How To... Take Better Photographs

Photography is all about capturing light. Frozen in a moment of time. There is no past to future progression that guides a video. It is an instant. A snapshot. The story is in your own mind when you look at the picture. Understanding, context and emotions are derived from your own personal memories and experiences, different to the person next to you looking at exactly the same image. Photography is both an art and a science. There is a vast amount of physics, engineering and software that goes into creating that perfect digital photograph. But if you have done it well then most people regard the end result as a form of art.

Right, enough of that rubbish. How do I take better photographs ? Some people come up with a set of rules. But they are not rules, they are guidelines. And you can break those guidelines and come up with a brilliant photograph. All the guidelines do are increase your chances of obtaining that perfect image. Read the guidelines. Read them and laugh at them. Ignore them. Up to you.

Framing. Regardless of technology, you still have to decide what you are taking a picture of and why. What is the focal point of your picture ? Or are you just capturing an overall mood ? Assuming you have the time, keep the camera steady and position it to obtain the best viewpoint. Run your eye around the frame, checking left, right, top and bottom. Can you remove any distractions by panning or zooming ? You don’t have to rely on a camera lens zoom; you may be able to walk nearer or away from the subject. You can always shoot wide and crop later, but this reduces image quality and is definitely a second best. Digital photography means you can take lots of photos and choose the best ones later. At the cost of your own time and storage rather than lots of money. See below for more tips on framing.

All photographs capture light. The best light is early in the morning, from dawn onwards, and in the late afternoon, until dusk. The light is more yellow/orange and shadows are longer, contrast is greater and more dramatic. The worst light is midday when there is more blue and the shadows are short, the light is ‘flat’ and there is not much contrast. But this is all mitigated by where you live. In the tropics, most light is directly overhead and the shadow-time may last 10 minutes. And in the polar regions the sun may never move far from the horizon line. Another factor is it requires more effort to grab pictures at dawn and dusk. It may be a lot colder and a lot less convenient. For professional landscape photographers this is just part of the job. For normal people, a nice breakfast or a sundowner is a better use of time.

Don’t put the subject of your photograph bang in the middle of the frame. This screams amateur. Offset it to the left or right. Or up or down. Or both. People like to formalise this as the Rule of Thirds. Place things a third of the way in from one or two edges. So you are shooting a yacht in the azure waters of the Adriatic ? Place the horizon line a third from the top. Or if the clouds are nice, a third from the bottom. Some cameras have a Thirds grid that you can switch on to help you frame the picture better.

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Leading Lines. Are there any natural lines in the view ahead that you can use to draw the observer in ? They should lead your eye to a focal point in the background somewhere. This gives a nice sense of depth and structure to your image. Look at the edges of buildings, roads and walls. Can you place your camera in such a way as to make use of them ? These lines are really the perspective lines that your brain uses to construct a 3D image from a flat 2D picture. Computers can also use these lines to calculate depth. Finding these lines adds another dimension to your picture. The classic view is a road or railway line that has width close-up but disappears to a dot on the horizon

