Photography Blog

Photography is indeed an art that everyone can get into and learn. It is a good way to appreciate the beauty of the World and God’s creation. It is a good way to capture the undiscovered secrets of this world. Through the camera, one can present another side of this world that others have not seen before. It is one way of making people aware of the undeniable reality whether good or bad.

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Although the camera has been around decades ago but nowadays with the help of modern technology, everything is clearer, better and brighter, now we have the digital camera to give us digital photography. Do you want to know the basics of digital photography? Do you want to learn how to do it? Let us discover this topic together.

Why learned digital photography? Well, my answer will be, why not? It is better compared to the traditional film photography we have way back. There are many features involved in a digital camera. Take for example color option, stabilization, auto-bracketing and many other features as well as advantages.

If you want to learn the basics of digital photography, you need to have a digital camera of course. Find a school or a person who offers tutorial on the basics of digital photography like lighting, angles and other techniques that can surely help you attain the needed skills in digital photography. You have to be familiar with each of the digital camera’s parts to use it effectively. You have to know each of their function and how you can make use of it as much as possible.

The basics of digital photography are easy to learn. You just need to make it work for you and have the effort, focus and determination to learn it. Surely, you will enjoy taking pictures.

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Aperture and other photo basics can induce yawns in the most eager of new shutterbugs, but once these basics are understood, the rest of photography comes easily into focus. Aperture, shutter speed and ISO are all terms good to know, whether you have a point-and-shoot or professional camera. This article explains aperture and provides tips for using it to create better photographs.

To better understand aperture, think about how the irises of your eyes get bigger and smaller to allow more or less light into the pupil. Like your irises, the camera’s lens diaphragm widens and narrows to let in more or less light. Thus the aperture determines the exposure of the picture, that is how bright or dark it is. The aperture also has another important purpose which we’ll look at in a second.

“Aperture” refers to the size of this opening and is measured in F stops. The smaller the F Stop number, the wider the aperture. This is where it’s easy to get confused. Actually the F stop numbers are ratios, which is why the bigger the F Stop number, the smaller the size of the aperture.

In addition to controlling light, aperture also controls depth of field. To better understand this concept, make a fist and hold it in front of your eye. Now slowly open your hand. See how the focus changes as you open your hand? Sure you can see more through the bigger opening, but when the opening in your fist is small everything is in focus? Try it again and see how when you open your fist, the object closest to you will come into focus while objects further away will be fuzzy. This is how aperture determines depth of field, that is how much of a photograph is focused.

If you are shooting in Auto Focus (AF), the camera will attempt to focus on what it perceives to be the main subject of the photograph, but the results may not be what you want.

For this reason, many cameras have an Aperture Priority setting. This allows you to set the aperture and then it automatically adjusts the shutter speed to compensate for the aperture. For example, if you set the aperture for a landscape, this narrows it, thus letting in less light. The camera would then automatically increase the amount of time the shutter stays open so that your photo isn’t underexposed or too dark. Aperture Priority isn’t exact, but this is how it usually works.

Now if you have an SLR and are taking pictures in manual mode, you can adjust the shutter speeds and aperture separately.

Most will have a camera with preset modes, such as portrait, landscape, sports, etc.
When the mode is set for landscape, the aperture automatically narrows so everything will be brought into focus. At the same time, the shutter speed automatically slows down, leaving the shutter open longer to offset the smaller amount of light coming through the lens diaphragm.

When you switch to portrait mode and focus on someone in front of you with the landscape in the background, the camera will make your subject in focus and make them stand out from the background. And it will speed up the shutter speed so the photo isn’t overexposed by the extra light allowed in with the larger aperture.

Remember: the smaller the aperture, the greater the F stop number (because it represents a ratio not a whole number) and the greater the depth of field.

