The REALLY SIMPLE GUIDE to taking great photos by John Rees johnreesphoto.com
Everyone’s a photographer We take more photographs than ever before. Billions are taken, uploaded to social media sites and shared every single day. And because most of us have a mobile phone, we always have a camera at hand.
The quality of cameras in a mobile phone is pretty good. There are of course, many more choices from inexpensive compact cameras to high end expensive cameras with interchangeable lenses. But having an expensive camera doesn’t guarantee you’ll take great photos. You must know how to get the best from what you use. A good photographer can take great photos with almost any camera. That’s because it’s a tool that they know how to use to get the best results. For most people getting a good image is a bit hit and miss. Sometimes they come out looking great, often they don’t! And that is very frustrating!
Taking great photos is a easier than you think. This short book isn’t about cameras, it’s about photography. It’s a very simple, basic overview of how you can improve the quality of the photos they take. Today there’s a tendency to over-complicate things. And photography can certainly be complicated and confusing. There’s certainly no shortage of jargon and technical buzzwords. Some people just love this stuff. But don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about any of it. I’m going to keep this really simple. I’ll teach you two things; 1. What to do before you take the shot 2. How to make it look great afterwards Before camera phones and digital cameras, we had film cameras. Film was relatively expensive to shoot, especially if the images were no good.
As soon as you pressed the shutter, that was that. You got what you shot. There was no way to make any changes. So you had to take a bit more care than you do today. People assume that because photography is now mainly digital, you can shoot and fix problems later on. But that’s not always true. Images that are out of focus, badly exposed or with too many distractions are often beyond repair.
And that’s why it’s better to get the image as good as it can be when you shoot it.
But do you really want to spend massive amounts of time trying to make a bad image look good?
I know that we have wonderful tools like Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture One and Aperture to help.
Of course you don’t. You want to spend more time taking photos, and less time trying to fix problems you should have taken care of earlier. The 3 most important things that will help you get better images every time are; 1. Composition 2. Focus 3. Exposure These are very basic and simple things to do. You don’t need to be a photographic genius. You just need to think about these things every time you take a photo. And when you do that, you’ll see the quality of your photos improve dramatically.
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Three things to think about before you take the shot
Three things to think about before you take the shot
1. COMPOSITION 2. FOCUS 3. EXPOSURE
Composition simply means the way your image looks. It’s how the parts of the image come together to tell a story. A good way to think about this is to ask yourself; • Why are you taking it? • What story do you want to tell?
You could be looking at a great sunset, an amazing landscape, an interesting building, an animal, attractive or unusual object, a person, or just capturing a fun time with friends. Whatever it is, there are 8 ‘rules’ of composition that you should think about Don’t worry too much at this stage about memorising them. Once you know what they are, you’ll realise that they make perfect sense. Then they’ll become second nature to you and you’ll just use them automatically.
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1. Rule of thirds
RULES OF
5. Simplicity
COMPOSITION
7. Aspect ratio
2. Fill the frame 3. Leading lines 4. Patterns, colours and shapes
6. Viewpoint
8. Break the ‘rules’
1. The Rules of Thirds You take a photo when your attention is captured by something. It’s the reason you reached for your camera. It’s the purpose of the photo. Mostly the subject tends to be placed in the dead centre of the shot. But doing this isn’t always the best thing to do. There are always exceptions of course, such as the image below.
What you want to do is to see the scene as a 3 x 3 block like this. In some cameras you can turn a grid on that makes it really easy. If you don’t have that you can just visualise it. Then you place the subject at key points of interest such as the four points shown in the image of the lighthouse. There is no right or wrong here. You should go with what you think looks best. And this obviously depends on the subject and the story you want to tell.
2. Fill the frame It’s great to leave space around image so it can ‘breathe’. When you do this in the right way, you can direct focus to the subject. But leaving too much empty space is a common mistake. This makes your subject smaller than it should be, and it can also confuse the viewer about what they're supposed to be looking at. That’s why in some cases, it creates a far stronger image when you fill the entire frame (or most of it) with your subject. Look at the two images opposite. The smaller image looks fine, it’s a horse rider clearing a water obstacle. But look how much stronger it is when it’s rotated slightly and cropped to fill most of the frame. You are now in no doubt what the subject is because it’s so obvious. It commands your attention in a way the first image doesn’t.
