Here comes week 1 of the photography learning journey.

Since last week, one thing I have understood for sure, there is much more to it than just point-and-shoot.

At the end of the last blog post, I summarized for myself a few links I want to go over, here they are again:

• Adorama.com how-to-learn-photography
• Grab your camera and get learning
• best-photography-blogs-for-beginners

One line stuck in my mind from the first one is, (I would say the best lesson so far…! )

“Bring Your Camera Everywhere”.

Though I don’t own a photography camera, I have been keeping my phone handy and ready to click the picture, whenever I could. And since I am in Saskatchewan, and this is “‘Land of the Living Skies”, there won’t be a day(especially evening), when the sky isn’t breathtakingly beautiful.

if you are not from Sask or have never been to Sask. check out this article:
Saskatchewan is called the ‘Land of the Living Skies’ for a reason. I have been here for a few months now, but unfortunately yet to see the Northern light,  but here is one from one beautiful evening in Saskatoon.

OK, Back to Photography, in short, there is a lot to photography, that I don’t know.

1. What is Photography:  More than any definition, I like the following definition:

Photography is an art form like drawing and painting; Photography is art created by Light!

Also, it’s a universal language of expression. During my search for good resources, I came across Steve McCurry. I couldn’t understand the phrase “A photograph can tell a story”. From many of his picture, he has been able to capture the deep story behind the canvas or ignites a spark such that you want to know more about the story in that picture.

Here is slide show of few of great pictures taken by Steve McCurry

I hope I can get some of you reading this interested in photography. Well, At least I  am pretty much emotionally invested in learning photography.

Now, onwards I will learn and cover some technical concepts of photography. (I might have to break it down into two posts, week#2 and week#3.)

Check out more photos by Steve McCurry on his Instagram feed

2. Technical stuff about photography: 

Let’s talk technical stuff behind photography.

Starting with 25 Technical terms used in photography:

Check out this Video for a full list of the term. I will only list up only a few of them, as I write more, I am checking back this video multiple times until I grasp these terms.

Terms in Photography:

1. Aperture
2. Shutter Speed
3. Exposure
4. Exposure Triangle
5. ISO
6. Brightness
7. Auto Shooting Mode
8. Manual Mode
9. Shutter Priority Mode
10. Aperture Priority Mode

Too much already, Right? Good for us; we can narrow that down to three pillars of photography.

• Pillar A: Aperture
• Pillar B: Shutter Speed
• Pillar C:  ISO

Pillar A:  Aperture

The above Video summarized Aperture pretty well with the analogy of the Human eye.
Everyone notices how eyes adjust when we go from Dark to a Full bright light area or vice versa; How are pupils become enlarged in Dark? When you move to the bright sun, your eyes are blinded by light for a few seconds but within a sec or two, you can see all clear as pupils shirk.

This is exactly what has been achieved by Opening/closing the lens. The bigger the number, the smaller the opening resulting in a loss of light that will pass to the camera. On the other side; the smaller the number, the bigger will be opening and more light will fall on the camera sensor.

Pillar B: Shutter Speed

Benjamin Jaworskyj has awesomly showed what shutter speed is and its affect.

In my words, as the name suggests, Shutter Speed is basically how long the camera sensor is allowed to see (or light is allowed to fall on the camera sensor) before the shutter is shut on it.

The key rule is faster the object or scene is moving, the faster the shutter speed we want. But less amount of light will fall on the sensor and the image will be too dark. The following picture illustrates this relation between shutter, speed of the object, and light.

Pillar C: ISO

ISO, this one makes me scratch my head a lot Still best I have gathered is, Higher ISO height will be the Noise. Which in effect will make the picture more grainy. So, Ideally, we want to keep it as low as possible.

Out of many videos I have watched, I liked this one better in explaining ISO.

3. Combine 3 Pillars of Photography

The goal is to take a clear picture and enough lit. Basically, in Photography we combine these 3 parameters and set them such that  picture is “not so bright”  or “not so dark”

On many resources, they are also called; the “Exposure Triangle”. I am not liking this analogy, just makes it more confusing.

How I would imagine, is by calling them “Salt”, “Paper” and “Chili” in cooking. We balance these basic spices to get the taste we like.

That’s a wrap for week 1. In next week I will be focusing on following:

• Getting comfortable in using three pillar I learned.
• Using the Manual mode of my Phone camera and a processional camera (If I am able to get my hands on it).

Until then I am adding slide at the end as places holder of more of my photos. I will keep it updating a click more. Please put you reviews in comments.

Until have have a good one.

Cheers,
Sunaina