Understanding photography basics like aperture is not only important for those using manual settings or Aperture Priority, it also helps those using preset modes. Here are three preset modes you should better understand:

Portrait: How much the background blurs when using this mode depends on your camera and the distance between your subject and background – a minimum of 10 feet works best. This mode can be used for any subject that you want to bring into focus, while taking the background out of focus, not just people and pets.
Landscape (also called “infinity” on some cameras) is the mode represented by a mountain peak or a figure 8. You can use this for any picture where you want everything in focus like landscapes, cityscapes or a picture of your garden.
Macro: This mode, depicted by the tulip, opens  the camera’s aperture extra wide so that you can take extreme closeups without the blur caused by not enough focus. Depending on your camera, you’ll be able to get anywhere within an inch to a foot of your subject. When preparing to take photos outdoors of items like flowers, remember that even the smallest petal movement can cause the image to be blurry because of the slower shutter speed. Also remember to focus on the part of the subject that you want most in focus, whether it be a butterfly’s wing or a caterpillar’s eyes.

Just applying this knowledge can help you produce some beautiful photographs that you’ll be proud to frame on your wall.

Professional wedding photographers constantly dispute the merits of digital photography versus the more standard film photography. This is a natural debate as our world becomes more digitized. Most people have or can borrow a digital camera. These types of cameras can do much more than a standard film camera. When the time comes to decide on our wedding photography, it is only natural that we would consider digital wedding photography.

Digital cameras have enjoyed improved quality over the past several years. Rather than the traditional 35mm camera, there are more options available for professional wedding photographers. They are willing to take a chance with new technology. Digital wedding photography is gaining credibility among professional photographers and, in time. many people will not be able to tell the difference between traditional and digital wedding photos.

In a majority of instances, digital cameras provide many notable benefits. Utilizing a digital camera gives the photographer the added advantage of immediate feedback. This would allow him to take more difficult shots or shots that may not turn out very well as he could correct them later if need be. A wedding photographer needs to be prepared for the need to use ambient light in their pictures. The option of taking more shots is certainly another advantage. Also, the photographer can take as many pictures as they’d like; after all, you only have to buy a memory card once, whereas film needs to be replaced often.

Another major advantage of digital wedding photography is that all of the settings are internal. Changing film speeds or the roll of film is fast and easy; the photographer can make the necessary adjustments without interrupting anything.

A lot of newly married couples like to have a photo album as well as having their pictures available in a digital format. Moving digital photographs electronically is easier and cheaper than the alternative of scanning film photos. Also, digital photos are easily manipulated to suit the desires of the couple. For example, certain photos can be printed in black and white or sepia tones.

One of the main disadvantages to having digital photos taken at the wedding is that a lot of photographers are not completely aware of how to use the new styles. In a number of ways, digital photography and film photography differ greatly, and even the most gifted and skilled wedding photographers are not at the top of their game when it comes to digital photography. When making a decision on a digital wedding photographer, you should always find out how long the photographer has been practicing digital photography. Also ask to see copies of both his film work and his digital work for comparison purposes.

It is obvious that digital wedding photography is turning into a more in-demand option for both professional wedding photographers and couples as well. Still, your choice depends on your own situation. Even though cameras are “point-and-click,” any photographer you decide on should have a certain skill level. Our personal digital cameras provide extra features and enhanced functions that are sure to please the majority of the population who owns or is in the market for a new digital camera. You should view as many portfolios as possible. To determine what works best for you, try both digital and traditional film.

Photo editing has come a long way since the darkroom.  Actions that used to take hours of painstaking work can now be done or, more importantly, undone at the click of a mouse.  So where do you get started in learning how to navigate the world of digital photo editing?  Here is a quick guide on photo editors to help get you started.

Digital Photography Editing Software
There is a long list of software on the market that is made exclusively for editing photos.  There is a huge range in price and quality when it comes to digital photo editing software. In the end, you will need to decide what you are willing to spend and what you want to do with it.  For this article, we won’t talk too much about different bits of software’s plusses and minuses, but know that there are options.  If you’re looking for free editors, you should look at The Giimp or Paint.net or if you want to buy a professional program definitely check out Adobe Photoshop.

Basic Functions of Photo Editing Software
Although photo editing software can be very complex and allow for endless creativity, here are a few basic things that you’ll want to know right away.

