Unlike most of you guys, I started with a decent 35mm Leica Point and Shoot from my dad (well, it's not really THAT point and shoot, I still have to focus and set all the apertures and exposure times myself, but it does have an internal electronic metering bar), and tried to match the masters with my meager camera.
It was before the Internet was really all that useful for research (circa 1992-1993), and I find that my local library's fine arts section a great resource. I would often just go in and find the largest coffee table book I can find on the photo section, and look at the pictures for hours and trying to figure out what people were doing.
It took a lot of experimentations, and it was expensive, but I learned a lot simply by going out and shooting.
As the other posters have suggested, go get a good photo book and read it. And if you can, enlist yourself to a photo class. I think most local community's NON CERTIFIED continuing education programs will accept you, regardless of your age. I took one back in the pre-digital ages, and believe me, even though I have used point and shoot digital for years rather than DSLR (I was stuck in the film world as far as SLR is concerned, till really this month, when I bought a Canon 450D) the lessons in composition, lighting, exposures, and so on do still show.
If you looked at the basics. It doesn't matter if it was for film or for digital, the principles are the same.
Let's see if I can run through the basics in words that are easier to understand. If I get too confusing please shout out, and I am sure me or the other guys in here would love to help answer your questions.
(Note to the guys, I am lazy and am not going to cover the STOPs, feel welcome to add that if you want).
Photography is really only about the "HOLE" and the "SURFACE", as it is about the lights comes into the HOLE in the lens and hitting the SURFACE of the capturing medium (digital CCD or CMOS chip in your case).
1. Exposure (HOLE):
- The LONGER the exposure, the more light passes through the HOLE in the lens and is captured.
- The more lights are captured, the brighter the image.
- The brighter the image, (usually) the stronger the contrast, to a point...
- That point is where the little bit of lights in your dark areas (assuming you want them to stay dark) starts to be captured too, and becomes lighter and lighter.
- OVEREXPOSURE is when the darks becomes washed out, and the areas that are white or really pale becomes bigger and bigger.
- The more you overexpose, the less detail your image will have.
- LOOK FOR DETAILS IN THE DARK AREAS, THE MIDDLE AREAS, AND THE BRIGHT AREAS.
- An image that has good exposures will be easier to adjust after because you have information inside the darks, the mid-tones, and the high-lights.
- You can always make an image more contrasty, but you can't turn contrast down.
- The more under-exposed (dark) an image is, the more saturated the colors will be when you adjust the brightness back to normal (photoshop, lightroom, aperture etc).
2. Apertures (HOLE):
- Aperture is the size of the HOLE in the camera.
- The smaller the number, the bigger the hole (example: F3.5 is a bigger hole than F5.6)
- The bigger the hole, the less exposure time you will need to get the same details in the darks, the mid-tones, and the high-lights. HOWEVER...
- The bigger the hole, the more BLURRY the areas which are not in focus is. This is called a Depth of Focus. ALSO...
- The bigger the hole, the smaller the areas (from you to the subject) that is in focus will be. (Example: in F5.6, you may have a person's face completely in focus, but at F2.4 you may only have the eyes in focus, but the tip of the nose and the ears are already blurry).
3. ISO (SURFACE):
In the old days, a film's sensitivity is rated in ISO (or ASA in Europe and Asia). And are available to consumers only in 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 ISOs. The system stuck.
- The bigger the number, the more sensitive to light the surface is.
- The more sensitive the surface is, the faster it is to capture the light.
- The faster it is to capture the light, the less details it will have. This is called GRAIN in the old film days or the digital equivalent, the NOISE.
4. WIDE vs LONG lenses
- I don't know which lens your camera comes with, but it should be a zoom lens (example: 24mm-85mm). There are also fixed lenses (example: it can shoot 50mm ONLY). Fixed lenses can usually have a bigger HOLE, good for those beautiful blurred foreground/background effect, or shoot in less light, like a dimly lit concert.
- The smaller the number, the wider the lens.
- The more a lens is wide, the more it will bring things that are closer to you even closer, and the objects far from you even further away. It will also usually make a closed space BIGGER.
- The more a lens is long, the more it will squish the distance between objects that are far from you and objects that are close to you. We call it FLATTENING.
- It is usually good to shoot a person with a longer lens because it will make the person's features look less strange.
- Wide lenses will make a person more and more deformed as the number go down.
- This is just a guideline, because sometimes that strange eerie person with a huge forehead, normal size chin, and tiny feet is exactly the effect you are looking for.
5. OTHER GENERAL POINTS
- READ YOUR CAMERA's MANUAL FROM COVER TO COVER A FEW TIMES AND TRY TO COMMIT TO MEMORY AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE!!! I can't stress how important this is. Understanding how to work your camera setting, and you are already far above a lot of newbies.
