Taking the Picture
Exploring digital photography should be a joyful experience. After all, photography gives us the opportunity to express our feelings. If you are pursuing photography, you've felt the satisfaction that comes from producing a photograph that works. Effective photos move people. They can make us feel uplifted or dispirited, nostalgic or repulsed, regretful or homesick, serene or agitated. Every picture conveys a message. The trick is to make it the message you intend.
Photojournalists take a number of shots from different distances or zoom settings. The three basic shots are a close shot, a medium shot, and a long shot. Together these tell a story. Photographing a series like this is also a good learning experience, as it forces you to see the same scene in different ways.
As with other skills, your skill as a photographer will increase the more you practice, practice, practice. Using a digital camera makes it even easier to learn by trial and error. First of all, you can preview your shot in the LCD screen. If you don't like what you see, you simply delete it and try again. Second, you can benefit from the instant feedback and make adjustments in lighting, angle of view, and composition as necessary. Finally, you don't have to spend money on film and processing in order to create dozens of images.
The first step to being a good photographer is learning to see the world as the camera sees it. When we look around us, we automatically and unconsciously screen out a lot. Clutter seemingly disappears from our view. Not so with the camera; it will record everything in a scene. As we look at the world, we are viewing it in three dimensions. The camera produces a two-dimensional image. Our eyes adapt to the lighting, but the camera's does not. The photographer learns to recognize and make alterations for these differences.
Take a look around you right now. What do you notice? Good photos can be taken anywhere. Although it would be a grand adventure to travel the globe taking pictures, it is not necessary to venture far from home to capture intriguing images.
An important skill for the photographer is previsualization: the ability to imagine how the photo will look. This only occurs when the photographer understands how the camera “sees” and how it will capture the image. Previsualization for the digital photographer requires an understanding of composition, light, and the mechanics of your digital camera.
The camera sees the world differently than you do. Colors are different; highlights white out or detail in shadows disappears. It takes a good deal of experience to understand how the real world translates into the world of pixels. After a while, however, you will be able to look at a scene and understand how it will look as a photograph.
