Hi, everybody, welcome to Episode Three of the photography explained podcast. This week, how to take a photo.
I’m your host, Rick, and each week I will try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 10 minutes without the irrelevant details. My aim is to explain things in just enough detail to help us with our photography and no more.
This is Episode Three, and I’m finally getting into the swing of it. In this episode, I just have nine headings, which I’m going to go through one at a time.
I give you some things to think about when you are taking a photo which will hopefully focus your and my mind and help us all to take better photos. The 9 things I talk about are
- What are you taking a photo of?
- Think about the composition
- Choose the right lens
- Get the exposure correct
- Aperture
- Shutter
- ISO
- Focussing
- Different angles
You can listen to the episode here
Or keep on reading. Or do both. Entirely up to you!
1 – What are you taking a photo of?
Why would anybody be interested in the photo that you’re taking? When I’m taking a photo for myself, I try and think about who my target audience is. Obviously, with my architectural photography work, I’m working for a client.
I know what I’m taking the photo of, it makes things a lot easier for me because my client wants a photograph of a building – the interior, the exterior, all that good stuff. But when you’re starting off, and you go out and about you’re taking photographs we all have a tendency to photograph anything and everything.
So when you’re out there with the camera, think about what you’re taking a photo of. And if you were to show that photo to another person, what would they think – would they be interested? Or would they just go
“Yeah, whatever”.
I mean, we’re faced with millions and millions of photos online these days, and people scrolling past instantly. So try to think about what you’re doing, what you’re photographing, and find interesting things to photograph.
A great tip I heard some time ago was this
If you want to take interesting photos, put your camera in front of more interesting things.
But having said that, I took some great photographs one cold winter’s day in my local woods, which I’ve never been to before.
So yeah, getting out and about, it’s a good thing as well.
Improve your photography
The single best way to improve your photography is to get out and take photographs. And so getting out there and working on things, trying things out, thinking about things. It’s always a good thing.
2 – Think about the composition.
In my commercial work, the composition is the thing I concentrate on most as I’ve got all my camera settings sorted, such that I don’t need to worry about them.
The only thing I need to think about on commercial shoots is the composition and exactly at which point I focus within that composition. So that’s why using a tripod is an excellent thing.
Think about the composition. I use my viewfinder and the LCD screen – I swap from one to the other. Think about the way things are arranged in the picture. Think about the things around the edges. And when you get back to your computer, (I’m assuming you are using a computer), have a look at the composition and see if it works. See what you could do to improve it.
Crop, create different shapes, and different formats – portrait and landscape. Play around with the composition and you’ll see you’ll see things appearing that are better images coming out of your compositions
3 – Choose the right lens.
Nowadays I only have three camera lenses. I used to have lots and lots of them. But now I have a Canon 17-40mm, 24-105mm and 70- 200mm lenses. So for landscapes, you tend to shoot wider (but you can get great landscape photos with a telephoto lens). What you need to think about is what you need to get into the composition.
And more often than not less is more so rather than going wide and including everything you might want to go a little bit longer into the telephoto range and get less in an image which gives you less to work with but more impact.
4 – Get the exposure correct.
This is essential – you must get the exposure correct. Now the exposure is a combination of aperture shutter and ISO. If you’re shooting in Programme, that’s fine. No one should criticise you for shooting in Programme mode, but they will. And all you need to do is ignore them – we all have to start somewhere.
All those people who say “Oh if you don’t shoot in manual, you’re not a real photographer” – to them, I say this – nonsense – if you shoot in manual and use the camera settings that it tells you to use, you’re just doing what the camera tells you to anyway.
I use AV mode – I set the aperture and the camera sets the shutter. I can do this because my photos are 99% taken with my camera on a tripod so I don’t need to worry about the shutter speed.
5 – Aperture
Let’s move on to the aperture that I use.
I use F8 for most of my photos because F8 is roughly the mid-range and the sharpest aperture, F8 – F11 tend to be the best apertures on a standard full-frame camera lens.
Shoot wide open if you want to blur the background, and/ or isolate details. The minimum aperture, i.e. the smallest opening hole, gets you the maximum depth of field.
But don’t forget, wide open (maximum aperture) and stepped down as far as you can (minimum aperture), and you do lose an amount of quality.
6 – Shutter Speed
I use the right shutter speed for the image I’m photographing. On a tripod, I don’t worry about the shutter unless there are fast-moving clouds, trees, rivers, or stuff like that.
If you are shooting handheld, your shutter speed should be the reciprocal of the focal length. Now that’s sort of how they say it. But this is how I understand it.
If I’m shooting at 100mm, I need to use a shutter speed of 1/125th second or faster. If I’m shooting at 50mm I need to use a shutter speed of 1/60th second or faster, hopefully you get the idea.
7 – ISO
ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor, (I have to say here or camera film) to light. The lower the ISO, the higher the quality of the image. The higher the ISO, the more chance there is of you getting noise in a picture. Now most people don’t know what noise is. But it can detract from an image. It’s more important that you get a sharp picture than a noisy picture. And most people don’t know what noise is anyway.
When I say most people, I mean people who aren’t interested in photography, they won’t know what noise is.
But they will know what a blurry photo is.
So if you’re given a choice, a sharp photo with noise or a blurry photo with no noise this is what you choose.
Sharp photo with noise
You can reduce it (the noise) in Lightroom, but you can’t fix a blurry photo. Ever. Fact.
8 – Focus
Now this is critical. It depends on what you’re photographing and the effect you’re trying to get, if you want everything in focus, or if you want to isolate one part of an image. Focal length has an influence on this as well.
For my architectural photography work, to give you a steer, I tend to focus a third into the scene. And I’ve used an aperture of F8 or F16 with a wide angle (17-40mm) lens – the widest focal length of course is 17mm. So focusing a third in is not a bad rule of thumb. It’s not that precise. But if you’re not sure, it gives you a start.
9 – Last one – different angles.
You take a photo from the starting position. Once you’ve done that, have a look at it on the screen. Then try taking photos from different angles, high up low down, to the left and to the right.
I have a few bits of kit that help me do this with my architectural photography work.
One of them is a painter’s pole. Another one’s a thing called the Platypod. These two get me from ground level to 4-5 metres above the ground from the exact same standing position
That’s it for this week. Sorry, this episode.
Hopefully, you found something helpful here. Apologies for the stumbling words. I think I’ve been doing a bit too much recording. So I’m going to move on.
Want to know more?
Head over to the Start page on the Photography Explained Podcast website to find out more.
And here is the list of episodes published to date – you can listen to any episode straight from this page which is nice.
Let me know if there is a photography thing that you want me to explain and I will add it to my list. Just head over to the This is my list of things to explain page of this website to see what is on there already.
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And finally a little bit about me
Finally, yes this paragraph is all about me – check out my Rick McEvoy Photography website to find out more about me and my architectural, construction, real estate and travel photography work. I also write about general photography stuff, all in plain English without the irrelevant detail.
Thank you
Thanks for listening to my podcast (if you did) and reading this blog post (which I assume you have done as you are reading this).
Cheers from me Rick