- Get a basic photo book, and read THAT cover to cover, a chapter at a time. There is no rush to put all that knowledge inside your head, or to put them to use immediately. Quality over quantity here... (Hmm I am sure I have come across PHOTOGRAPHY FOR DUMMIES, you might want to see if it's worth picking up).
- Try shooting in Black and White mode first, or shoot the same image in Black and White. There should be a function in your camera for this. This will teach you to see the gray values of the images. For example, the color RED may look really bright in real life, but in B&W it is actually DARK GRAY! Shooting in B&W will also help you understand your exposures better, and how to expose correctly.
- Bracketing, the practice of shooting a picture in different exposures, is a good practice for newbies to understand the effect of exposures. Now I don't know if Nikon cameras have this function, but Canon has a function called Automatic Exposure Bracketing, or AEB, which will automatically set your next 3 shots to bracketing.
- To do bracketing manually, set your camera to Av (semi-automatic function = Aperture Priority, this means you can set the aperture, and let the camera decide the exposure times.) And shoot a shot at normal exposure (0), a shot at 1 exposure less (-1, or 1 stop under-exposed), and a shot at 1 exposure more (+1, or 1 stop over-exposed). You can of course try other numbers.
- SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT, and then SHOOT SOME MORE!! I mean, it's digital, so go shoot your heart out, and experiment with all the concepts above. Try working the opposite of those guidelines, and see what happens!
- Learn to SEE THE LIGHT, and understand what it will do to the picture. Photography is the art of the capturing of the light. Cool ain't it?
*** MOST IMPORTANT ***
Try to always review your practice photos with a fresh mind. And when you come across a photo you took that you like, make sure you understand how you did it the 1st place. Then try to duplicate the effect. And maybe as a deeper practice, try to understand WHY you like that picture... it doesn't take an advanced formal arts degree to know you like something, but it takes a keen mind to understand WHY you like it!
Accidents, be they happy accidents, or disastrous accidents, are the best ways to learn, that is IF you can remember how you got there.
Well, I think this is as much as I can dish out without starting to go into terminologies that can be really specific and confusing for someone starting out. There's a lot to cover, and I myself is only really just learning how to shoot photos, and have a lot to go as well, but the basics never changes.
Once you have the basic techniques down, and have taken enough pictures, you will start to develop your own style. Don't worry.
It was before the Internet was really all that useful for research (circa 1992-1993), and I find that my local library's fine arts section a great resource. I would often just go in and find the largest coffee table book I can find on the photo section, and look at the pictures for hours and trying to figure out what people were doing.
It took a lot of experimentations, and it was expensive, but I learned a lot simply by going out and shooting.
As the other posters have suggested, go get a good photo book and read it. And if you can, enlist yourself to a photo class. I think most local community's NON CERTIFIED continuing education programs will accept you, regardless of your age. I took one back in the pre-digital ages, and believe me, even though I have used point and shoot digital for years rather than DSLR (I was stuck in the film world as far as SLR is concerned, till really this month, when I bought a Canon 450D) the lessons in composition, lighting, exposures, and so on do still show.
If you looked at the basics. It doesn't matter if it was for film or for digital, the principles are the same.
Let's see if I can run through the basics in words that are easier to understand. If I get too confusing please shout out, and I am sure me or the other guys in here would love to help answer your questions.
(Note to the guys, I am lazy and am not going to cover the STOPs, feel welcome to add that if you want).
Photography is really only about the "HOLE" and the "SURFACE", as it is about the lights comes into the HOLE in the lens and hitting the SURFACE of the capturing medium (digital CCD or CMOS chip in your case).
1. Exposure (HOLE):
- The LONGER the exposure, the more light passes through the HOLE in the lens and is captured.
- The more lights are captured, the brighter the image.
- The brighter the image, (usually) the stronger the contrast, to a point...
- That point is where the little bit of lights in your dark areas (assuming you want them to stay dark) starts to be captured too, and becomes lighter and lighter.
- OVEREXPOSURE is when the darks becomes washed out, and the areas that are white or really pale becomes bigger and bigger.
- The more you overexpose, the less detail your image will have.
- LOOK FOR DETAILS IN THE DARK AREAS, THE MIDDLE AREAS, AND THE BRIGHT AREAS.
- An image that has good exposures will be easier to adjust after because you have information inside the darks, the mid-tones, and the high-lights.
- You can always make an image more contrasty, but you can't turn contrast down.
- The more under-exposed (dark) an image is, the more saturated the colors will be when you adjust the brightness back to normal (photoshop, lightroom, aperture etc).
