Mastering Photography: The Basics

1. Introduction: Hi guys, welcome to mastering photography basics. This is a quick introduction. My name is Sophia Carey and I am a photographer based in the UK. I mostly specialize in fashion photography, portraiture, and events. Although you will find me dabbling in music and landscapes, and anything else I can get my hands on. In this class, I'm basically going to be talking you through, what I think the fundamentals, the basics, the essentials of photography are. You don't need to know anything about photography. We're going to be starting right at the basics, talking about the three things that I think are most important. They are mastering the exposure triangle, color theory, and composition theory. The tips that we will be going through will be applicable to any type of photography, whether it be street or music, or portraiture, or landscape, or whatever it is you're trying to do. We will also have a group projects which I'll be introducing in the next lesson. The course is designed so that you can watch it all in one go if you want or you can do a series of a few days, it's up to you. Just sit back, enjoy, and if you have any questions, my contact details are in the project description. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: Before we get started with the actual teaching of this module, I just want to set you guys a task. This task is going to run throughout the class and you can upload your progress and get feedback and give feedback throughout the class. Your assignment is to take four photographs, one that demonstrates the use of shutter speed, one that demonstrates the use of color theory, one that demonstrates the use of composition theory, and one using manual mode and using the exposure triangle to set your exposure. If you need help throughout the module, please do upload your photos, we can give them a bit of feedback, that's it's here for, we're here to learn and to share our knowledge. When you upload your photos, please also add a description as to which of the four photos this one is and how you achieve your desired effect. What materials do you need? Whilst DSLR that allows you to use a manual setting is ideal, I know that not everyone might have access to a DSLR, which is why I'm saying just use whatever camera you have handy. Even some phones allow you to shoot in manual and set your ISO, shutter speed, and aperture and I've also linked a couple of apps that you might be interested in that help you do that if you're not sure if your phone has that capability and you can check those out in the project description. A top tip for this brief is shoot in rule. Your camera will have a setting or it should do that allows you to shoot in JPEGs or RAW. If you shoot in RAW, you will be able to have more control of your image when post-processing. If you're not sure if you have the capabilities or the equipment to process RAW imagery, there should always be an option on your camera to shoot both in JPEG and in RAW. With that said, let's get going, let's start with the first lesson, which will be the exposure triangle. 3. Exposure Triangle: What is the exposure triangle? The exposure triangle refers to three variables that determine the exposure of a photograph after shutter speed and ISO. In order to be able to shoot in manual and have full control over your images, you want to learn how to balance these three elements of the triangle. How did the three elements affect exposure? Aperture refers to the size of the lens opening. It essentially controls the amount of light that set into the lens. The larger the opening the more light that comes into the lens, hits your sensor, and brightens up the image. The shutter speed refers to how long your shutter is open for whereby how much light comes in and hits the sensor. If your shutter is open for longer time and you have a slow shutter speed, then more light is going to come into the camera, hit the sensor, and brighten up your image. ISO refers to actual sensitivity of your camera sensor, so the higher the ISO the more sensitive your sensor is and the lower the less sensitive is. Let's quickly go into a little bit more detail about what each three of them mean because they don't just affect your exposure. Aperture also affects your depth of field. Depth of field basically refers to what's in focus in the image, so if you have smooth depth of field let's talk f/1.8 then maybe what's in your foreground will be in focus but what's in your background won't be for example. Therefore if you have a deep depth of field and a smaller aperture, then more of the image will be in focus. This is good for landscapes for example, whereas the smaller depth of field is great for portraits where you want the background so it will not be in focus. The numbers get a bit confusing when we're talking about aperture. The larger the aperture the smaller the number; like 1.8, and therefore the smaller the aperture the larger the number like f/22. The shutter speed also affects motion and the way that your camera captures that motion. For example, if the shutter is open for longer to let more light in, it's also capturing more movement. This creates a motion blur and can be really good if you're making images where you have light trails and stuff like that. I'll put an example here. If you want to freeze movement however, you're best using a faster shutter speed so that shutters goes quicker and you get that freeze frame of a second. In the example currently on screen I asked my subject to just stay really still while the carousel behind him was rotating and moving about, and then set our camera on a tripod, set a slow shutter speed. Then in the final image as you can see, my subject is in focus and the background behind him has a motion blur. Shutter speed is measured in fractions, for example, one of a second. When you have a really slow shutter speed it has these little apostrophes, and that basically represents a second. Your ISO also affects your noise or your grain of your image. As the ISO increases, the presence of digital noise increases as well. If you want a clear image with no noise, you're best using a lower ISO. I'm also going to add a cheat sheet into the project description so that you guys can see this, save it; save into phones, wherever you want to do, print out put out on any wall just to help you get used to what these three corners of the triangle I wrote about. Using what you've learned in this lesson, you should be able to just complete two of your images. The first one using shutter speeds, so whether that's a light trail image, capturing motion blur, or capturing action in a freeze-frame scenario. The second one is shooting a photo in manual with full control over the ISO shutter speed and aperture. In our next lesson, we're going to be talking at all about color theory. 