ralphh
No longer a newbie, moving up!
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2012
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- London
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Hi all,
Thought I’d write a short article for the beginners on here (ok, short-ish -it will probably take up a whole 5 to 10 mins of your life to read. Might save you years tho! It does get less text-heavy as you go on
).
I see a lot of questions about camera settings and gear. I also see a lot of people come on TPF with very little camera or photography experience wanting to start their own business and get told they can’t until they’ve “mastered” their cameras and bought better gear.
What I don’t see on the beginner boards is discussions about light and composition, which are much more fundamental and important than what settings your camera is on or even which camera you have.
If you really want to get the “basics” right, it’s light and composition you need to be thinking about. Camera settings can come later, or even not at all…
This is not a how-to article, but more a what-to-invest-your-learning-time-into-first article. All the information you’ll ever need is already out there on the internet. You just need to decide what to learn about.
My basic point here is that mastering all your camera settings and upgrading your gear pales to nothing in comparison to mastering light and composition, and you could be taking good photos on green-box-auto instead of taking bad ones on full manual if you diverted your attention away from all those switches and buttons and gear reviews and onto something more important.
Don’t get me wrong; clearly we eventually want to master everything so we can have vision and deliver on it in the best possible way, BUT, while there are indeed times when, for example full auto mode with deliver truly horrendous results, it will probably work just fine 90% of the time. Not thinking about composition and light will yield horrid results at least 90% of the time (and that is a very conservative estimate).
Given there’s only so many hours in the day, do you want to work on fixing the 10% you ruined by being on auto, or the 90% you ruined with bad lighting and composition? If you’d rather take bad photos with the right settings, or find that taking photos is secondary to reading the latest gear reviews, this thread is probably not going to interest you. If you’d like to progress at taking much better photos as quickly as possible, read on.
So why do people always start with camera settings? Why do people - even those who own cameras - ask “what camera / settings did you use for that?”. Well I suspect there are 3 main reasons:
1. The main one is probably that people don’t realise there’s anything else to it – if photo (A) looks bad and photo (B) looks good, the difference must be somehow related to the camera; people just don’t understand that light has different qualities and how fundamentally important light and composition are in terms of making or breaking a photograph.
2. Using something you don’t fully understand makes you feel like a passenger rather than the driver. But really, you’re still in charge of all the most important bits of a photograph (ie everything that goes into the front of the lens), even on Auto. If you want to “take charge” of something then take charge of something that actually matters and that the camera can’t help you with.
3. Playing with technology and lusting after gear is just a lot more fun than thinking about light and composition!
A few years ago, if someone had asked me to teach them photography I would have started with the fundamentals of exposure. By the time I was through with them they’d have been able to explain exactly why a 50mm f1.4 lens has as aperture radius of 17.6mm wide open, but they probably wouldn’t actually be any better at taking a good photograph. Good job no-one did ask me! Now days, if I was going to teach someone photography I’d probably start off by cutting a rectangle in a sheet of card and have them look through it and tell me what they can see.
Enough waffle, must be time for me to back all those statements up with some evidence…
So, let’s start off with some context; today I have decided to make a portrait of my 5-month-old daughter to hang on the wall of her grandmother’s house (grandmothers like this sort of thing, mother’s day is coming up next weekend in the UK and I’m gonna save a little cash and give my mother a photo of her granddaughter instead of going and spending my hard-earned money!).
I’m busy this afternoon and tomorrow, I get home after she goes to bed during the week, and grandma is coming to visit next Saturday, so it has to be this morning. No pressure on producing something that demonstrates my point to go with this article then! And I need get a printable photo out of it too…
Let’s start with a how to take terrible photo – and lets put me back at the start of my journey into photography… I pick up my point and shoot, which is on green-box-auto-noob-mode, walk up to my daughter, point it at her, press the shutter and POW! Instant free present! Woo!
ah… well that looks like cr@p – I better get some good gear, and learn how to “master” my camera
Ok, so let’s pretend I’m the worlds fastest camera buyer, reader and learner; I get hold of a full frame DSLR, a 35mm f1.4 prime (probably having bought a crop DSLR and zoom lenses first, later upgrading everything), and go on the interweb, learn everything there is to know about camera settings all in an hour and come back (otherwise daughter will be at collage and grandma will be dead before we get to the end of this article).