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3. Leading lines Every photo needs a focal point. This is what you want the viewer to see and that’s what leading lines will give you. They can control how a viewer’s eye moves around the image.
Leading lines are everywhere. You see them in walls, fences, river, telephone wires, line of trees, buildings, even people. Converging lines give a sense of perspective and threedimensional depth, drawing you into an image. Curved lines can lead you on a journey around the frame, leading you towards the main subject. Straight lies have a simplicity and directness of their own. There’s no mistake what direction you need to take. Diagonal lines can introduce a feeling of movement and drama. You can create diagonal lines by taking a different viewpoint and tilting your camera.
4. Patterns, colours and texture
dark feel about them that conveys a strong and dramatic mood to the image.
These are the 3 main ingredients of any image. A pattern is a sequence that’s interesting. It could be anything such as lines in a sand dune, waves coming into a beach, buildings or posts in a fence or tables or chairs arranged in a row.
Sometimes they all work together to create a strong image. Other times they don’t because one element is the most important. And that depends on how you describe the scene through your image.
Colour is an obvious attraction especially bright primary colours. This is usually what captures most people’s attention in sunsets for example. Lack of colour can also be effective and that’s why black and white images are often seen as evocative and more authentic. They convey a sense of mood and mystery that sometimes isn’t possible with a coloured image. Then there’s texture. The look and ‘feel’ in an image. Now I know you can’t actually ‘feel’ an image but I’m taking about the sense of feeling it conveys. You see texture on surfaces everywhere. You see it in the sky when you have clouds. Storm clouds have a definite
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You achieve simplicity by making your subject stand out by removing anything that’s a distraction.
5. Simplicity Your aim is to tell a story and the easier you make make it for the viewer to ‘get it’, the better it will work. That’s why the best images are simple, because that gives them an elegance and quality that makes them easy to understand. If you make it a viewer has to work too hard to understand your image, they’ll give up. And that’s especially true today where attention spans are so short.
There could be something in the background, to the side or in front of the subject. Basically anything that interrupts the view of the subject in a way that’s distracting. So check carefully and make sure you don’t have a telegraph pole coming out of someone’s head, or some rubbish on the beach that diverts your eye from the glorious sunset. Of course you can fix these things later in your photo editing app, but that takes time. It’s far better to compose the image correctly, so that those things are not visible. Believe me, it’s far quicker and easier than playing around in something like Photoshop later. Get it right in camera and you’ve got a head start.
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6. Viewpoint Most people take a photo from their eye level when they are standing or seated. This is usually fine, but it can also be boring because that’s what most people do! So to make your image more interesting, think about changing your viewpoint. If you’re shooting a building, shoot upwards. You could also go to the top of the building and shoot the scene below. This gives you a far different perspective than the ‘normal’ eye level view you see. If you’re photographing children or small animals, looking down on them makes them appear even smaller than they already are. So get down to their eye level. This creates a far warmer and more personable image than if you shoot them from above. Whatever you’re shooting it’s a great idea to experiment and shoot from many different angles. This creates interest in the image and it’s also a lot of fun when you get a really great image.
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7. Aspect ratio
It's easy to take every photo with your camera held horizontally. This is called ‘Landscape’ mode and it works really well for some scenes, such as landscapes. Landscape mode makes scenes look wide or panoramic. Also shoot a scene by turning your camera vertically. This is called portrait mode and this makes things look tall. Some scenes work better in one format, so you need to think abut the story you want to tell and the best way to achieve that.
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8. Break the ‘rules’ Now I’ve told you what the rules are, let’s break them! That probably sounds a bit strange and counter-intuitive. But there are many good reasons why you would do that. And this depends on what you’re shooting. If every image follows the same rules, they look the same and they can become very boring. So bending or breaking the rules of composition will give your image a different look. This will make it appear more interesting, help it stand out and hopefully get a great reaction. As you become a better photographer you can also use and break the rules to create artistic effects. But remember that not all the ‘rules’ apply to every situation. And that’s what makes photography fascinating and fun. It’s up to you to create something that tells your story in a unique and compelling way. So let’s get creative!