Cropping: Cropping is when you take parts of a photo you don’t need, then get rid of them by redrawing the frame.  So, anything inside the frame will become your new cropped image while anything outside the frame will be deleted.  One important thing to remember about cropping is that it changes the final dimensions of your photographs, so if you’re planning on printing them make sure you crop with the same aspect ratio (width to height).
Image Contrast: Contrast impacts how much the colors or tones stand out from one another.  Add contrast and you’ll see your darks get darker and your lights get lighter, remove contrast and eventually everything will cloud into a gray fog.  Higher contrasts can make for interesting imagery, but will also make the grain of your photos stand out more.
Level of Brightness: Brightness applies to the overall level of the entire image.  If you’ve taken a picture that turned out too dark, turning up the brightness may help some of the details stand out. If you slowly increase the contrast and brightness together, you may be able to save an otherwise un-usable picture.
Photo Saturation: Saturation refers to how deep your colors are.  In a color image, if you completely remove the saturation the image will turn to black and white.  If you amp it up, your colors will quickly begin to look unnatural and super-bright.
Hue: The hue changes the tone of your picture.  Adjust the hue and your entire image will shift from a blue or green tint to red, purple, or any other color.  Although it takes a little time to get used to, changing the hue can make a big improvement to images taken under fluorescent light.
Transforming Your Photo: Although each software does it differently, they all allow you to rotate, resize or flip your picture.  Hopefully you won’t have to make too many adjustments of this nature, but should an image turn out slightly crooked it’s good to know you have alternatives.

Regardless of which photo editing software you use, you should be able to adjust all of the elements mentioned above so you can get your photos exactly how you want them.  One way to add depth and bring out the picture’s color is to decrease the saturation amount while increasing the contrast.  Otherwise, do your best not to rely on editing and try to get all of the work done in the camera.  If you’re going to spend time editing a picture, make sure you start off with a good picture and make it better instead of trying to make a bad picture good.

Almost all of the most up-to-date dslr cameras feature a photography guidebook that will practically take you by the hand and shows you just about all you need to find out about snapping pictures when using the camera you just acquired. For the best results work with the instruction from photography tutorials that suit your degree of know-how; you would find three forms of tutorials that I will classify as basic, advanced and specialist.

Digital Photography Tutorials Benefits

The vital thing which you would certainly discover through photography tutorials is tips on how to deal with the photographic camera. You\’ll find the most intricate camera would demand only 10 minutes to find out its usage. It is because in the camera things are computerized and all you want to master will be just how to give it your command term.

The following point which Digital Photography Tutorials would certainly educate you on will be just how to snap a photo in a variety of situations, i.e. in full sun, for a cloudy day, if the sunlight is in front of you and when it\’s behind you, when the lighting is extremely poor or perhaps extremely bright etc. Even though usually the lighting circumstances are usually addressed by the photographic camera by design, the course would certainly explain to you the various factors so you would certainly understand it\’s capability far better and manage to work with it manually if capturing extraordinary subject matter.

Then comes the shutter speed, aperture and exposure that typically would be fixed manually in a normal photographic camera; using a camera your work is very much simplified since its inbuilt receptors are made to recognize the types of conditions and also form of subject matter (regardless of whether moving about or calm) you\’re shooting and supply you with the most effective combination regarding shooting the objective. The digital photography course would again describe how the photographic camera options and exactly why you don\’t need to concern yourself with these kinds of factors since you would certainly have needed to do in the event you used an everyday photographic camera.

Last but not least, digital photography courses will guide you through the usage of the digital photography computer software together with that you might change and further perfect the images you shot. A lot of the computer software involved will allow a massive array of manipulations to the pictures you export and would open up for you the latest world of ingenuity.

While you conclude the course, instantly use just what you discovered and perform the techniques right up until you are totally conversant and comfortable with the particular processes coached. In case you might have started out with the simple, bear in mind you\’ll still have 2 further levels to deal with. With each and every level you cross you will manage to fully grasp and also use your camera far better and acquire some excellent improvement with the pictures you capture.

In case you are missing out on digital photography facts you need to take better photographs, you will discover a comprehensive range of digital photography courses on the net, simply by conducting a Google search. Some of the courses are in video format, and others come in text pdf file format. You will probably encounter several digital photography blogs that submit frequent photography courses.

