COMPONENTS

Components of Photography

Before clicking any shot, check the following major elements:

• Focusing: It means to sharpen the subject and make background look out of focus.
• Exposure: Amount of light to be allowed.
• Colour: Colour of light plays an important role to make your photo look attractive.
• Composition: The composition of your image makes it unique. The angle from which any picture is taken matters a lot.

Notes: (Things To Know)

1. In "P" (Program) mode: Shutter speed and aperture is decided by camera itself. P mode allows you to set exposure or ISO only. "P" mode is good to start learning and understanding the proportion between shutter speed and aperture that camera applies at different situations. In P mode, what you can do:

Burst Selection

• For shooting actions use continuous shoot mode (Burst).
•  Set exposure compensation(+/-) according to availability of light

2. Full Frame vs 1.5x crop frame: Our DSLRs have 1.5x crop frame which means one using 500mm lens the actual view shown is 750mm (i.e 1.5 times cropped)

Thus crop factor is advantageous for telephoto shooting where as for wide angle shooting, it is a disadvantage.

3. If your camera is on auto-focus, After half click: Focus gets locked.

What all activates on pressing shutter button halfway:

-Display

-Exposure meter (Check for 0 reading, if not set it to zero by changing either shutter speed, aperture or ISO as per situation)

-Auto focus

4. Manual Focusing (MF): On the lens to set manual focus, switch button from AF to MF. While taking MACRO (close-ups) photography prefer using MF.

5. While focusing, keep in mind:

For eg: While clicking insect on leaf 's  photo:

a) Highlights- Insect, its details should be clear.

b) Shadows- Background, usually prefer dark background so that viewer's eyes gets focused to subject.

c) Mid-tones- Leaf or the place where insect is resting.

6. To know the minimum focusing distance of your lens(which is required for MACROs), take focus ring max. out then try focusing from close distance as possible. (Do this on MF mode)   

7. Other Exposure modes:

• Aperture Priority (AV mode) : You decide Aperture (depth of field) and camera decides Shutter speed. Use AV mode for shooting Close-Ups.
• Shutter Priority (TV mode) : You decide Shutter Speed and camera decides Aperture. Use TV mode for freezing or blurring action.
• Manual Mode (M): This is your choice mode. You decide everything in this mode. After understanding basics of camera setting and referring manual, one can make best use of his/her camera from M mode.

8. Metering:

- Evaluative metering: It measures the light of entire frame and shows the average of all light on the metering meter. 

- Partial metering: It measures light of central region of frame.

- Spot metering: It measures light of central spot(very small dot) only.