4. Colour Theory: Why? Why do we start with color theory? It is arguably my favorite theory in photography. I love playing around with colors and seeing the effect that they have on my photographs. Color can have a massive effect on your photographs and the emotion that your photographs convey. Not only that, but you can use colors to make your images more eye-catching or more cohesive, easier on the eye, it's something that I find essential to photography. I'm going to go through my three most used color pairings within my photograph. The first and maybe the most effective use of color theory within photography, I will leave that you to decide that, is using complementary colors. Complementary colors refer to colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. As per the name, these colors just compliment each other and just generally look good, and the strong contrast between them often make images pop, which is really good for catching people's eyes. You should have seen some examples up on the screen of how I personally used complementary colors throughout my work. Monochrome colors are the next colors that I want to talk about. People often think of monochrome as black and white while actually monochrome translates to one color. Using a monochromatic color scheme, which basically refers to just using one dominant color, is a great way to keep the phrase cohesive as I've shown in these examples on the screen. Finally, analogous, that is very difficult to say, I challenge you to say that 10 times. Analogous colors are basically colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. For example, you might have a yellow with and green, a yellow, and then a yellow urine. Using these three colors together is a great way to create a cohesiveness and harmony within your image. After this lesson, you should now be equipped to do one more of your photographs, whether or not you want to implement complementary colors, analogous colors, or harmonious colors, have a go, let us see what you're doing and try them out. In the next video, we're going to be talking about the final concepts to be able to complete your four images and that is composition. 5. Composition Tips: Let's talk about composition. There are a lot of different compositional tips that you can explore. I think you could ask any photographer and they would all have a different view on what makes a perfect composition. I'm not going to talk to you about how to make a perfect composition. I want to talk to you about some of the tips that I like to use within my own work that I think are effective composition tips. The first tip that I'd like to talk about is using leading lines. Leading lines, essentially refer to putting your subject somewhere in the image then using the lines that are in the image to direct the viewer's eye to your subject. For example, you can have a subject stood here. Here's your subject and as meander of a river, it comes down here and leads to your subject. Your viewer's eye is then going to follow the meander straight to your subject. Or for example, you could have the lines of a cop-out roof. Imagine you're looking at a cop-out roof and the lines go like this and your subject is in the middle. These lines are going to lead to your subject and make your viewers eyes draw into the subject. You can also use lines in an environment in cohesion with whoever your subject is. For example, in these two images that I'm going to be showing you, both of my subjects are people. In the first image, we've got a picture of the lovely Holly. She's stood by the staircase and as you can see, her arms, her limbs are following the line of the stairs. What this does is it just creates a certain type of cohesion within the image. You don't have overlapping lines, you don't have a chaotic composition and this is going to settle your viewer and make it easier to adjust. You can also see in the second image of [inaudible] how they are facing the slope of the Bannister and this creates a similar effect. An example of how an image might be chaotic with the use of lines is, for example, if you took a photo of me sat like this and there was a fence behind me, and if the fence line went through my head, this line would be distracting. It would be chaotic, it would interrupt the image and the way that they view it is digesting that image and that's not something you want to remove. Let's look at framing. There are so many ways to frame your subject. You could frame them within a window that was behind them, or you could frame through a gap in a fence. You can get really creative of your framing and how you frame your subject. In this image to the side, we've got the modal low bay and he is stood lower down the main, arms straight high up on some stairs, and the actual stairs are framing low bay in this composition. What this does is it just creates another dimension and it makes the image far a little bit more interesting. Another compositional tip is to use symmetry within your work. Wes Anderson famously does this. I'm going to show you some Wes Anderson pictures up here if you're not familiar with his work. Wes Anderson within his films and his artwork famously uses symmetry to create an interesting composition. Another tip when you're using symmetry is to center whoever your subject is or whatever your subject is, whether it's a person or a tree, within the center of your symmetrical environment. This is similar to using leading lines and draws you viewers eyes into the middle of the subject. They are arguably my favorite tips when it comes to composition. Matching your composition can be really effective and useful within your imagery. It's definitely not something that you want to take lightly or neglect. Now we've spoken about composition, have a go using one of these tips within your photograph and let's have a look at what you've been creating. [NOISE] You should have now create all four of your images and we can get to give them feedback, giving advice, and if needs be, keeping trying, keeping practicing, and keeping exploring these different aspects of photography.