Excellent Digital Photography Tutorials Introducing A Free Digital Photography Guide Called \”How To Take Beautiful Digital Pics Made Simple\”. These basic tips reveal how to use a digital camera like a pro…

www.LearnDigitalPhotographyNow.com/Digital-Photography-Tutorials

Choosing photo-editing software can be difficult. Windows comes with rudimentary tools that will help you with your photos. But you’ll need more if you plan on doing more than resizing and rotating photos. Also, cameras usually come with editing software. However, these probably lack essential features to editing your photos. For the average user, Photoshop is overkill. The learning curve is steep, to say the least. It will allow you to transform a photograph completely. However, its tools are aimed at creative professionals. Even experts struggle to master it! If you have outgrown lesser photo-editing programs, Photoshop may be for you. There are no other programs in the same league. The first thing you should look for is ease of use. Try editing one of your photos. With any program, there will be a learning curve. But, you should be able to find the controls you need fairly easily.
New and expert photographers alike have experienced it. You take an otherwise perfect picture of friends or family but there’s one major flaw: glowing red eyes. Here are some reliable tips for avoiding red-eye in the first place: whenever possible, try not to use a flash. If you have to use a flash, ask your subject to look toward the camera, but not directly at the lens. Also, use additional light sources in the room. You can also take pictures during the day, because at night the pupils will dilate meaning red-eye will be a certainty. Lastly, you can stand farther away from your subject.

At some point or other you’re likely going to want to change the size of a digital photo. This will usually be to serve an intended purpose such as emailing a smaller sized version of your original photo. A common size change for a digital photo is cropping. This can be done to either “zoom in” on a section of the photo (create a new photo of just a portion of the original photo) or to change the aspect ratio of the photo. Cropping involves selecting a portion of the image and removing the rest. This creates a new smaller image with just the portion of the image that you want. Cropping can be used to remove annoyances in the photo, to “zoom-in” on a selected portion of the photo, or to change the aspect ratio of the photo so that it can be printed full frame on a selected paper size. Most good photo programs have a cropping tool.

If you have a rather plain photograph, or a black and white picture, there are ways to manipulate the colors to make the picture more interesting. Your editing program will probably have a way to enhance the color of a picture, or you can completely change the color of an object. If you learn to use the tools well, you could be able to convert a black and white picture to color. You can also create aged effects, or make a picture grayscaled. Experiment with your program and find out what you can do to improve the coloring of your pictures.

Unsharp masking is an image manipulation technique now familiar to many users of digital image processing software, but it seems to have been first used in Germany in the 1930s as a way of increasing the acutance, or apparent sharpness, of photographic images. The “unsharp” of the name derives from the fact that the technique uses a blurred, or “unsharp”, positive to create a “mask” of the original image. The unsharped mask is then combined with the negative, creating the illusion that the resulting image is sharper than the original. Digital unsharp masking is a flexible and powerful way to increase sharpness, especially in scanned images. However, it is easy to create unwanted and conspicuous edge effects. On the other hand these effects can be used creatively, especially if one channel of images in RGB or Lab colour space is selected for unsharp masking.

What’s the “right” size for a picture? Well, that depends on the photo. Most monitors display at 72 dpi (dots per inch). So, if you want the picture to be 5 inches wide (probably about the biggest you would want for an e-mail message), the picture would be 360 pixels wide (5 inches x 72 dpi = 360 pixels). Pixel is short for “Picture Element” and is the smallest unit of visual information used to build an image. If you have ever zoomed in on an image, Pixels are those little squares that you see. The more pixels in an image, the better the resolution.

Final compression and using the right format can be as important as taking good photos and scanning them correctly. Macs and pc’s – and other types of machines – are readily mixed in today’s computer environments. This means that proprietary file formats are no longer useful, because you want to be able to exchange files with other people using other types of computers. Web formats are excellent exchange formats, but unfortunately not well suited for archival purposes. This list covers the most common file formats and comments on their characteristics. BMP is the format that is the native Windows format, but it has no advantages over TIFF apart from support in Windows Paint. It is accurate but compresses poorly and has nothing close to the flexibility of TIFF. Use TIFF for archiving in stead. Useless on the web. TIFF is the best format for storing originals and transporting files. TIFF is accurate and compresses well without loss of quality. TIFF can store all types of pictures – simple and complex, B/W and color, photos and logos. TIFF is platform independent and works on both Mac’s and PC’s. Edit Your Digital Photos
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Image editors (also known as photo editors) allow you to create and modify graphics and photographic images. This includes tasks such as painting and drawing, color correction, photo enhancement, creating special effects, converting images, and adding text to graphics. Your image editor will probably be your most frequently used tool for working with graphics so it should be flexible and intuitive. Many software programs are available for enhancing and otherwise working with bitmap images, but unless they can perform all of the tasks above sufficiently, they should only be considered as companion tools to your primary photo editing application.

