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It is very important if you are new to digital photography to take things step by step. This means doing your homework, and not running off to the photography store to buy a Digital SLR camera, they are expensive piece of equipment and you might end up spending money that you don’t need to spend, buying something that is not ideal for what you have in mind. You need to know what is meant by pixel, resolution, CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) and CMOS, Shutter lag, Optic and digital zoom, Digital image, JPEG, TIFF, RAW, etc
A trick to getting good quickly in Digital Photography is to get a good compact camera, one that gives you the most option in manually setting the aperture, shutter speed and ISO (might be labelled Sensitivity on a compact) and get to know it very well.
Why, because compact camera (point & shoot) are very portable and versatile, you can have it with you all the time (giving you the opportunity to practice taking more pictures), trying all the different combinations of the available setting and getting to understand what impact they have on your final picture will also help you understand the impact & importance of the three triad of aperture, shutter speed and ISO for when you buy a DSLR.
Composition
Composition means arrangement: the orderly putting together of parts to make a unified whole. There are basic principles that govern the way visual elements behave and interact when you use them in the four borders of a photograph or the visual arts. When we have an understanding of the three composition rules, we will then be able to make our photographs more exciting and effective. The rules are:
- Rule of Third
- Golden Section Rule
- Diagonal Rule
Optical and digital zoom
These are two important terms used in digital photography and you need to know the difference. When choosing a camera it is important to know the lens zoom range, the type of zoom is vital for the quality of the final photos. The OPTICAL zoom range is the one you want to know, when you zoom optically you will get closer to the subject and the maximum details are recorded by the camera. In digital zoom the picture is cropped and enlarged inside the camera electronically. This is not as important as you can get the same effect later using your photo editing software.
Image quality & Picture size
Picture Size and Image Quality have a direct effect on photographs when they are printed. Lots of people often think picture size and image quality are the same thing, and mistakenly go for quantity over quality. Though they are linked, they are very different and should not be overlooked when setting up your camera.
Picture Size is the measurement of your final picture in pixels (the little colour dots that make up your image). The measurement 1600×1200 is 1600 pixels wide and 1200 pixels high, giving a total of 1920000 pixels in your final image.
Image quality determines how the camera processes and stores the final image. A lower quality image will give you more space for storage on your memory card by reducing the number of pixels stored. It does this by removing pixels from the overall image in order to get it to a certain size; these removed pixels can never be restored. So the more the quality of your image the better the quality of your photographs.
Pixels
A digital photo is built from a number of pixels; these are small coloured dots which together forms a grid pattern resulting in the final picture. It is similar to the way an artist creates a painting by combining little bits of paint, thousands or millions of pixels are also combined to create a detailed and seemingly continuous image. The more pixels there are the more details there is in the picture. Note that the quality of the final picture is determined by the way the sensors in the camera process the pixels (image quality) and different cameras do this differently.
CCD and CMOS
CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor)
These are the two most common image sensors used in digital cameras. The sensors collect and convert light into electrons which is then processed and stored in a digital format on the memory card. Sensors in compact digital cameras are smaller and have more noise than the bigger DSLR sensors, even if the cameras have the same megapixels. CCD sensors are better but they consume much more power than CMOS sensors. The better the sensor the less the noise introduced.
Digital image file types
There are many digital image file types used in today’s digital photography. What are the differences between all the digital image file types and are all of them needed?
The size of a digital file is expressed as Megabyte (MB). The higher number the more space the file needs on your memory card. Different file types takes up different amount of space on your memory card. Another important issue with the different file types is the way they are compressed. A heavy compressed file will loose some image quality, but you save space.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
This is the most commonly used digital image format. This file format is very compatible with web browsers, image viewers, and image editing software. The images can be compressed by a factor of 10 to 20 compared to the uncompressed original with very little loss in image quality. Most files on the web are saved as JPG.
The advantage is relatively small file size. Most digital camera stores files as JPG. You can choose how much the file should be compressed by the camera. High compression removes information (pixels) from the file. Once removed, the information is lost forever. If you later want to edit the picture in editing software, you might experience quality loss.
As memory card are quite cheap now, I recommend shooting your picture at the maximum of what the camera is capable of doing
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
This is a flexible image format that normally saves 8 or 16 bits per color – red, green and blue – for a total of 24 or 48 bits. TIFF is a much used file standard in the printing industry because TIFF is capable of handling device-specific color spaces, such as the CMYK.
You keep more information in the file as the compression is less and much better that JPG compression. The size of a TIFF file is bigger compared to a JPG. More advanced digital cameras can store files in TIFF format.
RAW
This is a loss-less compressed file format, and by far best way of saving photos as there is no quality loss. Recently RAW has become one of the most important of the digital image file types and the one most mentioned in both photo magazines and on the web. Storing the image in RAW format means the data from the sensor is stored without any processing from the camera. You need special software to process the data.
Exposure
Exposure will make or break a photograph. I am sure we have all had the experience of taking what we believe will be a great picture, only to have the picture as either too dark (under-exposure) to make anything out, or so light (over-exposure) that all the details are bleached out.
The culprit is our knowledge or lack of, in balancing the three areas that determine Exposure; they are Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO settings.
ISO (International Standards Organisations) – It is the sensitivity that the film or digital sensor has to a given amount of light. The higher the ISO the more sensitive it is so that you can shoot with less available light.
Aperture – This is the size of the hole (or gap) inside the camera lens through which light enters the camera. It works like the iris in the eye – it can be larger when the light level is low to allow more light in, or it can close up very small when it is very bright.
Shutter speed – This is the length of time that light is allowed to come through the aperture onto the sensor that record your picture. It’s like opening and closing the curtains.
Understanding exposure – Achieving the correct exposure has been described like putting a cup under a steady running water tap, how much water we collect is determined by 1, The size of the cup (width). 2, How long we leave it under the tap (time). And 3, The amount of water we want to collect (quantity). We need to ensure we don’t collect too little “underexposure” or too much “overexposure”. To get the right exposure for any photograph we need to develop an understanding of how much light we need (how much our surrounding has), and the proficiency to determine how much aperture (width), shutter speed (time) and ISO setting (quantity) will give us the best light for what we have in mind.
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