Digital Envisions

In the past, practicing photography was a costly, and often time-consuming affair. The cameras weren’t cheap, there were additional expenses such as film, you had to get your film developed, and you couldn’t see what your photos looked like straight away. The list went on and on. Then digital photography came along. At first digital cameras weren’t really in the same league as film-based cameras were as far as quality goes. Back then, purchasing a digital camera that was anywhere near the level of quality of a film-based camera would set you back an obscene amount.

Today however, the price of digital cameras has plummeted, thanks to several technological advances. That combined with its already more efficient and user friendly design has resulted in a boom in the number of people showing interest in the field. This article will look at some of the Digital Photography Basics to help you get started:

Lighting

Probably the most important principle to get your head around when learning Digital Photography Basics, is the concept of lighting. Put simply, photography wouldn’t exist without light. In fact, the word photography comes from the Greek word for light, photos.

In short, lighting can either make or break a photo, so it is important that you learn to control it. There are number of things you can do to control the light in your photos. Things like natural lighting, using a flash, adjusting your shutter speed, aperture and ISO sensitivity can all be used to affect the exposure of your shots.

White Balance

Not only does the amount of available light change, but also the type of light. For instance, there is a distinct difference between natural sunlight, and the light from a tungsten globe. As such, your digital camera should have a white balance setting, which basically balances the colors of your camera to compensate for the type of light that you will be shooting in. Generally people will leave this setting on automatic so that the camera can decide, but if you do know what your main light source is going to be, you can often get better results by setting it manually.

ISO Sensitivity

The ISO of a digital camera is pretty much how sensitive the chip which records the image is to light. The higher ISO, the brighter the image will be. It is quite handy in low light situations, as you can still produce a properly exposed image. However, there is a draw back with increasing the ISO. By increasing the ISO, the camera is effectively magnifying the signal that results when a light photon hits the chip. When this happens, the electrical noise that the tiny circuitry within the camera produces is also magnified, resulting in a number of pixels that vary in color from their surroundings.

Optical Zoom Vs Digital Zoom

Many digital cameras today will give you a choice between using optical and digital zoom. Optical zoom works in much the same way as a zoom lens on the conventional film cameras. The focal length of the lens changes, and in turn the magnification is increased or decreased depending on whether you’re zooming in our out. Digital zoom on the other hand crops the given image to a certain size and then enlarges the cropped image to fill the entire space. As such, this type of zooming results in a loss of image quality. You generally want to steer clear of it and only use it as a last resort. You can generally do a much better job using most image editing software on the computer.

Keep Shooting

As simple as it may sound, one of the most important rules of Digital Photography Basics is to never stop practicing. As with almost anything else in this world, if you want to get better at something, you need to do it over and over again. Digital photography is no exception. Read your camera’s manual, keep learning new things on the Internet and in books, and most important, keep playing with your camera.

Before you know it, you’ll be surprising yourself and those around you with just how good your photos are. You never know, you could end up making a career out of it.

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