The display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. Some commentators also use this term to indicate a range of input formats that the display’s input electronics will accept and often include formats greater than the screen’s native grid size even though they have to be down-scaled to match the screen’s parameters. An example of pixel shape affecting “resolution” or perceived sharpness is displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution, which makes the image much clearer. However, newer LCD displays and such are fixed at a certain resolution; making the resolution lower on these kinds of screens will greatly decrease sharpness, as an interpolation process is used to “fix” the non-native resolution input into the displays native resolution output.

While it might be neater to store digital images, you aren’t done with organizing and storing images. There are various options for data storage, and no one answer is right for everyone. In fact, there may be more than one right answer for you. However you store your images, be sure to file them so they are easy to organize and find. Choose one system and stick to it. Create named folders on your hard drive or name compact discs, for instance, to store them. ALWAYS make copies of your images, leaving the originals intact, before you edit, alter or crop them. The hard drive is where most people store the bulk of their images. This is a good option, but isn’t without problems. For instance, if you have all of your images on your hard drive and it crashes, you’ve lost all your precious images. A horrible thought, of course! Do use the hard drive, but also back up all images right as you transfer them to the hard drive by any secondary method. The compact disc is a wonderful way to store images; it can be rather efficient and it is relatively easy to set up. The downside is you need a CD-burner to use this method. If you do have one, simply keep a running backup of all your images. Be sure to pay special attention to organization so you don’t wind up popping ten CDs in just to hunt down one photo. When you burn a new CD of images, write down the dates and descriptions of the photos on the CD. Or name the CDs and keep a notebook that lists what is on each CD. Better yet, make an index print of images on each CD and write the name on top of the print.

When it comes time to touch up your digital photos, you will need a photo-editing program. You can choose a low-priced, consumer-oriented program or a high-priced program targeted at professional photographers. For most of us, the consumer-oriented programs are more than adequate-and, in fact, you might have received one with your computer or digital camera. Depending on what you do with your photos, you may not need a lot of the bells and whistles when it comes to photo editing. Explore your options and find out which software is best for you. If you’re a beginner, you may be happy with a package that offers only the basics, like cropping and red-eye removal. Or, perhaps you need something with more creative effects. For the ultimate in photo-editing, you may consider investing in a professional editing suite. Be warned though, software like that is going to cost you. Adobe Photoshop, for instance, has become the industry standard among professional photographers everywhere. It allows functions like level adjustment, advanced compositing, and RAW image processing.

Sharpening is one of the most impressive transformations you can apply to an image since it seems to bring out image detail that was not there before. What it actually does, however, is to emphasize edges in the image and make them easier for the eye to pick out — while the visual effect is to make the image seem sharper, no new details are actually created. The first step in sharpening an image is to blur it slightly. Next, the original image and the blurred version are compared one pixel at a time. If a pixel is brighter than the blurred version it is lightened further; if a pixel is darker than the blurred version, it is darkened. The result is to increase the contrast between each pixel and its neighbors. The nature of the sharpening is influenced by the blurring radius used and the extent to which the differences between each pixel and its neighbor are exaggerated.

Digital cameras, even relatively cheap ones, take incredibly large images. However, looks can be deceiving and, while the pictures may look big onscreen, they may look disappointing when you try to adjust them for printing, emailing, or long term storage. They’re best left untouched, if possible, so that you have more flexibility later. All photo editing software will have a command for changing the pixel dimensions of an image. Look for a command called “Image Size,” “Resize,” or “Resample.” When you use this command you will be presented with a dialog box for entering the exact pixels you wish to use.

