It has come as quite a surprise to me to find that many of my friends who have DSLRs are still only using their camera in Fully Automatic mode. Although this will indeed still take good photos, and is fine for ‘starting out’, I would really recommend that if you’ve spent £500 / $1000 + on a camera, then why not learn how to use at least some of its many features, rather than sticking with fully auto all the time  – it really is simple, and you’ll be reaping the benefits in no time.

Investing in a more-expensive camera does not mean that you’ll automatically (pun-intended) get better photos, but, if you take a little time to learn some fundamentals, then I guarantee that your photos will improve, and you’ll also enjoy the whole photographic process more as well. And the good news is that graduating from Fully Auto is easy!

1. Try Shooting In Aperture Priority Mode

Shooting in Aperture Priority mode  – which is ‘AV’ on Canon cameras, ‘A’ on Nikon – may sound a little daunting at first, but, trust me here, it is absolutely dead simple. And the beauty of shooting in this mode is that you can control how blurred the background (and foreground) of your photos are – something which you can’t decide upon when shooting in Fully Auto. Cool, huh?

I did a whole post on how to blur the background, which you may want to look at sometime, but, basically, the thing that is probably most under your control in how to get those pro-looking shots where the subject of your photo is nice and sharp against a really blurred background, is to shoot in Aperture Priority mode, and simply dial in a low f-number.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what f-nunbers are, or even what aperture really means, as this is just a quick guide – you can learn more about that stuff later. For now, just know that if you put in a low f-number (using a finger-dial on most DSLRs) such as f/5.6 or f/3.5 or smaller, and then take your shot as normal, you’ll get a lovely blurred background. How easy is that?

Using Aperture Priority mode, I chose f/5 to get a nice blurry background

Shooting in Aperture Priority is classed as a semi-automatic shooting mode, as you are deciding the aperture value, and the camera then works out how fast the shutter speed should be in order to get the correct exposure. You can also shoot in Shutter speed priority, with you now controlling the shutter speed value, and the camera choosing the aperture – but I shoot in Aperture priority probably 90% of the time, as I like to control how blurry the background of my photos will be. Try it, it’s so simple!

2. Choose Your Focus Point

One of the most annoying things about shooting in Fully Auto – in my opinion, anyway – is that you can’t choose exactly what you want the camera to focus on. Now, I do admit that sometimes the camera is clever enough to know what part of the scene you are wanting to focus on, but a lot of the time it just doesn’t have a clue (like, for instance, when you want to take a shot of two people standing side-by-side – a lot of the time, when in fully auto, the camera will focus on the background between the people – annoying!).

And why should the camera know what to focus on anyway? It should be us – the photographers – choosing what we want to focus on, as focus is a huge part of the creative process of photography anyway.

So, to take control of this fundamental aspect, and forever make sure you’ll be focusing on the part of the scene you actually want to focus on, find the focus point selection button on your camera, which looks like this on a lot of Canon cameras:

(For Nikon cameras it seems it is a little more complicated, and involves using the menu system – there is a good guide on how to set it here.)

Once you’ve found out how to change your focus point, change it from ‘automatic’ to the centre-point (using the finger-dial on Canon cameras). Now, when you come to take your photos and you’re looking through the viewfinder, you’ll notice that the centre-point will highlight when you press the shutter button halfway, and – hey presto – your camera will now always focus on exactly where you put that point.

By enabling my centre-focus point, I made sure the focus was on the people in the foreground - if I'd had the camera in fully auto, there was a good chance it would have focused on the people in the background instead.

Centre-focusing doesn’t always produce the best looking shots, though, so make sure to hover the focus-point over what you want to focus on, press the shutter button down halfway, recompose your shot, and then fully depress the shutter – suing this technique means the camera will focus on your chosen subject, but that the subject itself needn’t be in the centre of the frame.

Another benefit of choosing the centre focus-point is that this is the most sensitive point, meaning more accurate and faster focus. Bonus!

There are, of course, loads more things that you can control, but following these 2 easy steps is enough to have you graduating from Fully Auto in 2 minutes. Honestly, it’s just so simple – have a go, take some shots, and you’ll see how easy it is.

If you liked this little guide, you may want to follow me on twitter. Of course, you may not want to, either, but at least I tried!