This time I’m ‘taking control’ of my DSLR – I select my aperture, dial in some exposure comp, and I set my ISO so I have a decent shutter speed. I’m using the centre focus point because it’s more accurate – it’s cross type y’know… I’m gonna use f2.8 because this lens sharpens up a bit in the corners stopped a couple of stops, and I’ve set it to RAW format, so I can change my WB, sharpness, saturation, contrast, etc later on my now properly calibrated monitor.. yada yada yada…. oh yeeeaah, i AM the master...
POW! Advanced camera uber control skill home made present!
She's gone from looking bemused to looking thoroughly disappointed.....
The expensive gear doesn’t seem to have helped much, and clearly I haven’t actually progressed as a photographer very much either - in reality I’ve probably spent years learning all about camera settings, just to go ahead and pick pretty similar values to the ones the camera would have picked in Auto in the first place, in the mistaken belief that camera settings are a key thing that’s wrong here. The only thing I need to do is add a watermark and I’ll be good enough to be featured on youarenotaphotographer.com
So, could I have used that time and energy to progress more if I’d have been learning something different?
Given that this scenario isn’t actually fictional – I really am tight-fisted, and my mother really is going to get a photo of my daughter for mother’s day, printed on my crummy all-in-one inkjet, and I really do needed to do this today, I’ll take you through how I would approach this.
This is the way I approach taking a photo when I want to produce something more than a snapshot (if you pay attention, you may notice the camera doesn’t actually appear in this until quite near the end):
First, let’s think about what I actually want this photo to look like. I’d like to show my daughter playing (with) her little plastic piano – last time grandma was round she loved watching her play (whacking) it. Obviously I want her looking at the camera, but the piano is uninteresting from the back. Maybe I can shoot her slightly from behind / to the side, and see if I can get her to look over her shoulder at me. At this point a mental image starts to form. I imagine her on the right hand side of the frame, her face (the main subject) being in the top-right 3rd, looking at me, with the composition balanced by the secondary subject of the piano mid/low left. I’m thinking that to show the piano keyboard properly I need to be slightly above her level, but I don’t want to be looking down on her from miles above. I’m probably going to want the camera about 6” above her eye level, but I’ll finalise that when I’m actually looking through the viewfinder.
I start to give other things like the background some consideration. It’s nothing complicated this time; I want a clean, uncluttered background – preferably a light neutral colour to make her and her little plastic piano pop, but I definitely do not want a white studio background look – I want this to look like I shot it in the house, not in the studio; uncluttered and clean, but without the clinically-clean seamless paper look. Despite that, I do want it look somewhat formal as I want it to be reminiscent of the photos my mother has of me as a baby.
I now have a very strong picture of what it’ll look like, and it looks nice in my mind. If I wasn’t an incompetent ape when it comes to wielding a paintbrush I could paint it instead. If I can’t get it straight in my mind then most of the time I won’t go any further with it – if you can’t get a picture to look good in your head then you have very little chance of getting it to look good with the camera except by luck.
Now that I know what I want compositionally, I’m going to think about my light. Given my daughter is only 5 months old, she can sit up for about a minute tops. Then she’ll get too tired, keel over, and I’ll not be able to sit her back up again, so I have no time to adjust once she’s “on set”. Knowing what I want, and how to get it is key - I can't experiment here.
I want a soft, gentle light, reasonably even, but not flat; it still needs to have some direction to it to give form and shape, but I don’t want harsh or deep shadows – young children rarely look good with 'creative' lighting, so let’s look around the house to see where the light is how I want it… (I won’t bother taking you on a photo tour of my house, but skip ahead to the point where I’ve found some nice light).
So, in my bedroom there are two windows near my bed. Opposite them the wall is painted white. So I can sit my daughter on the bed with a white background (ok, it’ll be light grey in the final image as I’m not lighting it, and it’s further from the light source than she will be, but that’s fine).
The fact that there’s two windows means that I’ll have light from both sides and I’ll not have any deep shadows; I’ll end up with a key-light & fill-light situation and I can move my daughter nearer to one window or the other to change the ratio and softness of the light. This room faces south, but the fact that it’s cloudy outside means the light will be pretty soft coming straight through the windows so we can be close to them. If I only had one window I’d use a reflector, and if it was summer I’d move further from the window into the shade, or find a north facing window to give me some much softer lighting. I will always be able to find or modify the light so that fits the bill.