Ready for the slightly technical ? Pictures are formed from light. In the old days the light interacted with chemicals on the negative. These days, the light falls onto a grid of electronic sensors. The output of these sensors is written to a memory card and you have to print your own picture if you want a hardcopy. But there are still 3 fundamental parameters to obtaining that image, governed by the rules of physics that have not changed. Shutter speed, aperture and ‘film’ sensitivity. Light is passed from a lens through to the focal plane via a shutter. The on/off switch for light. This used to be a mechanical shutter. Now it is precisely controlled in electronics. There are even ‘software’ shutters. The shutter speed typically varies from a few seconds to a few thousandths of a second. The bigger the range, the more expensive the camera. Then there is the aperture. This is the iris that controls how much light you let into the camera. It’s basically a hole that these days is controlled through electronics. Big hole, lots of light. But it also determines what ahead of you is in focus. The light rays are focussed by the apertures and lenses. The lenses are typically fixed ( unless you have a zoom lens ). Mathematically, the aperture number is the focal length of the lens divided by the diameter of the effective aperture. So a 80mm focal length with a 10mm aperture has an aperture number of 80/10=8, written as f/8. Aperture numbers are typically f/1.x to f/22. The amount of light onto the sensors is proportional to the square of the aperture diameter. So going from f/2 to f/8 decreases the light by 16 times! A narrow aperture like f/22 keeps virtually everything in front the camera in focus and is great for landscape photography. A wide aperture like f/2 has a very shallow depth of field so everything that you haven’t focussed on, foreground and background, can be blurry. Which is often the effect you want for portraiture ( see bokeh effect ). Finally the sensitivity or ‘ISO’ determines how much ‘gain’ there is converting your light into electrical signals. In the old days, the only way to change the film sensitivity was to take the roll out and put another in! Different chemicals were needed. ISO 64 to ISO 400. Nowadays, thankfully, you can just turn a dial or press a few buttons. Typical digital ISO values are 100 to 6400, although you can go much, much higher.  So why not just crank up to maximum ISO ? Well, all good things come with a downside. And that downside is noise ( or ‘grain’ as we call it ). A high ISO means you can shoot in candlelight but often at the expense of noise. Your pictures will look a bit crude and blocky, especially when zoomed in or cropped. The colours may not be nicely saturated as they are at ISO 100. A picture may be better than no picture but the quality may not be good enough to print out and put on the wall.

All these 3 parameters work together to produce a picture. So who cares ? Why not just press the shutter button on your smartphone or select ‘Auto’ or ‘Program Mode’ on your camera. Couldn’t agree with you more. 9 out of 10 times you’ve got a great photo. But there may be a few occasions where knowing how to loosen or tighten the bolts on the engine will help you out. And give you the magic shot that other people will struggle with.

Freezing water fountains and sports photography. You want a very fast shutter speed. Typically 1/500s to 1/1000s or higher. This reduces the light dramatically so you need to select a wide aperture to go with it. And that means your focussing needs to be bob on. You can reduce the need for super-fast shutter speeds in sport ( e.g. horse racing, motorsport ) by panning. You sweep the camera smoothy around at the same radial speed as the target, keeping it in the same position within the frame. Takes a bit of practice but gives you a nice pin-sharp object against a horizontal motion-blur background.

Portrait Work. You want a wide aperture to give a nice blurry background. Focus accurately on the eyes. The shutter speed will be quick. If you are indoors in a studio you will probably want some kind of fill-in flash from the side to remove any shadows.

Night Photography. Crank up the ISO but be careful about noise. You want a long exposure time, perhaps more than 1s, so mount your camera on a tripod. At more than 1/60s you can blur the picture with camera shake. You will need a wide aperture as well.

Landscape Photography. You want a really low ISO. Like 100. A nice small aperture. You may want to mount the camera on a tripod to allow longer exposure times. Light is really important. Is this the best time of day for this view ? What are the clouds like ? Is the sun behind you ?

Indoor Photography. No, you don’t want to use a flash. Nobody uses a flash. Turn the ISO right up and keep the camera close to your body to reduce shake.

Star and Moon Photography. This is rather specialist. You are going to need a tripod and ways of controlling the focus area and exposure metering zones. You are going to need a long exposure time. And high ISO. And some noise reduction in software. Try taking the moon first on a clear night with a long zoom. Forget planets. That won’t work without a telescope. The 500s rule is useful. Remember the stars are moving. Because you are moving. The earth is spinning. Divide your focal length into 500s to see how long you can expose your image for before the stars streak across the sky. So a 50mm lens can be exposed on a tripod for 10s before this happens. A wide-angle lens is more resilient. For the super-nerds, a better formula for modern digital cameras is 500 / ( focal length * crop factor ). The crop factor for APS-C sensors is 1.6 ( compared to full-frame = 1.0 ), giving a reduced exposure time of only 6s.

