5 TIPS I WISH I HAD KNOWN WHEN I STARTED IN PHOTOGRAPHY
Yes, yes, as you read. 5 tips that I would tell myself when I started and that I'm sure you will find useful.
When I started to photograph and to take photography seriously, most of the advices I read or received was always the same, but there was one that beat all the others by a landslide: practice, practice, practice. And I have to admit that it is one of the best tips, for beginners, for intermediate photographers and even for professionals. Because that's the way it is in this world of photography, you never stop creating and in order to create you have to practice new techniques. But in this article I'm going to go a step further than the typical advice that I'm sure you've been told many times before coming to this blog.
Are you ready? Here we go!
TIP nº 1. FORGET ABOUT GEAR AND EXPERIMENT.
You will hear and read on lots of sites that there are landscape lenses, portrait lenses, macro lenses... lenses for everything. Don't panic! It's true that there is an infinite choice of lenses and some of them are more suited for landscape, some for portrait, some for astro, some for macro... but does this mean that if you don't have a slow lens suited to a particular type of photography you can't do it properly? The short answer is no. The right lens will make your life easier to get what you are looking for, and even in some specific cases it will be impossible to get the results you have in mind with any kind of lens, but here we are talking about specific cases and I am not going to go much deeper. What I want to make you understand with this first tip is that if you want to take a macro photo and you don't have a 1:1 lens, don't worry. Try shooting with what you have and zoom in with software. If you are in front of a stunning landscape and you don't have a wide angle lens, don't worry! Activate your imagination and find a way to build the picture you have in mind through manual panning, focusing on details of the scene or even photographing your companions. What matters is that you start to get to know your equipment, its physical limitations and that you put your creativity to work.This from someone who tried to do a macro back in 2017, on the second day she took a reflex in manual mode, three-drops with a kit lens and, hey, it wasn't so bad. Here is a comparison of the image taken in my beginnings with a mid-range camera and kit lens vs the image I took in 2020 with a 105 mm 1:1 macro lens.
In the first case, I didn't have a tripod or spotlights, so I used a famous saga of rather thick books as a tripod and all the lamps/flashlights I could find at home. The 2020 shot was taken with a tripod, spotlights and a light diffuser.
Leaving aside technical issues, you can see that you can get very, very decent results with any equipment and lens, do you dare to experiment!
tip nº 2. SHOOT IN RAW... AND BUY A GOOD EXTERNAL STORAGE UNIT.
Shooting in RAW will give you enormous versatility when it comes to processing your photographs, so it is very important that you shoot in RAW if you are interested in processing your images with an editor when you get home but... RAW files are tremendously heavy so storing them on your computer is not the best option as they will fill up your memory fast and slow down your computer's speed.
Ok, it is not necessary to have an external memory to start shooting but I assure you that I would have loved someone to tell me when I started shooting in RAW so I wouldn't have had any surprises and save a lot of time in desperation due to the slowness of the computer.
TIP Nº 3. FIXED FOCAL LENGTH LENSES ARE YOUR FRIEND.
"I can't wait to buy a 50mm f1.8 to take some amazing portraits" You will have heard this sentence a thousand times. Fixed focal lengths offer beautiful blur for portraits or details but they are not only my favourite lenses for this reason. Did you know that they are the lens that will give you the best sharpness? And when you're just starting out it's not really a big deal but if you get the photography bug, you'll end up appreciating having a lens with amazing sharpness and it will go to the top 1 of the lenses you use the most. "Mara, but with an all-round lens I have a wider focal range covered" Absolutely true but here we come back to TIP #1: Forget the equipment and experiment. One of the best ways to learn composition is to have a fixed focal length, because with it, the one who is going to have to move to get the framing is going to be you and not the little wheel of the telephoto. Crouch, jump, climb a tree, climb a mountain or take pictures from the top of a building. Here you will realise that you are the one with the "power" and not the equipment in your hands. So, take your prime lens, go for a walk in the woods, look for perspectives that you enjoy and then tell me about your experience. I assure you that you will be surprised! ;)
Same place, same camera, same focal lens: 35mm f/1.8, different perspectives that I was playing with.
TIP Nº 4. STAY AT HOME.
No, I haven't gone crazy and I'm not contradicting myself with the intro of this post. Stay at home from time to time, yes, but not to watch streaming series or to order your book collection. Stay at home and open your photo editing software (Lightroom, CaptureOne, Camera Raw or whatever you are using) and spend hours getting to know the software, learning techniques to process RAW photographs. Nowadays photography techniques have evolved, it is a fact and that is why it is important that you not only know how to control your camera, the basic parameters of photography, light and composition, but also how to control colour. I would say that the key to good photography is 70% what you get when you go out with your camera and 30% what you do with the files you take home in Raw. Play with light, colour, cropping, curves, masks, train yourself in all the work behind the monitor. Invest time from the beginning and you will be able to evolve at the same time in both fields. And once again, experiment, let yourself be carried away by curiosity and play with all the options that the software offers you.
TIP Nº 5. DON'T DELETE PHOTOS YOU DON'T LIKE.
Let's see, that completely out of focus photo or the one of your foot when the camera shoots by itself because you have the live view on (happens to me all the time, doesn't it happen to you?) you can delete them. I mean all those photos that you take home excited, thinking that you have an incredible photo in your hands, that you sit down at the computer, you start to edit it and you realise that what you saw is not in that photo. You get frustrated and decide to move on to the next one, which turns out to be ideal and you didn't think it would be one of the best shots. After several unsuccessful attempts you stop liking it and forget about that photo that you thought was incredible. That photo is probably amazing but you lack the knowledge to process it in a way that makes it perfect. Forget about it, leave it on your (external! Tip #3) hard drive and keep on learning. After several months (or even years if it coincides with times when you can't dedicate so much time to photography) recover that folder from the hard drive and try to edit it again, you will be surprised to discover that that photo that you no longer liked and that has been stored for so long, becomes one of your new favourites.
Double satisfaction: a new image you love + everything you've learned along the way ;)
The first edit I didn’t like so much vs the final edit.
I hope those tips are as useful to you as they are to me today!
How many of these tips do you already put into practice? Would you like to share any more with the community? Don't hesitate to tell us about your experience in the comments, anything can be of great help to whoever comes after you and reads us.