I already know what the difference looks like between key-lighting the near side of a face (called broard-light) and far sides of a face (called short-light). I want the stronger light on her back and the near side of face so I’ll place her nearer to the right hand window. This means moving the bed a bit, but that’s no biggie.
I used an aftershave bottle to quickly double check my light – to make sure it really is going in the direction I think, and shadows are being filled. While I was checking that I thought I’d be helpful and take a quick snap.
The shot on the left is with only the key-light window (I shut the curtains on the other) the shot on the right is using both windows. Notice how it doesn’t get any brighter (as the camera has compensated) but the shadow is significantly filled.
You could of course use off-camera flash instead, but either way, the light needs to thought about, and finding some nice light in your house can very often be done with minimal equipment - reflector and a window will often do the job -- you just need to see and understand what it is you are seeing by learning about light.
Either way, you can see the amount of thought I’m putting into the lighting, and the fact that there are endless options for getting it how I want it, regardless of what state the natural light is in when I find it. There are plently of places to learn this stuff.
Next, I neatly make the bed and put a light cream blanket on it so I have a nice surface to work on. The scene is set, I just need my model.
I pop my daughter down with her piano, arranged like I planned, crouch down, look at it, and make sure it’s going to look right. I look at the background, and realise I need to take down the picture hanging on the wall. Really should have thought of that before now, but I never claimed I was perfect! Now I can get my camera involved. I get everything lined up in the viewfinder nicely, as close to as I pictured it as possible, but making final adjustments now imagination has met reality to make sure that it’s well framed and composed, I call her to make her look over her shoulder at me....
And this time I have something that grandma will love. Ok, I’m not going to win any awards for these, but it is very close to what I imagined and I’d say mission accomplished. The actual taking of the photographs took seconds (all i really had), and was nothing complicated.
So upgrading my gear and learning about my camera settings got me from here to here:
But by learning a few bits about light, and putting some thought into my composition got me from here to here:
It’s pretty clear what makes the biggest difference.
And in case you're thinking "ok, he made a bad photo with a DSLR, that doesn't mean you can make a good one with a point and shoot on auto with no considderation of camera settings", this lighting situation is not tricky for a camera on auto. Evern a point and shoot on auto would have rendered the scene pretty well too. In fact I took one, just to prove the point:
Sadly my daughter was already starting to sag, so and I rushed it, and fluffed it somewhat, and only got one chance (she fell over just after this shot), so isn’t as nice looking as the DSLR one above, but that has nothing to do the camera, I promise - it's the framing and view point. White balance is a bit off too, but that's a 1-click fix in photoshop elements, and it’s still a LOT better than the sucky DSLR one, and this was shot without any thought about camera settings AT ALL – full blown green auto mode. There are significant differences between DSLR and point-and-shoot at 100% crop of course, but this is a function of sensor size and lens quality not manual vs auto and what it looks like at 100% on screen is not what makes or breaks an image:
On flickr or in a smallish print you wouldn’t see these differences, and most people who wind up here already have a DSLR of some sort, not a compact.
Again, please note that I’m not in any way saying nice gear and camera settings are not important, of course they are, and some settings like aperture and focus have a direct effect on your composition itself (no, not framing, composition and framing are different), I’m just saying they’re less important that what is actually entering your lens.
I’m also not claiming to be a great photographer - I’m still working hard to improve, but it took me years and years to realise that to really improve, I need to be worrying about light and composition much more than settings and gear... all that wasted time and money… *sigh*
Bottom line;
Good gear and the right camera settings are the icing on the cake, but first make sure it is a cake you’re icing, not a turd. No-one likes iced turd.
^^ hmmm, that’d make a good signature
Anyway, just something to think about when deciding where to expend your time and effort when trying to become a better photographer…
-------------------------------------------
EDIT: A couple of people have raised a valid issue with my point here, which is that when you get onto more advanced subjects, camera settings are just as important, and in some cases possibly even more important than light an composition. It was never my intention to say this was not the case;
Just to be clear, I was specifically aiming this at beginners and the things beginners tend to photograph - their friends, their children, their cat.... Or the mum who's bought a camera to photograph her kids and now wants to start a little back-room business photographing other peroples kids. More advanced portrait (and cat) phototographer should also find this useful too.
Someone taking long exposure night scenes of city-scapes... not so much
Re-reading my article, this wasn't as clear as it could have been, so appologies for that.
