Learn photography faster: 8 tips, tricks, shortcuts and time savers

If you’re a relative newcomer to photography your probably itching to learn more so we’ve put together 8 tips that will fast-track your understanding and improve your photography.

1. Start using aperture or shutter priority mode

If you currently shoot using your camera’s full automatic mode or one of the scene modes then it’s time to take a bit more control. Switching to full manual mode can seem a bit daunting and in many situations it’s unnecessary as aperture or shutter priority mode let you take control of the appearance of the image while still letting the camera handle the exposure.

The first step is to decide what’s the most important feature to take control over for a particular scene. In aperture priority mode you set the aperture while the camera sets the shutter speed to give a correct exposure.

Conversely, in shutter priority mode you set the shutter speed and the camera selects an appropriate aperture.

With a moving subject, for example, you are likely to want to set the shutter speed manually ether to freeze the movement or to produce a nice bit of blur, so you should set your camera to shutter priority mode.

If you are shooting a landscape and want lots of depth of field, or a subject against a busy background that you want to blur, aperture priority is the best choice as it will allow you to set an aperture to dictate depth of field.

2. Use a lens hood

The primary aim of a lens hood is to shield the front element of a lens from stray light in the same that the peak of a baseball cap shields your eyes from the sun.

It helps prevent flare which can reduce contrast and cause aperture-shaped hot-spots in your image.

A lens hood also provides a little protection for your optic, preventing the glass from being knocked as you carry the camera.

In addition, it can shelter a lens’s front element from drizzle, saving you time wiping the glass between shots or cloning over blurred patches in an image.

If your lens was supplied with a lens hood use it, if it wasn’t, buy one to suit it.

3. Switch to manual focus

In many situations the fastest way to get a subject sharp is to use a camera’s autofocus (AF) system, but there are a few occasions when it’s better to switch to manual focus mode and drive the lens yourself.

When you’re trying to shoot a near-by subject that’s moving around the same point, for example, it’s often quicker to focus manually at the point that you want to capture the subject and then wait for the composition to come good.

Imagine a clump of daffodils swaying in the breeze, for instance.

If you use your camera’s autofocus system the chances are that the flowers will have moved away from the position you want them in before the camera has finished focusing the lens.

However, if you focus the lens manually, you cut out any focusing delay and just have wait for the flowers to move into the correct position before pressing the shutter release home and taking a shot.

4. Use live view

5. Try spot metering

6. Lock the exposure

7. Move or zoom in to spot meter

7 daily exercises that will make you a better photographer

The saying ‘practice makes perfect’ is as valid for photography as any other activity, so we’ve put together a collection of exercises that will help you become a better photographer.

1. Spot meter

Modern metering systems have great general-purpose modes, often called Evaluative, Matrix or Multi-area, which do a great job of accessing a scene and setting good ‘average’ exposure settings in many situations.

However, they’re not 100% foolproof and very dark or very light scenes, or backlighting can trick them into over or under exposure.

They’re also not psychic and don’t know what you’re seeing in your head when you take a shot.

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Switching to spot metering puts you in control of where the camera meters from and helps you develop a much better understanding of the tonal range in a scene.

A standard spotmetering system allows you to meter from a very small part of the scene and it suggests exposure settings that will render your target a mid-tone.

Consequently, you need to take care with the positioning of this spot, study the scene carefully and decide which is the best area to take a reading from.

It’s often helpful to combine spot metering with AE Lock as this will fix the exposure settings (after metering) while you compose the image.

2. Check the histogram

Just like the Levels display in image editing software packages such as Adobe Photoshop, a camera’s histogram display is a graph that represents the brightness of the pixels that make up an image.

The scale runs from black, with a brightness reading of 0, on the left to white, with a brightness reading of 255, on the right.

The peaks in the histogram indicate the number of pixels with that brightness and a large peak means lots of pixels have that brightness.

This means that a vary dark image will have peaks over to the left of the graph, while a bright one has peaks on the right.

Meanwhile, a correctly exposed ‘ideal’ scene has a histogram with a so-called ‘normal’ distribution with a peak in the middle and just a few very bright and very dark pixels.

Checking the histogram after every shot will increase your understanding of the brightness distribution of an image.

It will also enable you to determine whether an image is under- or over-exposed with the majority of pixels being grouped to the left or right of the graph respectively.

3. Use a single prime lens

4. Set a specific white balance

5. Set a custom white balance value

6. Use manual exposure mode

7. Post a single image every day

15 ways you can improve your photography in a day

You don’t have to be a technology expert to take better pictures. The art of photography lies just as much in how you ‘see’ the world as how much you know about camera settings. So here are our top 15 tips for better photography that almost anyone can use. The more advanced your camera, the more control you’ll have over the settings, but in the end it’s the eye behind the camera that makes the difference…

1. Change your viewpoint
Don’t just shoot everything from head height. Try lying on the ground to get a worm’s eye view or getting up high on a balcony or a rooftop to look down on your subject. It can make everyday subjects look new and different.

2. Fill the foreground
If your subject is far away it can leave the foreground looking empty, so look for some interesting objects to fill it, such as a bed of flowers or a cafe table in a city scene, rocks in a landscape or a boat in a seaside scene.

3. Look for frames
Trying using natural frames for your photos, such as archways, doorways or windows. They can act as a kind of natural enclosure for your subject, whether it’s a portrait, a landscape or a photo of a landmark. It stops your viewers’ eyes from wandering out of the frame and subtly focuses attention on your subject.

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4. Shoot at night
The rule with digital camera is, if you can see it, you can photograph it! You can shoot city streets at night by bracing your camera against a wall or a table and using a high ISO, but it’s better still to get a tripod, set a low ISO for best quality and use the camera’s self-timer to fire the shutter so that you don’t jog it and blur the picture.

5. Move in closer
Don’t just take ‘long’ shots. Move in closer and fill the frame with your subjects. It doesn’t matter if you crop off the edges because this can give the picture even greater impact. Try this with patterns and textures, such as fruit on a market stall or brightly-coloured fabrics.

6. Change the exposure
Digital cameras can only estimate the correct exposure – they don’t know whether your subjects are intrinsically light or dark, or how you want the picture to look. So if your picture looks too light or too dark, use the EV compensation control to reduce or increase the exposure. You’re the one who knows what you want your pictures to look like, not the camera!

7. Watch your speed
Camera shake is the single biggest cause of failed photos, so watch your camera’s viewfinder or LCD for the shutter speed indication (you can switch on info displays on most cameras). A speed of 1/30sec or below is risky for hand-held shots, and with telephoto lenses you may need to shoot at 1/250sec or faster. If the light’s too dim for the camera to use these speeds, increase the ISO setting.

8. Capture movement
You can use shutter speeds creatively on cameras with shutter-priority or manual modes. Slow shutter speeds of around 1sec will blur moving water, and 10sec or more will blur pedestrians, and turn traffic at night into trails of light. All you need is a tripod and time to experiment.

9. Switch off the flash
If you’re taking pictures in sports stadiums, theatres or museums, turn off the flash! The only way to get well-lit, natural-looking shots is to increase the ISO setting and use whatever natural lighting there is. Besides, flash is annoying for other people – it’s why photography is banned in so many places.

10. Find your focus
You can’t always trust the camera to choose what to focus on. It might pick the object nearest the camera or whatever is in the centre of the frame, depending on the focus mode. Instead, on most models you can choose the focus point manually, moving it around the frame to position it over your subject.