Cropping is the process of selecting and removing a portion of an image to create focus or strengthen its composition. Even the best photographers will often get back to their computers to view their photos and find that they are not ideal for one reason or another including distracting background elements, framing mistakes, or unbalanced images. While the temptation might be to delete such images the beauty of shooting in the digital format is that editing images after shooting them is relatively quick and easy. Cropping is one option for fixing such problems. This is usually done in photo editing software. Cropping images give you a second chance to frame your images. While you can never really add to the photograph to put more space around your subject (or recover the ear you clipped), cropping the image even tighter can take the focus away from the clipped part of your subject and make the image quite dynamic.

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When you want to maximize your digital camera, you need to have some basics of digital photography. Some might think that they need to join photography classes to get the best of their hobby but little do they know, you just need some background information and you will be able to improve the quality of your picture.

So, let’s start.

The first thing to learning digital photography is to have the right camera. When you are starting on photography, you will be wasting your money when you dive straight into the professional DSLR camera. It is true that DSLR cam capture better picture but as a novice photographer, you might have problem appreciating its potential.

When you are unsure of your skill level, you should stick to a compact digital camera and practice your skills before you get something more complicated.

Then, let’s talk about the basic format of digital photography.

You need to understand that the digital images you captured is actually made up of million of pixels. Most people thought that the more pixel you have the better picture quality will be. That is not entirely true. You will enjoy better picture quality with high pixel when you have a larger image sensor.

This is because the more pixels you have in a small image sensor, the more they are compressed together. When you take a picture at high ISO, the pixels are going to introduce digital noise to the near by pixel. However, when you have a larger image sensor, these pixels will be more loosely pack. Hence the intensity of noise in your picture at high ISO will be less.

Still, it is not the end of the world when you have noise in your picture. Another beauty of digital photography is that you can always edit your picture with software. Although it does involve work but when you think about saving the once in a life time picture, all the extra work is worth it.

You might think that software is only for professionals. But as the technology improves, software developers have made the software so user friendly that you can learn it over a short tutorial.

For anyone who loves taking pictures, it’s worth while getting acquainted with photo editing software as they can make a big difference with how your pictures turn out.

Image editing software to a digital photographer is what the dark room is to a film photographer. The big benefit of photo editing software is that it’s easier to do than setting up a darkroom.

Plus, with photo editing software you can do both standard image editing, such as cropping and adjusting color, and with the right software, you can also try your hand at photo manipulation.

Image editing refers to any change that is made to a picture. Photo manipulation is what photographers sometimes refer to as “trick photography” where you can do things like changing backgrounds and other things. (For some fun examples of photo manipulation, look up the “National Geographic Photo Foolery” page online.)

Before you choose a photo editor, you first want to understand the type of image editing you want to do. In this article, we’ll highlight the most popular ones:

Picasa:

Google’s free photo editor. If you are just getting into the very basics of digital photography, this will serve you well for a while. It is really designed to be more of an online photo album or photo manager but can also handle basic photo editing. Picasa offers basic editing tools such as retouch, which helps you remove blemishes, scratches, etc. Like many photo editors it has red eye remover. It also has fun applications like creating screensavers with your photos and integration with Google Earth.

If you’re ready to advance from digital photography basics and do more with your images, consider one of the other photo editors.

Adobe Photoshop Elements:

This is more user-friendly and less costly than it’s “big brother” Photoshop CS4 and is the market leader in photo editing and manipulation. It’s good for the photography enthusiast plus there is a free trial version.

Adobe Photoshop CS4:

This has everything a professional photographer or graphic artist needs. It sells for approximately 0 on their site, but it’s offered for half that by some vendors and may offer a free trial version.

Paint Shop Pro:

This is a close competitor to Photoshop Elements and also runs about . They also offer a 30 day free trial.

The GIMP:

An odd name for such a powerful program, the acronym stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This open source, freeware continues to improve and has a good community of users should you need help. It is available for Unix/Linux platforms, as well as Windows (NT4/2000/XP/Vista) and Mac operating systems (OS X). It doesn’t quite have everything that you get with Adobe Photoshop CS4, but it has more than Elements or Paint Shop Pro and is used by some professionals.  

To get the best use out of your photo editor, look at its guide or help sections for an overview of what you can do with it, and then read the help sections on any new applications you want to try that aren’t 100 percent intuitive.

It takes time but you will be amazed at the magic you can do with your photos if you spend a little effort.