It’s my anniversary in a few weeks, so I was browsing around online for some gift inspiration, and happened upon Anniversary Gifts By Year. One of the present ideas that struck me as being rather a good idea was a digital photoframe that can receive photos instantly via email – called the Kodak Pulse (available at Amazon US and UK).

The ability to send a photo straight away to the photoframe is brilliant, especially if you’re into your photography (and you probably are, if you’re reading this blog!). If you have parents who live some way away from you, and you don’t get to see them much, just give them one of these, and whenever you have a great new photo to share with them, you just email it – and the photo will instantly show up on their frame! A great idea, and one that really elevates this from the typical photoframe.

Here’s a video review of the Kodak Pulse:

The Kodak Pulse is available available from Amazon US and UK

I’ve been interested in off-camera flash for a while now, and really fancied having a go, seeing what it could do for my photography – so, last week, I bit the bullet and ordered the Canon ST-E2 wireless transmitter (from Amazon UK, also available at Amazon US). It really wasn’t cheap – not by any means! – but it means I can now fire my 430 EX II flash wirelessly, with full ETTL support. While I was spending my hard-earned money (oh, how easy it is to spend too much money on photography!) I also bought a portable softbox kit too (Amazon UK – similiar one on Amazon US).

Anyways, enough of the talking, here’s my first off-camera flash shot, of my dog, jumping. Softbox was camera left, using a 430 EX II flash.

What do you think? Have you tried some off camera flash photography? There’s so much to learn, if you have any tips you’d like to share, please do leave a comment below!

Yep, we know, as budding amateur photographers, that the flash on our little compacts are nowhere near strong enough to illuminate a concert photo, but, though we may silently scoff at people who do it (go on, admit it, you have had a little inward grin at those times, havent you?), wouldn’t it be fantastic to see thousands of those little flashes all going off at the same time? Well, it seems Robbie Williams had the same idea – just watch the video below to see what happened. Pretty. Darn. Cool.

Ever come across a fantastic image on the web and wondered, ‘just how did they take that shot’? Well, with the help of this free nifty tool, now you can find out!

It’s called ‘Jeffrey’s EXIF Viewer‘ and all you have to do is enter the URL of an image you find on the web (meaning, you don’t have to download the image – just copy and paste its unique location – such as ‘http://www.example.com/examplephoto.jpg’), and it will instantly return all the data of just how that photo was taken – things like the camera make/model, which lens was used, what focal length, shooting mode, shutter speed, aperture and so on.

All of this data can really help you see just how the photo was taken, and thus it’s a fantastic learning tool.

As an example, I recently came across some great wedding photography on Marianne Taylor’s Photography Blog, and I was interested in just how she achieved some of her shots. So, I simply right-clicked on the photo I was interested, chose ‘Copy Image Location’, visited Jeffrey’s EXIF Viewer, and pasted the image location (URL) into the tool. Et voila! Up came all the details of how the photo was taken, part of a screenshot of the result below:

(I use Firefox as my web browser, by the way, so if you use Internet Explorer you’ll need to right-click the image you want to find out about, choose ‘Properties’, and then copy and paste the URL into the EXIF tool.)

So I instantly learned that the photographer used a Canon 5D Mark II camera, with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. She was shooting in manual mode, and chose a shutter speed of 1/800 sec, an aperture of f/2.8, and ISO 100 to get the exposure. I’ve only chosen the basics to report back on here, the tool actually gives even more in-depth info. Fantastic!

It really is a great tool to further your learning. One caveat, though – it won’t show you data for every single photo out there, because if a photographer/webmaster has chosen to ‘save for web’ in photoshop, then the EXIF data is stripped out (if you use Flickr, and ‘save for web’, that is why the details of how your photos are taken are not showing, by the way), and this tool will thus not work. But for many, many photos, it will work, and show you just how that pic was taken – very useful.

Why not try it out for yourself?

I recently had the pleasure of taking photos (lots of them!) at 2 friends’ weddings over 3 days. Yep, quite exhausting, but good fun and really good experience. Of course, I wasn’t the main photographer at either of the weddings – not even a ‘second shooter’, as both weddings actually had 2 pros at each. But I was more than happy to take lots of shots without the added pressure of actually having to produce the goods!

At the first wedding I was actually an usher (the ‘photogrusher’), so couldn’t actually take as many as I wanted, as I had other duties to do (it’s actually quite stressful in itself, being an usher!). At the second wedding I was free from any responsibilities and so could take more. Over the two weddings, I shot around 500 photos. Anyway, here are a selection of some of my fave shots, and my thoughts on what I’ve learnt from this experience is at the bottom:

So, What Did I Learn? A Lot!

