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What is the importance of learning basic photography skills?

The basic photography skills are highly important when wanting to practice photography and develop a photographic aesthetic.

The first skill is to get to know your camera. Cameras today are quite different, from mirrorless to film cameras to accessing your phone camera’s settings with an app, each one has a very specific functionality and so learning how your camera works is very important.

The second one is learning how to balance exposure using ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture. This is what is called the exposure triangle and it is key when it comes to managing light and shadow as well as depth of field.

A third basic skill to learn is composition. Composition is how we balance the elements inside the picture. There are many ways to balance the elements inside of a picture; using the rule of third, using a triangle to centre the main subject, etc.

Composition allows us to give importance to certain elements inside the photograph and to make the eye navigate the picture the way we want it to do so.

Focus is another skill to have. How to focus the subject using your lens or using automatic focus. This has a direct relation with the aperture you have chosen.

Lastly, probably the most important one is capturing light. Photography is all about capturing light information. This is highly important when it comes to focus, colour, contrast, brightness, the overall of the picture. This might be the most important skill and perhaps the most difficult to master.

This can be quite intimidating at first, but learning with a teacher or tutor can make things quite easy and fun.

What are the main responsibilities of a photographer?

A photographer has the responsibility of capturing the image. The result may vary depending on the type of photography and the style of the photography.

Fashion photography is more glamorous than sport photography that focuses more on capturing motion and precise moments. The same can be said of wildlife photography compared to landscape photography.

Portraits might be quite different from architectural photography.

What they all have in common is those basic skills we mentioned previously. In order for you to capture fast motion you would have to set your shutter speed at a certain speed which will inevitably affect the aperture and the ISO. The same for fashion and portrait, these may use a lens that is different from landscape.

The responsibility of the photographer is to understand these styles and settings and use their camera accordingly.

One final responsibility that can be mentioned is capturing the right moment or to evoke the ambience of that moment. This can be found in journalistic photography for example. The photographer, through the photos, needs to provide information but also a context and sometimes a powerful message.

Is Photography creative?

Photography is absolutely a creativity. The way a photographer composes the picture is a constant reminder that those decisions are creative decisions. The same can be said of the depth of field  used, or the choice of lens.

Fundamentally, photography is not about capturing reality, but capturing reality with a certain emotion and message to the viewer. The same subject could be photographed one hundred different ways and they would all mean something different.

The camera in combination with the lens and light are powerful factors that can alter immensely the result of a picture. The way a photographer combines these elements is essential to the result and those multiple combinations may vary quite differently from one photographer to the other. This is because each of these decisions are creative, artistic decisions.

If you are interested in taking photography lessons, you can find a private instructor easily by visiting Superprof. Learning with a private photography teacher can be a real pleasure. Someone who guides you through the different features in your camera, the different styles of composition and someone with whom you can share the pictures you have taken and talk about them, compare them and analyse them.

Visit Superprof and enter photography in the subject you would like to learn and New Zealand in your location and a list of photography instructors will appear before you so you can choose the best teacher for you.