Depth of field is how much of your photograph is in focus. On a camera with manual control, you have the means to change it. You may want a huge depth of field for a landscape and a narrow depth of field for a portrait ( so nothing to distract from the face ). You may want to have a huge depth of field for a close-up macro shot, but find that is impossible to achieve in one shot.

An approximate formula for depth of field is DoF = 2 * u2 * N * C / f2 where u = camera focussing distance, N = aperture f-number, C = circle of confusion limit and f = focal length of lens ( keep the same distance units throughout e.g. mm ). C is calculated from how good the human eye is at resolving detail but you could use the value 0.02mm. So a high aperture number with a short focal length gives a wide depth of field. And a low aperture number and a long focal length gives a narrow depth of field.

Camera software can now perform a huge range of computationally-intensive tasks, especially when you consider the smartphone. Take tiny lenses with fixed apertures and no zoom and tiny image sensors and make them punch far above their weight by applying lots of maths. You don’t need heavy glass zoom lenses when you can digitally crop the image and reduce the noise. You don’t need wide apertures for portraits when you can identify the subject with depth sensors, parallax or A.I. and then blur the background with Gaussian filters. Software bokeh. You can also reduce camera shake without optical image stabilisation. Software can recognise the type of scene you are taking and tweak all the settings accordingly. Looks like you are taking a landscape ? Then let’s make the grass a little greener and make the sky a little bluer. No harm in a saturation boost. Take ten shots and pick the best. Pick the one where everybody is smiling and nobody has their eyes shut. Or why not mix-and-match ? Combine several photos to get the best from everybody ? OK, it's a bit fake but it will make the best memory for everybody who was there.

On a digital camera, pre-processing can be thought of as what you do in front of the lens. Perhaps a filter. A circular polarising filter for reducing or enhancing water reflections. A UV filter to protect the lens. A Neutral Density filter to force longer exposure times and make those waterfalls look dreamy. In the old days you could get colour grading and sky filters but these have been completely replaced by post-processing.

Post-processing happens after the image is captured and either before or after it is written to the SD card. Or after it goes from the SD card to your tablet or laptop or computer. And there is really no limit as to what can be done to improve or artistically alter the image. But be aware, you can still mess up. If your picture is badly framed and out-of-focus, is badly under or over-exposed, then you need a miracle more than a software algorithm. But if you want to shoot in Black and White, or change the white balance or saturation, or make the contrast more punchy, then it can be all be done after you have pressed the shutter button. Professionals and keen amateurs often shoot pictures in RAW ( the native, unprocessed sensor output ) and ‘develop’ their photos digitally on a laptop or PC. But RAW files do not use lossy compression and take up a considerable amount of storage space.

The Elephant in the Room. What’s the elephant in the room ? The elephant is computational photography. We have progressed from purely mechanical cameras with clever chemistry to electronic cameras with controller software to fully mobile computers with imaging capability. The compact camera in your pocket business has been blown away by smartphones. Why buy a camera on its own when a phone can do that job just as well if not better? And do a hundred other jobs like post your photos effortlessly to social media. Why buy a separate video camera ? Why buy a wrist-watch ? Why buy a calculator ? Why buy a satnav for your car ? Why buy a weather station ? Why buy a games console ? The smartphone is now the ultimate one-stop shop for all your computing needs.

Then add to the mix neural networks. Some cloud-based computing. Some A.I. ? What will the camera of the future ( and this is a near-future ) look like ? Will you be able to obtain photos without even getting out of bed to take them ? Just describe what sort of picture you would like to take and it appears on the memory card as if you had taken it. Or perhaps the ‘Auto’ or ‘Intelligent’ or ‘Scene’ mode goes to ‘A.I.’ mode and it adds the blue sky, fluffy white clouds and automatically removes the distracting people and cars in the foreground. Unless it recognises the people as family or friends. What will a photograph mean in future ? Less of a memory and more of an artform ? Seeing is not believing but experiencing emotion. A time when deep-fakes are no longer deep and no more fake than anything else you see around you. A life inside a constructed reality.

Executive Summary

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