Hi, everybody. Welcome to Episode 42 of the Photography Explained Podcast. In this episode, what are the steps in photography?

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 you and me with our photography and no more. I have to tell you this. I can now say this in my sleep quite nicely. But when it comes to recording, I still have to read it from the script. Yes, there is a script.

Anyway, moving on. So who am I? Well, I’m a professionally qualified photographer based in England with a lifetime of photographic experience, which I share with you on my podcast.

What are the steps in photography? Here are my 10 steps, follow these and you will have a good grounding in photography.

1. Learn your camera
2. Learn composition
3. Light – photography is drawing with light
4. Exposure
5. Focus
6. Practise
7. Try things
8. Niche down
9. Learn to edit
10. Review your work
11. Other gear
12. Enjoy

You can listen to the episode here

Or keep on reading. Or do both. Entirely up to you!

Number 1, step 1 – Learn your camera.

If you check out the photography explained podcast episode nine, I covered that nicely in “How can I learn to use my new camera?”

Now this is one of those fundamental things to me. We buy these fancy bits of kit. I have bought cameras and never learned how to use them properly. And it was a bit of an eye-opener when I actually opened up the manual on my Canon 6D.

I mean, it’s fine. When you get a new camera, take it out of the box, chuck a battery and a memory card in and go out and have some fun with it.

Of course, we all do that and why wouldn’t we? But at some point, you should really learn how to use it properly, you’ll be amazed by what you might find out that you did not know.

Number 2 – Learn composition.

Now, this is something which to me is so fundamental that I covered it in episodes 12, 13, 14 and 15. Composition, if you think about it, is what the photograph is, this is the start middle and end of photography to me.

So take some time to learn composition.

Once I started thinking about this and studied composition, my photographs got much better. And I took much less rubbish.

3 – Number three.

Step three, I’ll get the hang of this, you never know. What’s worrying is my list goes to 12 even though the title says 10.

Okay, we’ll call them bonus ones.

Number three, learn about light.

Photography, after all, is drawing with light.

So you need to become a student of light, learn what it does, how it interacts in the scene, how it makes things relate to each other, and how from moving from one point to another, you can change how the light is playing in a scene.

I’ll say again, photography is drawing with light. Some say writing, I say drawing. I’m happy with that.

Step four is exposure.

Now you have to learn how to get the exposure correct. Again, this is something else I’ve covered in previous episodes (he says looking at his list, Episode 21 – What does exposure mean in photography?).

And then there are some other ones which were about aperture shutter and ISO. You can go to my Photography Explained Podcast website and check out the list. It’s all there, all good stuff.

But you have to get your exposure correct. So learn exposure.

Next one, Step five, learn focus, get your focus nailed.

Get the bits you need in focus, get the bits you don’t want in focus blurry. There’s an art to this, it takes practice.

Number six, Step six is practice.

Now, I’ve said this more times than I care to remember – the number one way to improve your photography is to practice. Get out with your camera, take photos, practice, practice, practice.

The more I practice, the better I get.

The less I practice, the rustier I get and the less of an enjoyable experience it is.

So once you have got a digital camera it doesn’t cost you any more to take 10 photos or 100 photos – it’s not quite free but you know what I mean? It’s all going on a memory card.

So, practice. If you take one thing away from this, that is it. I do talk about this in some of the other episodes on the podcast.

Number seven, try things.

Now in recent episodes, I’ve gone through some of the different types of photography. I didn’t do all of them, I did a list of the 20 most popular types and I went through them. Well, the ones I know most about, and the ones I knew the least about, those being wedding photography and street photography.

So try all these things. And once you’ve had a go at them, which sounds quite onerous, doesn’t it, after you have tried all these different photography things, different genres, styles, types, call them what you want.

When you have tried these things, I strongly advise that you do this.

Number eight, step eight, niche down.

The saying in the online marketing world is “The riches are in the niches”. The wordplay does not work with how we pronounce niche!

What do I mean by this?