Three things to think about before you take the shot
1. COMPOSITION 2. FOCUS 3. EXPOSURE
This is a really basic one, but it’s the most common cause of bad photos. Whether it’s a gorgeous landscape or beautiful people, if it’s unintentionally out of focus, it’s ruined.
If you’re taking a close up of a flower or a portrait, it’s a good idea to make sure you focus on the main subject. In a portrait that means focussing on the eyes. To make this stand out you want to throw the background out of focus.
Notice I said ‘unintentionally’. That’s because there are sometimes reasons for having part of the image out of focus.
This is called ‘Depth of Field’ and it’s the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear sharp.
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In a landscape you’ll usually want the image to be sharp all the way through. In a portrait you’ll want it to be sharp on the face and then out of focus behind that. This is called a shallow Depth of Field.
How you set focus depends on your camera. With a smartphone it’s usually as easy as pointing on the screen at what you want to focus on. With other cameras you can set auto focus where the camera selects and locks on to a point you specify. Or if your camera supports it, you can manually focus to get the exact effect you’re looking for. To get a sharp landscape you should focus at a point roughly one third into the scene. When you do this, you should get a well focussed and sharp image. You can do a lot to fix image problems. You can adjust the light, crop the image and change the colours. But you can’t really change the focus. I’ve seen some people try to do it by sharpening an image. But this never works because it just makes it look really bad. There are also apps that can help, but the results are not good. The only foolproof way to solve a focus problem is to avoid it in the first place.
Three things to think about before you take the shot
1. COMPOSITION 2. FOCUS 3. EXPOSURE
All digital cameras work in the same way. They let light in through a lens on to a sensor that’s made from silicon. This is how the photo is created. There’s more to it than that, but that’s all you really need to know at this stage! Exposure is the amount of light that you let in through the lens of your camera to make that image. Every image usually has three types of light - highlights, shadows and mid-tones. If you let in too much light, your image will be too bright. There may be areas that are white which means that the highlights could be ‘blown’ and the detail is lost. If you let in too little light it will be dark. There may be areas that are black which could mean the shadows are ’blocked’. In some cases you may be able to recover highlights and unblock shadows in a photo editing app. But if the highlights are really ‘blown’ there may be nothing you can do. That’s because there are actually no pixels to work on. There’s nothing for you to recover.
This looks bad and if you were to print the image you’d just see a white space where something should be! It may save on ink but it looks bad! Unblocking shadows may be easier because you could open them in a photo editing app. But when you do this, it can introduce ‘noise’ which makes it look grainy.
You can reduce the noise in a photo editing app, but be careful not to overdo it or you’ll end up with a very smooth image that has a plastic look. This is a histogram that you will see on most cameras. It’s basically a map that shows you how highlights and shadows are distributed throughout the image. Highlights are shown on the left and Shadows on the right.
In a well exposed image both are within the vertical lines as you can see here. When an image is over exposed you’ll see the curve way over to the left. For shadows it’s way over to the right. So how do you get a good exposure? Well that does depend on what camera you are using. I’m a Nikon user but I’m not going to talk about that in this book. Instead I’ll talk about how you can do it on your iPhone. If you are an Android user I think it’s pretty similar. With iPhone you set both the focus and exposure using your finger! You point at the area you want to focus on and this will lock on to that point. Now, if that point is very bight, the image will usually be darker or under exposed. That’s because the camera is taking an exposure reading based on the light at that point.
If you point at a dark area, the reverse happens and you end up with a bright or over-exposed image. This happens because the camera is setting exposure of the overall image from the point you’ve selected. It’s averaging what it thinks the light is. So you really want to select an area that’s neither too bright or too dark. You want to pick a mid-tone! Look at the scene for an area that’s mid way between the brightest and darkest part of the scene and select that. You may have to experiment, but this generally produces a better, more balanced exposure. You should then be able to see detail in both the highlights and the shadows. Getting a perfect exposure with something like an iPhone is hard to do. But remember that it’s usually better to under-expose an image than it is to blow the highlights. A more sophisticated camera will give you far more control over exposure, but that’s a topic for another time.
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Four things to make your image amazing!
4 EDITING TIPS
So you’ve taken your shot and it looks pretty good. But unless it’s 100% what you want, there are 4 things you can do to make it look even better. 1. Crop 2. Tone 3. Colour 4. Sharpness and Noise
Four things to make your image amazing!