Thought I’d write a short article for the beginners on here (ok, short-ish -it will probably take up a whole 5 to 10 mins of your life to read. Might save you years tho! It does get less text-heavy as you go on
). I see a lot of questions about camera settings and gear. I also see a lot of people come on TPF with very little camera or photography experience wanting to start their own business and get told they can’t until they’ve “mastered” their cameras and bought better gear.
What I don’t see on the beginner boards is discussions about light and composition, which are much more fundamental and important than what settings your camera is on or even which camera you have.
If you really want to get the “basics” right, it’s light and composition you need to be thinking about. Camera settings can come later, or even not at all…
This is not a how-to article, but more a what-to-invest-your-learning-time-into-first article. All the information you’ll ever need is already out there on the internet. You just need to decide what to learn about.
My basic point here is that mastering all your camera settings and upgrading your gear pales to nothing in comparison to mastering light and composition, and you could be taking good photos on green-box-auto instead of taking bad ones on full manual if you diverted your attention away from all those switches and buttons and gear reviews and onto something more important.
Don’t get me wrong; clearly we eventually want to master everything so we can have vision and deliver on it in the best possible way, BUT, while there are indeed times when, for example full auto mode with deliver truly horrendous results, it will probably work just fine 90% of the time. Not thinking about composition and light will yield horrid results at least 90% of the time (and that is a very conservative estimate).
Given there’s only so many hours in the day, do you want to work on fixing the 10% you ruined by being on auto, or the 90% you ruined with bad lighting and composition? If you’d rather take bad photos with the right settings, or find that taking photos is secondary to reading the latest gear reviews, this thread is probably not going to interest you. If you’d like to progress at taking much better photos as quickly as possible, read on.
So why do people always start with camera settings? Why do people - even those who own cameras - ask “what camera / settings did you use for that?”. Well I suspect there are 3 main reasons:
1. The main one is probably that people don’t realise there’s anything else to it – if photo (A) looks bad and photo (B) looks good, the difference must be somehow related to the camera; people just don’t understand that light has different qualities and how fundamentally important light and composition are in terms of making or breaking a photograph.
2. Using something you don’t fully understand makes you feel like a passenger rather than the driver. But really, you’re still in charge of all the most important bits of a photograph (ie everything that goes into the front of the lens), even on Auto. If you want to “take charge” of something then take charge of something that actually matters and that the camera can’t help you with.
3. Playing with technology and lusting after gear is just a lot more fun than thinking about light and composition!
A few years ago, if someone had asked me to teach them photography I would have started with the fundamentals of exposure. By the time I was through with them they’d have been able to explain exactly why a 50mm f1.4 lens has as aperture radius of 17.6mm wide open, but they probably wouldn’t actually be any better at taking a good photograph. Good job no-one did ask me! Now days, if I was going to teach someone photography I’d probably start off by cutting a rectangle in a sheet of card and have them look through it and tell me what they can see.
Enough waffle, must be time for me to back all those statements up with some evidence…
So, let’s start off with some context; today I have decided to make a portrait of my 5-month-old daughter to hang on the wall of her grandmother’s house (grandmothers like this sort of thing, mother’s day is coming up next weekend in the UK and I’m gonna save a little cash and give my mother a photo of her granddaughter instead of going and spending my hard-earned money!).
I’m busy this afternoon and tomorrow, I get home after she goes to bed during the week, and grandma is coming to visit next Saturday, so it has to be this morning. No pressure on producing something that demonstrates my point to go with this article then! And I need get a printable photo out of it too…
Let’s start with a how to take terrible photo – and lets put me back at the start of my journey into photography… I pick up my point and shoot, which is on green-box-auto-noob-mode, walk up to my daughter, point it at her, press the shutter and POW! Instant free present! Woo!
ah… well that looks like cr@p – I better get some good gear, and learn how to “master” my camera
Ok, so let’s pretend I’m the worlds fastest camera buyer, reader and learner; I get hold of a full frame DSLR, a 35mm f1.4 prime (probably having bought a crop DSLR and zoom lenses first, later upgrading everything), and go on the interweb, learn everything there is to know about camera settings all in an hour and come back (otherwise daughter will be at collage and grandma will be dead before we get to the end of this article).