Simple, I photograph buildings. That’s it. I don’t photograph anything else. I photograph anything in the built environment, any kind of building structure, installation, plant, you name it, anything.

I don’t photograph animals, things that move, people or fashion. All these other areas. I’m not interested in them. But I want to do the thing that I enjoy.

So niche down.

Don’t try to be the photographer who photographs everything for everybody, everywhere. Because if you do that, you’ll be appealing to no one. You won’t have a target audience, and you’ll be spreading yourself too thin.

How do I know this?

Because I spent years doing it. I tried to cover all areas of photography, thinking I need to get as many jobs as possible. And yeah, it didn’t work. Now I do one thing, it makes it much easier to focus on it, no pun intended, to market it, to work at it, to become excellent at it.

Step nine is editing.

I use Lightroom for 99% of my photos, I use Photoshop to remove things. That’s it. I’m not a fan of Photoshop, I’m not clever enough. Lightroom is great. I’ve been with Lightroom since version one.

So choose some software, whatever it is, I’m not saying Lightroom – that’s what I choose to use, and learn how to use it properly.

I’ve been using Lightroom since 2007. And I have been using it all the time for all the photos taken since then. And I’ve got to the point now where I’m doing less editing of images than ever, I’ve refined my workflow down to something quite simple and basic, but it’s repeatable and gives me high-quality images every time.

Step 10. Review your work, and look at what you’ve done.

Be honest with yourself, critique your work, and even better, get somebody else to critique it. I know it’s difficult to do. I did that when I joined the British Institute of Professional Photography. That was my first formal critique, and it was a revelation, an eye-opener.

And it was a great leveller for me because I thought I was better than I was.

So get a critique – I’d even suggest you pay for one from somebody who’s trustworthy, this kind of thing.

Step 11. Other gear.

Don’t worry about gear too much. Get a camera, get a tripod, get a couple of lenses, get the basics that you need and learn how to use them. I used to spend all my time looking at gear, buying gear, not using gear, wasting money, and not practising.

Forget the gear – that’s not going to give you great photos, the camera and what you point your camera at and how you take the photos are. Sure we need gear obviously, but don’t obsess about it.

Number 12. Step 12. Enjoy photography.

I still love photography. I feel very fortunate that after all these years, I still love photography, and I want you to enjoy it as well. One of the best ways of enjoying photography is to get out and practice taking photos.

Keep it simple, and don’t worry about the other noise around there because there’s too much noise in this world for me.

My one-line summary is this.

Follow my 10 steps in photography, and you will have an excellent grounding in photography. Let’s keep it simple and enjoy it.

So what do I want you to do now?

Number one, just let me know your thoughts on Twitter.

You can get hold of me @rickphoto

Number two – to subscribe to my podcast

If you enjoyed this episode. This helps me

Three, rate and review my podcast

if you enjoyed this episode, this helps me too

Four tell someone you know about my podcast.

This also helps me and if you want to tell more than one person I won’t stop you!

Next episode?

Well I enjoyed this, which is a bit of a putting things together episode, so I think I’m going to do more steps, maybe steps to taking a photo step by step. I don’t know. I’ll think about it, and I’ll record something later on.

Here is the title – PE43 – Step By Step Guide To How I Prepare My Photography Gear.

Thank you

So for now, I will say thank you for listening to my small but perfectly formed podcast, check out my website, Rick McEvoy Photography where you can find out all about me and my architectural and construction photography work as well as my photography blog where you can learn lots more about photography.

And please also check out my Photography Explained Podcast website where you can find out how to ask me a question, find a list of episodes, and also things I’m going to explain in future episodes. You can also listen to the podcast from there.

This episode was brought to you very much by the power of spring optimism.

I’ve been Rick McEvoy. thanks again for listening to me and for giving me 12 minutes of your valuable time. See you in the next episode.

Cheers from me, Rick.

OK – that was the podcast episode.

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.

Let me send you stuff

I send out a weekly email to my subscribers. It is my take on one photography thing, plus what I have been writing and talking about. Just fill in the box and you can get my weekly photographic musings straight to your inbox. Which is nice.

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