1. CROP 2. TONE 3. COLOUR 4. SHARPNESS & NOISE
Cropping is where you change the size and shape of your image by chopping bits from the top, bottom and sides of your image.
©john rees You can crop an image to change the orientation. You can crop it to look short and wide to create a panoramic look.
You can crop it to be tall and narrow to create a portrait. You can also crop a section as a square, which looks like an old 35mm film slide. Cropping is also good to remove unwanted areas from your image. If there’s something at the edge that you don’t want to see, it may be quicker to crop it out than to repair or clone it out with an editing app.
Four things to make your image amazing!
1. CROP 2. TONE 3. COLOUR 4. SHARPNESS & NOISE
Tone is also called contrast. And this is the difference between the light and dark areas or highlights and shadows in your image. The way you adjust tone depends on how you want the image to look. Some people like images that are dark and contrasty. Others like them to be bright and open. Of course, what you choose will be determined by your subject, and also your own personal taste. As a general rule, you will want some detail in all parts of your image. If it’s too dark the shadow areas will be ‘blocked’ and will look black. This is fine if, for example, you’re looking for a silhouette effect like the image opposite. But if you want to show detail, you’ll need to open up the shadows. When you do that though, be careful about the noise you may see. I’ll talk about that a bit later. If you open the highlights too much, you will ‘blow’ them and here is where you’ll see bright splodges of white with no detail. We saw this in the earlier section on Exposure. You’d be less likely to do this on purpose
though because the artistic effect isn’t that pleasing to the eye. You can affect the tone of an image through Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, Highlights and Shadows. Play around with sliders and find a look that you like. As with other things, there’s no right or wrong here, it’s personal taste and preference.
Four things to make your image amazing!
1. CROP 2. TONE 3. COLOUR 4. SHARPNESS & NOISE
Colour is probably one of the most important elements of an image. Unless it’s a monochrome or black and white! Black and white is self explanatory but what about monochrome?
©john rees You can experiment with this and have a lot of fun. Let your imagination run riot and you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve.
©john rees Some people think it’s just another word for black and white. It can be, but usually it’s an image that has varying shades of one colour.
Great colour makes an image. In fact in many cases, the colour is the subject. How many times have you shot a glorious sunset because of the reds, oranges and blues in the sky? A common mistake with colour is a tendency to be heavy handed and make images look too vibrant, bright and over-saturated.
It’s easy to do but be careful. When you’re using a photo editing app such as Photoshop, it’s easy to get carried away with all the filters you can apply. But this tends to distract from the image rather than make it look better. Try to aim for a look that is bright and vibrant, but balanced.
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Four things to make your image amazing!
1. CROP 2. TONE 3. COLOUR 4. SHARPNESS & NOISE
Sharpness is what makes an image looks crisp and clear. But if it’s overdone it will introduce fuzziness and noise into the image. This will make it look ‘speckled’ and bad. You will see this noise at the edges of things that have space around them.
You will also see noise in areas of colour. If you oversharpen an image that has a bright blue sky, you’ll see that this also breaks up. In short, overdoing sharpness makes an image look pretty bad. Some people mistakenly think that sharpening will correct an image that’s out of focus. That’s not true. In fact, the only real way to correct an out of focus image is to shoot it again! Sharpness is also sometimes called Definition or Clarity. They basically do similar things although they sharpen in a different way. But whenever you use any of these settings, go easy on them and play around to make sure the image looks good. If sharpness introduces noise, noise reduction takes it away. That’s why these sliders are often used in tandem. You apply some sharpening and it makes the image noisy. Then you dial this down with noise reduction. But be careful because if you apply too much nose reduction it makes your image look artificial, too smooth and plasticky.
With any of these settings, the best approach is not to overdo it. Also, if you compose, focus and expose the image well, there will be little need to play around with it afterwards. Less really is more and you should aim to spend as little time as possible post processing your image. Just pay attention to the basics and you’ll consistently shoot images you, and your fans will love to look at. So that’s it for this really simple introduction to taking great photos. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and if you did, please tell you friends. Oh, and be sure to look out for more courses in the future. If you’d like advance notice you can send me an email or contact me through my website johnreesphoto.com. Have fun and happy shooting!