This time I’m ‘taking control’ of my DSLR – I select my aperture, dial in some exposure comp, and I set my ISO so I have a decent shutter speed. I’m using the centre focus point because it’s more accurate – it’s cross type y’know… I’m gonna use f2.8 because this lens sharpens up a bit in the corners stopped a couple of stops, and I’ve set it to RAW format, so I can change my WB, sharpness, saturation, contrast, etc later on my now properly calibrated monitor.. yada yada yada…. oh yeeeaah, i AM the master...
POW! Advanced camera uber control skill home made present!
She's gone from looking bemused to looking thoroughly disappointed.....
The expensive gear doesn’t seem to have helped much, and clearly I haven’t actually progressed as a photographer very much either - in reality I’ve probably spent years learning all about camera settings, just to go ahead and pick pretty similar values to the ones the camera would have picked in Auto in the first place, in the mistaken belief that camera settings are a key thing that’s wrong here. The only thing I need to do is add a watermark and I’ll be good enough to be featured on youarenotaphotographer.com
So, could I have used that time and energy to progress more if I’d have been learning something different?
Given that this scenario isn’t actually fictional – I really am tight-fisted, and my mother really is going to get a photo of my daughter for mother’s day, printed on my crummy all-in-one inkjet, and I really do needed to do this today, I’ll take you through how I would approach this.
This is the way I approach taking a photo when I want to produce something more than a snapshot (if you pay attention, you may notice the camera doesn’t actually appear in this until quite near the end):
First, let’s think about what I actually want this photo to look like. I’d like to show my daughter playing (with) her little plastic piano – last time grandma was round she loved watching her play (whacking) it. Obviously I want her looking at the camera, but the piano is uninteresting from the back. Maybe I can shoot her slightly from behind / to the side, and see if I can get her to look over her shoulder at me. At this point a mental image starts to form. I imagine her on the right hand side of the frame, her face (the main subject) being in the top-right 3rd, looking at me, with the composition balanced by the secondary subject of the piano mid/low left. I’m thinking that to show the piano keyboard properly I need to be slightly above her level, but I don’t want to be looking down on her from miles above. I’m probably going to want the camera about 6” above her eye level, but I’ll finalise that when I’m actually looking through the viewfinder.
I start to give other things like the background some consideration. It’s nothing complicated this time; I want a clean, uncluttered background – preferably a light neutral colour to make her and her little plastic piano pop, but I definitely do not want a white studio background look – I want this to look like I shot it in the house, not in the studio; uncluttered and clean, but without the clinically-clean seamless paper look. Despite that, I do want it look somewhat formal as I want it to be reminiscent of the photos my mother has of me as a baby.
I now have a very strong picture of what it’ll look like, and it looks nice in my mind. If I wasn’t an incompetent ape when it comes to wielding a paintbrush I could paint it instead. If I can’t get it straight in my mind then most of the time I won’t go any further with it – if you can’t get a picture to look good in your head then you have very little chance of getting it to look good with the camera except by luck.
Now that I know what I want compositionally, I’m going to think about my light. Given my daughter is only 5 months old, she can sit up for about a minute tops. Then she’ll get too tired, keel over, and I’ll not be able to sit her back up again, so I have no time to adjust once she’s “on set”. Knowing what I want, and how to get it is key - I can't experiment here.
I want a soft, gentle light, reasonably even, but not flat; it still needs to have some direction to it to give form and shape, but I don’t want harsh or deep shadows – young children rarely look good with 'creative' lighting, so let’s look around the house to see where the light is how I want it… (I won’t bother taking you on a photo tour of my house, but skip ahead to the point where I’ve found some nice light).
So, in my bedroom there are two windows near my bed. Opposite them the wall is painted white. So I can sit my daughter on the bed with a white background (ok, it’ll be light grey in the final image as I’m not lighting it, and it’s further from the light source than she will be, but that’s fine).
The fact that there’s two windows means that I’ll have light from both sides and I’ll not have any deep shadows; I’ll end up with a key-light & fill-light situation and I can move my daughter nearer to one window or the other to change the ratio and softness of the light. This room faces south, but the fact that it’s cloudy outside means the light will be pretty soft coming straight through the windows so we can be close to them. If I only had one window I’d use a reflector, and if it was summer I’d move further from the window into the shade, or find a north facing window to give me some much softer lighting. I will always be able to find or modify the light so that fits the bill.
