temperature out there is high in terms of the light available to us. Please add more red ambus and yellow. Now, with the shade setting, we are telling that the temperature or the light available is really high. So please add a lot of reds and ambers to compensate that. But when it's overcast or darker clouds out there, almost no sun, we tell our camera that hey, it is bright outside, but there is a little less light. So the cloudy white balance, the preset will add a balance of blues, reds and ambers to give it a fair balance. But when you are inside and you just have let's say verbs, LDs and indo lighting. You may choose incandescent of fluorescent presets. This tells the camera that, hey, the light available to us or the light temperature is pretty low. So to compensate the reds and the ambers inside, it will add a lot of blues. To get the white balance required. Try for yourself if you can use incandescent white balance setting on a bright day outside. You will see your fort turn out to be super blue. So similarly, if you use shade preset inside your house during late evenings, it will be uncharacteristically amber or red. So it is so crucial for us to make use of our white balance settings properly. Generally, our white balance settings on our camera is set to do, meaning our camera is interpreting, whether you are inside or outside, or it is cloudy or bright. So I want you to now be in full control, always be in the habit of changing your white balance setting, reading, in which setting you are outside, is it cloudy or are you inside right now? Thank you so much, everyone. Let's move on to our next class. Okay. 11. Exposure Settings Tips: Getting our exposure settings right. In photography, when we say exposure settings, it means ISO, F stop and Serped. These three settings are part of the exposure triangle, and they are the cornerstone of any camera out there. Once you get the hang of the balance of these three settings responding to real life scenarios, I am confident that you can pick any camera in the world and just be friends with it. So as I have mentioned this before, different cameras of different manufacturer would have different interface, different names, to the same settings and some unique features. But the essence of exposure settings is the same. All right, everyone. The best way to learn the balance of exposure settings is to go through real life scenarios. So let's have a quick look at a bunch of photos in real life and try to talk about the settings that were used clicking there. So in this photo, here we can see a tennis ball captured in middle of motion. It means a high shed of speed, we can see the quality is good and depth of feel is shallow. So to get this result, we want to have a high shed of speed, a low stop setting, and a low ISO value. Now, in this second portrait photo, we clearly see it daylight. Our subject is in focus. There is background plow, good quality, still motion to achieve this, navigate to a low stop number, low ISO number, and then use your shutow speed settings to set how bright or dark you want your image to be. We want still portrait. So we don't really want to go below one by 30th of a second. In this photo, it is all about taking a photo during night. It is tricky, everyone. We don't have a lot of light in here. So we want to now operate at a lower stock number, an ideal shutter speed number. Nothing below one by 32nd. We still want a still image not motionar here. Now, we may have to use a higher ISO number, so to get it bright enough, visible image. So generally during night, A conditions with not enough light. We have to sacrifice a bit of quality. Now, this is a landscape for everyone. We know that we need to work on a large stock number, a large depth of feel 11-22. We want to use the ISN number 200-800 for a decent quality and navigate cero speed to an idea number of one by 30th a second to get good exposure. Reading this image, we can clearly see motion glow. This means guys that Archer speed is quite low. I would say it is about 30 seconds. Now to get this kind of result, we want to use a tripod ideally for stability. Because it will take your cameras 30 seconds without interruption to get this exposure. It also means that your F stop settings would be quite high and your ISO really low. A lower shutter speed setting means a lot of exposure, meaning a lot of light coming into your camera. This is a simple street shot achieving this means using a mid range stop 4-8, a low ISO for quality and a ser speed ranging from one by 38 to 100 of a second for a stable shot. Everyone, it is not easy to get the balance right in the first time. Even though I've broken these scenarios for you, it will be best for you to discover what I'm really talking about for yourself. All these exposure settings on their extremes produce extreme results. A balance is always working on a lower ISO, F stop in low in range, shutter speed from one by 30 to one by hundred for many photos in real life scenarios. But to get interesting results to achieve very specific loads. You may want to just take time and practice and go through class videos lowly and surely. Also make sure to have your white balance settings change accordingly. Thank you, everyone. Let's hop onto our next class video. Okay. 12. Depth of Field Project: Hello, everyone. I want us to now play with our camera apertures. Change our stop settings and click some amazing photos. I would advise everyone to refer to my aperture and depth of field class video. Just as a refresher for this particular exercise. Now, the first prompt is produce a picture with the shallowest depth of field. As much as your camera would allow. A quick tip, your top setting would be the lowest that your camera or your lens can allow. If you will notice that if you're using a zoom lens and if you're changing your focal length or just zooming it like this, the lowest top setting you can use would change. So my advice would be to not change your focal length and it as close to your object or subject. Physically as much as you can to achieve the lowest stop setting in your camera lens. Now, second prompt is producing a picture with a mid range shallow depth of field. For this, maneuver your top settings anywhere between 5.6 to eight. Our goal here is to get both the subject and a little bit of background as well. This is ideal for street photography. Here we want to get both the subject and the nearby background activities both in sharpness of focus. Now, the third prompt is to produce a picture with a deep or a large depth of field. All right, everyone. So let's play with a larger stop settings. So here, anywhere 9-14 would do, aim is to get the details of the background more and more clear. The fourth prompt here is to produce a picture with the largest depth of field that your camera can allow. We want to now navigate to a highest est of settings to get the most details of a beautiful landscape. Dally, this setting, as I mentioned, is for landscape photography, where our aim is to try to capture a lot of details. So think of a mountain range or a city escape from a b, right? So getting a lot of details in. All right, guys, all our photos with FTOps are interdependent with each other with other two exposure settings as well. That is ISO and Sopeed. So again, please feel free to upload these photos and class project. Come up with clever names and titles. Also do mention which prompt