Although I am not a professional photographer; I love take picture when ever I have free time to be a turist in the city, I do really enjoy taking pictures, would like to share some of my personal notes, little photography knowledge.
Photography is a great hobby for a person of any age, background or ability. With Today's technology, all you need to get started is a basic digital camera. Although I would recommend a minimum of 6 mega pixels.
After purchasing your camera it is important to thoroughly read the enclosed manual as many times you needed and understand the basic controls and the camera's capabilities, very important to learn your cam's controls. Now, you are to start taking pictures.
First step as a photographer should be to check camera settings. Next, decide on your subject matter. start visualizing your composition. Figure out how to bring all the components together to take a good picture.
Photographers specialize in several different areas; such as landscapes, marinescapes, wildlife and portrait work. The lighting and camera controls will be slightly different for each of these. First I would recommend playing with composition. There are several rules in taking a good picture.
Basic camera controls
A brief overview of all the major digital camera controls,
recommendations about which settings to use in various shooting scenarios. May want to have your camera manual handy so that you can confirm whether your camera offers a particular option, and if so, how you activate that feature.
Image Resolution
The resolution control determines the number of pixels that your camera uses to produce a picture. Some digicams offer tree or more options.
The term megapixel means one million pixels. if you multiply 2288×1712 pixels, you get roughly 3.9 million pixels, or 3.9 megapixels which can round up to 4 megapixels.
Compression
Compression is a bit of software manipulation done to reduce the file size of a digital image.
Compression enables you to fit more pictures into your available camera memory. Be aware, however, that the more compression you apply, the more you sacrifice image quality.
As is the case with a low-resolution image, a highly compressed image may appear only slightly degraded if printed at a small size and on uncoated paper stock.
Creative Impact
With film imagine, you know that the larger the film negative, the more you can enlarge the photo without losing sharpness and detail.
You can make a similar connection between pixel count and print size. The more pixels you capture, the larger you can print your photo without a noticeable loss of quality.
Manual exposure controls.
When you take a picture, three camera components affect exposure:
Aperture:
The aperture is an iris in the lens that can be adjusted in size to control how muh light enters through the lens. Aperture size is represented by f-numbers and written with the letter f followed by a slash and the f-number–for example, f/2.8 The higher the f-number, the smaller the aperture size. The aperture settings themselves are referred to as f-stops.
Shutter speed,:
The shutter is like a window shade behind the camera lens. When you take a picture, the shutter opens briefly to allow light to enter through the lens and strike the camera’s image sensor. Shutter speed refers to how long the shutter remains open. The slower the shutter speed, the more light the sensor soaks up.
ISO rating:
ISO ratings are used to indicate the light sensitivity of the image sensor. The higher the ISO number, the greater the light sensitivity, and the less light is required to expose the image.