I already know what the difference looks like between key-lighting the near side of a face (called broard-light) and far sides of a face (called short-light). I want the stronger light on her back and the near side of face so I’ll place her nearer to the right hand window. This means moving the bed a bit, but that’s no biggie.
I used an aftershave bottle to quickly double check my light – to make sure it really is going in the direction I think, and shadows are being filled. While I was checking that I thought I’d be helpful and take a quick snap.
The shot on the left is with only the key-light window (I shut the curtains on the other) the shot on the right is using both windows. Notice how it doesn’t get any brighter (as the camera has compensated) but the shadow is significantly filled.
You could of course use off-camera flash instead, but either way, the light needs to thought about, and finding some nice light in your house can very often be done with minimal equipment - reflector and a window will often do the job -- you just need to see and understand what it is you are seeing by learning about light.
Either way, you can see the amount of thought I’m putting into the lighting, and the fact that there are endless options for getting it how I want it, regardless of what state the natural light is in when I find it. There are plently of places to learn this stuff.
Next, I neatly make the bed and put a light cream blanket on it so I have a nice surface to work on. The scene is set, I just need my model.
I pop my daughter down with her piano, arranged like I planned, crouch down, look at it, and make sure it’s going to look right. I look at the background, and realise I need to take down the picture hanging on the wall. Really should have thought of that before now, but I never claimed I was perfect! Now I can get my camera involved. I get everything lined up in the viewfinder nicely, as close to as I pictured it as possible, but making final adjustments now imagination has met reality to make sure that it’s well framed and composed, I call her to make her look over her shoulder at me....
And this time I have something that grandma will love. Ok, I’m not going to win any awards for these, but it is very close to what I imagined and I’d say mission accomplished. The actual taking of the photographs took seconds (all i really had), and was nothing complicated.
So upgrading my gear and learning about my camera settings got me from here to here:
But by learning a few bits about light, and putting some thought into my composition got me from here to here:
It’s pretty clear what makes the biggest difference.
And in case you're thinking "ok, he made a bad photo with a DSLR, that doesn't mean you can make a good one with a point and shoot on auto with no considderation of camera settings", this lighting situation is not tricky for a camera on auto. Evern a point and shoot on auto would have rendered the scene pretty well too. In fact I took one, just to prove the point:
Sadly my daughter was already starting to sag, so and I rushed it, and fluffed it somewhat, and only got one chance (she fell over just after this shot), so isn’t as nice looking as the DSLR one above, but that has nothing to do the camera, I promise - it's the framing and view point. White balance is a bit off too, but that's a 1-click fix in photoshop elements, and it’s still a LOT better than the sucky DSLR one, and this was shot without any thought about camera settings AT ALL – full blown green auto mode. There are significant differences between DSLR and point-and-shoot at 100% crop of course, but this is a function of sensor size and lens quality not manual vs auto and what it looks like at 100% on screen is not what makes or breaks an image:
On flickr or in a smallish print you wouldn’t see these differences, and most people who wind up here already have a DSLR of some sort, not a compact.
Again, please note that I’m not in any way saying nice gear and camera settings are not important, of course they are, and some settings like aperture and focus have a direct effect on your composition itself (no, not framing, composition and framing are different), I’m just saying they’re less important that what is actually entering your lens.
I’m also not claiming to be a great photographer - I’m still working hard to improve, but it took me years and years to realise that to really improve, I need to be worrying about light and composition much more than settings and gear... all that wasted time and money… *sigh*
Bottom line;
Good gear and the right camera settings are the icing on the cake, but first make sure it is a cake you’re icing, not a turd. No-one likes iced turd.
^^ hmmm, that’d make a good signature
Anyway, just something to think about when deciding where to expend your time and effort when trying to become a better photographer…
-------------------------------------------
EDIT: A couple of people have raised a valid issue with my point here, which is that when you get onto more advanced subjects, camera settings are just as important, and in some cases possibly even more important than light an composition. It was never my intention to say this was not the case;
Just to be clear, I was specifically aiming this at beginners and the things beginners tend to photograph - their friends, their children, their cat.... Or the mum who's bought a camera to photograph her kids and now wants to start a little back-room business photographing other peroples kids. More advanced portrait (and cat) phototographer should also find this useful too.
Someone taking long exposure night scenes of city-scapes... not so much
Re-reading my article, this wasn't as clear as it could have been, so appologies for that.
Last edited:
. Indoors still needs some thought of course as the windows give it direction and therefor create shadows.
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