Equipment:

Although all of my equipment is pretty budget stuff (i.e. no mega expensive ‘L’ lenses for me, I’m afraid!) I found that it all worked to do the job pretty well. My Canon EF-S 55mm – 250mm zoom (available from Amazon US and UK) was invaluable, especially for the candid shots – it meant I could be at a good distance from my subject, and thus able to take photos unobtrusively, without them knowing I was there. This just wouldn’t really be possible without such a long focal length.

When I bought my 50mm f/1.8 prime, I used it extensively for lowlight photography without a flash, which it excels at, but at the weddings I found its limited focal length rather, well, limiting! It’s much harder to take candid shots when you have to be really quite close to your subject – and people generally stiffen up when they know they’re having their photo taken, losing the great naturalness of candid photography. And as I was sitting quite far back from the couples during the ceremonies – which were both in dimly lit interiors – I found that the 50mm just couldn’t get me close enough to the action. I couldn’t use flash during the ceremony either, so this means I didn’t get any good shots of the vows at all. Luckily I wasn’t the pro! Makes me realise that I’d really need to invest in a constant f/2.8 zoom or something similar (similarly expensive!) if I wanted to take some close up, lowlight photos without flash…

But, talking of flash, I fell in love with my Canon 430 EX ii (available from Amazon US and UK) all over again! Being able to bounce the flash off the ceiling during the receptions meant that I could get some lovely looking – and sharp – shots, even when taking shots from quite far away with the 55 – 250 zoom. It was also great to take some dancing shots.

Technique:

Flash. Bouncing the flash off the ceiling was great for natural-looking shots indoors. By raising the ISO in the camera to around 800 (thus making it more sensitive to light) it meant that my flash didn’t have to work so hard (easier on the flashgun!) and that the light travelled further, so I could take flash shots from across the room. To take some cool dancing shots that included the ambient light, and a sense of movement, I shot in shutter priority mode, and chose a speed of around 1/20th sec – this mean that the flash worked to ‘freeze a moment in time’ – sharply – with the slower shutter speed meaning the ambient light (and thus light trails of the dancing/movement) was also picked up. So much better than those normal flash snaps you see with a pitch black background!

A slow shutter speed and flash was also used to get the shot of the happy couple with the fireworks in the distance.

Shooting Mode. I shot most of the time in Aperture Priority (‘AV’ on Canon cameras, ‘A’ on Nikon), choosing – generally – the lowest f number available to me. This meant that I could put the backgrounds out of focus, which is generally what I wanted for the mainly-candid photography that I did. I wrote a whole post on how to blur the background of your photos, by the way, if you’re interested. Ooh, and angling your camera when taking photos can really add some drama to your shots, I found.

Post Production. I found that Photoshop can indeed be your friend! I used a combination of curves, unsharp mask, black and white conversion and applying a simply vignette over the shots (not everything used in every photo!). When I first got into photography I never thought I’d be interested in the post-production side, but now I absolutely love it – it’s very addictive when you realise the power you have in your hands!

What Do You Think Of My Efforts?

I’d really appreciate any comments/thoughts/advice on how you think I’ve got on – from my technique, to my post-production, to composition – everything, really! I’ve so much to learn, and every comment really helps. Unless it’s a ‘your photos suck’ comment. That probably isn’t too helpful…!

So far on LearningTheLight.com, I’ve not tended to talk about the video side of DSLRs – but that’s about to change. Although many people buy DSLRs for their photographic prowess, more and more are investing because of their fantastic video quality: high-definition, the ability to use all different types of lenses, and great overall quality mean that our trusted still-memory taker can also be our best-friend movie maker!

One of the more recent cameras that particularly excels with video is Canon’s T2i (known as the 550D in the UK). With full 1080P, 30 frames per second recording capabilites, the video you can take with it is just awesome – check out these examples, all taken with the T2i:

If you’re interested in the T2i, you may like our 15 Great Photos Taken With The T2i / 550D feature, our T2i vs T1i comparison, or even the review we did of the T2i digital field guide.

When I first started to learn about the theory of photography, the one thing that caused me the most confusion was to do with f-stops and aperture. Did a higher f stop number mean a smaller aperture? And did that thus mean more depth of field? Or less? Argh, it was so confusing and hard to learn…!