For example, here are a just a few of the things you can accomplish (the top 5 even with just Picasa):

* Crop
* Resize
* Lighten or darken shadows, highlights, and midtones
* Correct Colors
* Remove blemishes, a stray branch, a logo, or anything else you don’t want in the picture
* Blur Backgrounds (Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro and The GIMP all offer background-blurring applications. Picasa doesn’t.)

You can also create all sorts of special effects with a photo editor. For example you can turn your photo into an impressionistic painting. You can also convert a color picture into a black and white image to better capture the tones and highlights.
Or for a more vintage or antique look, you can choose sepia.

Even if you don’t care about special effects, learning the basics of even the most basic photo editor will allow you to fix mistakes made in photographing. Just cropping alone can do wonders if you couldn’t get a close enough shot or you’ve got too much clutter in the picture. For these reasons image editing is part of just about any digital photography basics course or book you might find. Before long, you will be editing and producing quality photographs that you will be proud to hang on your wall.

You can call it the digital disease of photography or perhaps the death of photography. The reality is that digital has caused a decline in the quality of photography. There are several reasons, one of them being the speed of digital and the resulting lack of thought before the shutter is released. Quick on the draw and not enough careful consideration.

This has been a hobby horse of mine for a few years and some have said get off and stop flogging a dead horse. They may be right and maybe a little wrong. But, there is a solution or rather a number of solutions. The one I want to consider is getting back to basics. In most vocations when skills diminish it’s time to get back to basics. This is where the problem lies in digital photography. The bottom line is that in order to learn digital photography you need to learn the basics of photography.

There are two things that need to be done then. Get back to the basics or if you haven’t learnt the basics, begin with them. Here is where the big question lies. How do we get back or begin with the basics. The operative word is learning. Learn photography or learn digital photography. Picking up a camera and shooting doesn’t make you a photographer. So what do we do? Acquire the skills. This is much easier said than done.

Our current generation is the most fortunate generation as we have the internet and the ability to read, read and read. Again easier said than done. What I would like to suggest is that acquire specific literature i.e. books on photography. The internet is full of them especially electronic downloadable editions. But lets go beyond this and back to the paper books. There are a number I’d consider to be fundamental to any aspiring photographer’s library. So here are a few suggestions:

1. The Digital Photography Book by Scott Kelby

Scott Kelby gives you the simple insider tips pros use. It’s easy to understand and very simple to apply resulting in great photographs.

2. Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera (Updated Edition) by Bryan Peterson

Exposure and how to use aperture and shutter speed always confused me until I read Bryan Peterson’s book on exposure. A must have book in your library.

3. The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos by Michael Freeman

Michael has been around for donkey’s years and handles a subject that every digital photographer needs. Composition. By understanding composition your photographs will improve a hundredfold.

4. Learning to See Creatively: Design, Color & Composition in Photography (Updated Edition) by Bryan Peterson

For some of us seeing creatively is a natural ability while with others it’s something we need to learn or acquire. This is one of the best books I have read on creativity in photography.

5. Digital Photography Masterclass by Tom Ang

Tom Ang has been around a long time and with this book takes you further along you photographic journey. Great assignments throughout this book. He will take you to a new level.

6. Understanding Shutter Speed: Creative Action and Low-Light Photography Beyond 1/125 Second by Bryan Peterson

This book is linked with his other one on exposure and helps cement your understanding of how to use your shutter speed.

7. Understanding Digital Photography: Techniques for Getting Great Pictures by Bryan Peterson

Getting the shot is what it is all about. Bryan gets you thinking before your press the shutter button too quickly and succumb to the disease of digital. If there was a one man solution to this problem it’s Bryan Peterson.

These are just some of my favourite authors and photographers who have enhanced my photography dramatically. By going back to the principles of good photographic composition and learning photography and not just digital photography you’ll become a better a more rounded photographer. Don’t allow digital to take you backwards. Take the principles of great photography and apply them to digital. Remember, great photographers take great photos using any medium, digital or film. Keep learning and don’t stop making great images.

Do you want to learn more about photography in a digital world? I’ve just completed a brand new e-course delivered by e-mail. Download it here for free: CLICK HERE. You can also learn to take perfect photos in 21 steps by taking a look at my new ebook 21 Steps 2 Perfect Photos Wayne Turner has been teaching photography for 25 years and has written three books on photography.