2. Apertures (HOLE):
- Aperture is the size of the HOLE in the camera.
- The smaller the number, the bigger the hole (example: F3.5 is a bigger hole than F5.6)
- The bigger the hole, the less exposure time you will need to get the same details in the darks, the mid-tones, and the high-lights. HOWEVER...
- The bigger the hole, the more BLURRY the areas which are not in focus is. This is called a Depth of Focus. ALSO...
- The bigger the hole, the smaller the areas (from you to the subject) that is in focus will be. (Example: in F5.6, you may have a person's face completely in focus, but at F2.4 you may only have the eyes in focus, but the tip of the nose and the ears are already blurry).
3. ISO (SURFACE):
In the old days, a film's sensitivity is rated in ISO (or ASA in Europe and Asia). And are available to consumers only in 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 ISOs. The system stuck.
- The bigger the number, the more sensitive to light the surface is.
- The more sensitive the surface is, the faster it is to capture the light.
- The faster it is to capture the light, the less details it will have. This is called GRAIN in the old film days or the digital equivalent, the NOISE.
4. WIDE vs LONG lenses
- I don't know which lens your camera comes with, but it should be a zoom lens (example: 24mm-85mm). There are also fixed lenses (example: it can shoot 50mm ONLY). Fixed lenses can usually have a bigger HOLE, good for those beautiful blurred foreground/background effect, or shoot in less light, like a dimly lit concert.
- The smaller the number, the wider the lens.
- The more a lens is wide, the more it will bring things that are closer to you even closer, and the objects far from you even further away. It will also usually make a closed space BIGGER.
- The more a lens is long, the more it will squish the distance between objects that are far from you and objects that are close to you. We call it FLATTENING.
- It is usually good to shoot a person with a longer lens because it will make the person's features look less strange.
- Wide lenses will make a person more and more deformed as the number go down.
- This is just a guideline, because sometimes that strange eerie person with a huge forehead, normal size chin, and tiny feet is exactly the effect you are looking for.
5. OTHER GENERAL POINTS
- READ YOUR CAMERA's MANUAL FROM COVER TO COVER A FEW TIMES AND TRY TO COMMIT TO MEMORY AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE!!! I can't stress how important this is. Understanding how to work your camera setting, and you are already far above a lot of newbies.
- Get a basic photo book, and read THAT cover to cover, a chapter at a time. There is no rush to put all that knowledge inside your head, or to put them to use immediately. Quality over quantity here... (Hmm I am sure I have come across PHOTOGRAPHY FOR DUMMIES, you might want to see if it's worth picking up).
- Try shooting in Black and White mode first, or shoot the same image in Black and White. There should be a function in your camera for this. This will teach you to see the gray values of the images. For example, the color RED may look really bright in real life, but in B&W it is actually DARK GRAY! Shooting in B&W will also help you understand your exposures better, and how to expose correctly.
- Bracketing, the practice of shooting a picture in different exposures, is a good practice for newbies to understand the effect of exposures. Now I don't know if Nikon cameras have this function, but Canon has a function called Automatic Exposure Bracketing, or AEB, which will automatically set your next 3 shots to bracketing.
- To do bracketing manually, set your camera to Av (semi-automatic function = Aperture Priority, this means you can set the aperture, and let the camera decide the exposure times.) And shoot a shot at normal exposure (0), a shot at 1 exposure less (-1, or 1 stop under-exposed), and a shot at 1 exposure more (+1, or 1 stop over-exposed). You can of course try other numbers.
- SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT, and then SHOOT SOME MORE!! I mean, it's digital, so go shoot your heart out, and experiment with all the concepts above. Try working the opposite of those guidelines, and see what happens!
- Learn to SEE THE LIGHT, and understand what it will do to the picture. Photography is the art of the capturing of the light. Cool ain't it?
*** MOST IMPORTANT ***
Try to always review your practice photos with a fresh mind. And when you come across a photo you took that you like, make sure you understand how you did it the 1st place. Then try to duplicate the effect. And maybe as a deeper practice, try to understand WHY you like that picture... it doesn't take an advanced formal arts degree to know you like something, but it takes a keen mind to understand WHY you like it!
Accidents, be they happy accidents, or disastrous accidents, are the best ways to learn, that is IF you can remember how you got there.
Well, I think this is as much as I can dish out without starting to go into terminologies that can be really specific and confusing for someone starting out. There's a lot to cover, and I myself is only really just learning how to shoot photos, and have a lot to go as well, but the basics never changes.
Once you have the basic techniques down, and have taken enough pictures, you will start to develop your own style. Don't worry.