you're responding to from that I've given one to four with your exposure settings. As always, sit down on your computer, on your light room, other photo editing softwares to make your photo pop even more. 13. Compositional Strategies: Let's talk about compositional strategies that you can use while taking photos. I want to talk about rule of thirds, one of the most useful and time tested practices using your standard three by three grid lines on your camera screen. Some characteristics we can discuss here are nine equal quadrants, providing a helpful visual cue, compartmentalizing subjects and objects. Helping in creating a flow between subject and object as well, balance and equilibrium, organizing light and shadows in a more concise way. Other compositions we can achieve using rule of thirds are centered. It gives us two equal halves, gives us tunnel vision, effect, organize attention, it is aesthetically pleasing. It is simpler in its organization of all the elements, and like rule of thirds, it organizes flow of colors and light this time. Other perspective weight strategies that we can use such as shooting from below or even above. So Below gives us the idea of being small or maybe looking at something more powerful to us while looking from above is more about observing things which may look smaller than they might be, or it gives us specific idea of our relationship to it or them. Frame within a frame is a very interesting strategy. It is basically a frame in terms of, let's say, a window or a door within our camera frame. So you can find natural frames around nature with trees and various natural or man made structures as well. Now, let's talk about leading lines. The lead your vision, the command focus gives you a sense of direction. Also, leading you in and out of the subject and object. Then there are advanced strategies in terms of using triangles and diagonals to frame. These can be sort of advanced leading lines, creating shapes from a point of focus and organization of various elements. You can also use negative space effectively to communicate an interesting idea of mystery or intrigue or may give your eyes a breathing room of sorts. There are other interesting composition ideas in terms of the golden triangle and golden ratio. They all for someone, starting out can be incorporated by simply using as mentioned, our three by three grid lines on a camera, you can think of them as advanced form of rule of thirds. These composition strategies are highly effective once you have your exposure settings all set as you can follow the previous course videos. Thank you and see you in the next class video. 14. Creative Photo Project: Hi, everyone. I want us to explore our unique creativity. In previous class exercise, we responded to various problems relating to specific camera settings. This time, I want you to be a free flowing creative person who is aware of the technical abilities of the camera. It is now time for you to hone down your artistic eye and endeavors to click three amazing photos of your choice. Now, these three photos will be the highlight of your digital portfolio. Please refer to my making the digital photo portfolio as a refresher. All right, guys. What I want from you is to find an artistic inspiration, let's say, a photographer, an artist or a concept that really speaks highly to you. Choose the story that you want to tell. Do you want to talk about, let's say, your immediate surroundings or your travels or an abstract concept or life in general, or the people as you see it around you. Now, in your digital portfolio, I want you to take some time and write about the concepts that you are working here. Come up with a unique title for the photos you are taking. If you like please, I would suggest mentioning the exposure settings, the camera and the lenses that you are using. You can also write in the descriptions of your photos about your technical ideas or even as I mentioned, your artistic inspiration. All right, guys, you are free to share the photos directly here or the links to your first online digital photo portfolios. I'm so eager to see the wonderful work that the class can produce here. Okay. Thank you so much for following up with all these exercises. I sincerely hope that these can serve as something useful in your journey of becoming an amazing photographer. Cheers, everyone. 15. Digital Portfolio: I will show you basic steps of curating both an online as well as an offline portfolio for your reference. A digital portfolio is a very powerful way of curating your work. You can find a space to create different sections of your creative photos. It is also a very interesting way to relay your vision out there in the world. I would like to see you try your hand in creating a simple and beautiful photo portfolio. You can use services like ICs, which allows users to create free websites with tons of great photography and creative templates. I also recommend for offline portfolios as well, which can be shared as simply as PDFs or presentations by using free design softwares like v. It is a very easy and user friendly software, which has a lot of design templates and customization options. 16. Final Tips: Thank you for following up with all the course videos. I sincerely hope that they were of help can become the foundational basis for your photographic and creative journey. In closing, I would like to point out that all the projects I've asked you guys to participate in will aid you immensely to put together both the theory of photography and to a tangible practical. Thus, a digital portfolio in today's digital age is crucial for others to see your work curated in a concise manner. In addition, it is a very effective way of motivating yourself and also communicating your creative vision in a more professional manner. Lastly, there are a few tips for show that I want to discuss, which in my experiences, working with the camera, I found useful. While setting your exposure settings in manual mode on your camera, I aim to first set my ISO to its lowest number possible. Then move on to my Aposure setting, and then lastly, my shut of speed. If I If still, I am not satisfied with the exposure I am getting, I revisit my ISO. I only sacrifice my low ISO settings when my pogo and surer speed setting doesn't give me ample of exposure that I'm looking for. This is quite common during night time or low light conditions. Second useful tip, multiple shots of one frame. Maybe in different angles. I would rather have 100 photos to choose from rather going through ten. It is my personal experience till now that out of 100 only ten would satisfy me. So take a lot of bad photos to find the gem you are looking for. The last tip is to always check your focus multiple times. Sometimes it is too bright out there we are able to accurately read a mind looking at the small camera screens that we have in our cameras. If the focus on our subject is sort of right or wrong. Always double and triple check your focus. And when in doubt, if it's in focus or not, retake a photo and do a focus check. A great photo can be down with an improper focus when you look at the photo at a larger screen later. So thank you everyone for taking your time out and following these course videos. I sincerely hope that I'm able to help you become a better photographer. It has been a pleasure curating this course and best of love with making friends with your camera.