Robin says: Use the '2 F's' rule to easily remember your f-stops!

So, I bring to you an incredibly easy way to remember how to set your f stops -  Just remember the ‘2 F’s:

If you want more Focus, you want more F-numbers.

Easy, huh? So, if you’ve got a gorgeous landscape ahead of you, and you want to make sure everything from the foreground to the hills in the distance is nice and sharp – meaning you want as much Focus as possible – you use as high an F-number as you can, such as f/16. And of course, this works the other way around – if you’re looking for less Focus (for instance, if you’re looking to make the background of your shot blurry), then you’ll want to dial in less F-numbers, such as f/2.8.

The ’2 F’s': Easy peasy, lemon-sqeezy. Who says photography is hard?

Whilst looking through some photography threads on Flickr, I stumbled across this post, which was a long discussion on the subject of Funeral Photography. I’d never actually though about it before, and it really got me thinking. What do you think about it?

By Dsb Nola, on Flickr

The thread contains a lot of thoughts from various people – some very much against it, and some for it. Myself, I can see both sides…

Why It Might Be A Good Idea

• Although an obviously very sensitive time, it is a large gathering of friends and relatives, some of whom may not have seen each other in years. Therefore having photos of everyone together – even if it is such a sad occasion – could be looked back on in later years very favourably.
• As mentioned in the thread, this could actually bring some comfort to the people left behind – viewing the photos, seeing who came to show their support and love…
• I’ve not been to many, thankfully, but the ones I have been to have passed in a blur of stress and emotion – so having photos of the day could help people remember actually who attended, who read the eulogies and so on…
• Another point mentioned in the thread is that many people just can’t attend funerals, as they may live in a different country – being able to send photographs to these people who couldn’t come could be a way of making them feel more connected to the event, almost as if they were there themselves.

But I Can Understand Why Folk May Not Agree

• Perhaps the most emotional and sensitive event you can attend, surely a funeral is not a place for taking photos?
• Not only could it seem distasteful, but the presence of a photographer could also make everyone else uneasy.
• Would you be happy, if you were a professional photographer, to make money from recording such an event?

What do you think about it? Leave a comment below if you’d like to share your thoughts.

If you’ve just splashed out on the brilliant Canon T2i (knows as the 550D in Europe), then you may be a little bewildered with all the controls and functions your new camera has to offer. If you’re anything like me, and you devour any reading material to do with photography, then you might want to look into getting the Digital Field Guide for the T2i, available at Amazon US and UK.

What You’ll Learn

One of the best things about buying a book made specifically for your camera model, is that everything the book talks about is designed just for you – there are no ‘general’ settings and exposure talk,  instead each feature, such as aperture and shutter speed, is explained according to the T2i’s buttons and dials.

Indeed, the first chapter, entitled ‘Setting Up the EOS Rebel T2i/550D’, contains a large diagram showing you your way around the camera, pointing out just where and what everything is. On of the best ways to improve your photography is getting to know just what your camera can do, so this first chapter is vitally important to take in.

Once the basics are out of the way, the rest of the nearly 300 pages include in-depth guides on the following features:

Controlling Exposure and Focus

Getting Great Color

Customizing the Rebel T2i / 550D

Shooting in Live View and Tethered

Using Movie Mode

Using Flash

Exploring Canon Lenses and Accessories

The Elements of Exposure and Composition

Event and Action Photography

Nature and Landscape Photography

Portrait Photography

Exploring RAW Capture

View the video above for a small introduction to the book, as well as an example tutorial for ‘Auto Exposure Bracketing’, a feature that is explained in more depth within the book.

Will It Make Me A Better Photographer?

Well, although it doesn’t come with an Ansel Adams guarantee, I can safely say that, if you own a T2i, buying this book will definitely enable you to take better photos. It’s not just the amount of specific T2i / 550D tips and tricks covered in the book, it’s also the excellent information on all aspects of photography – such as exposure, composition, flash, night photography and more – that will definitely help you advance your photographic knowledge, and thus your shots.

You can buy the T2i / 550D Digital Field guide at Amazon US or UK.

Seeing as you’re interested in the T2i, you may also like a feature I did called ’15 Great Photos Shot With A Canon Rebel T2i / 550D (And How They Were Taken)’.