Welcome to your new favorite hobby! Photography is something that really relieves your stresses and allows you to escape from the everyday frustration and pain of the day to day grind.

Liam Theo Creative overlooking the beautiful mountains of Utah and the stunning City of Salt Lake City while holding his camera

Finding Your Camera

First and foremost, you’ll need to find a camera that best suits you. I would recommend that you find a digital camera and only buy a film camera if you really develop a love and passion for the trade. There are 3 main camera bodies to choose from:

Of course, there are some other brands, but they build more point-and-shoot cameras, like Olympus, FujiFilm, and Panasonic. Depending on what type of photography you’re interested in, a point-and-shoot may suffice for your needs, but most of the time I would recommend one of the top three listed above.

Before You Start Shooting

These are just a couple of things you should experiment with prior to going out and shooting. If you just head out to start taking pictures but don’t understand a couple basics, it could become quite frustrating and ruin the whole experience for you.

Aperture

The aperture of your camera is listed as your f-stop. So on your camera, you should see something saying f/2.0 or something of that nature. The f-stop number determines how wide or narrow the hole in your lens is open. Oddly enough, the smaller the number the larger the opening and the more light being allowed in. Additionally, the f-stop number determines your depth of field. The depth of field is how much of your image is in focus. For example, most landscape photographs have a large depth of field, meaning much more of your image is in focus. If you think of the number of the f-stop in relation to the depth of field, this could be helpful. The smaller the f-stop number, the shallower the depth of field.

ISO

The ISO controls how sensitive your camera is to light. A common mistake made by beginner photographers is they will crank their ISO to the highest setting while attempting to capture low-light images. This is a mistake because the higher your ISO the grainier your photo will turn out. As a general rule of thumb, while I’m shooting, I focus on keeping this number as low as I can at all times.

Shutter

The shutter refers to how long your camera sensor is exposed while capturing an image. This is important to understand because it can really make or break your image. If you are capturing movement, you’ll want your shutter speed to be as high as possible. As you get more experienced, you can toy around with lower shutter speeds while capturing motion, but for now, you’re focusing on understanding how the shutter speed works. In opposition to a high shutter speed would be keeping the sensor exposed for long periods of time, this is most commonly used for night photography. Keep this in mind when your shutter speed starts getting low, anything below 1/30 should be attempted with a tripod. At this speed even as little as your breathing or blood pumping creates enough motion to blur an image.

Get Out There And Play

Really, the best way to learn is by doing. Go out and start snapping pictures, but don’t do so mindlessly. This is a new skill that you’re attempting to build, so really focus on each image you take. Ask yourself a few questions:

Do I like this photo/image?
Why do I like this picture?
Does it have a shallow depth of field or a large depth of field?
How’s my exposure/lighting?
What’s the natural attention grabber? / What’s my subject?
Does the positioning of my subject create a good flow of the eye for my viewer?
Is my image grainy or clear?

I will be writing and publishing another post to help you with composition and developing your skills further. For now, go out and play. Take a lot of pictures and review them to learn what you’re doing well and what needs work. Share your work with me and ask questions anytime!

Contact Me

My Photography Work

Below I have included some of my photography work for you to reference. Use it as a tool to breakdown each image and figure out why you do or don’t like it? Learn composition and editing. Try to capture images similar wherever you are.