Return to Digital SLR Photography Tips Home Page

Learning Digital Photography

Learning digital photography may sound like a big task but take it a day at a time and a photo at a time.

So you have a digital SLR camera...

"Now what?" you ask. Well, take next step is to begin learning digital photography.

It's not as scary a task as it sounds. All you have to do is take it a day at a time and a photo at a time.

I am by no means an expert but I'll tell you this: My photography wouldn't have improved had I not done what I did.

Take photos.
Review photos.
Read.
Fiddle around with camera.
Take more photos.

It's not much, but skills are honed and perfected through repetition.

All I did was read, learn, ask questions and, most importantly, took photos to apply what I learned.

One of the keys to learning digital photography is to take it...

A Day At A Time

Digital photography is a skill. Like all skills, you have to learn and then continually strive to improve. At the most basic level, your digital SLR camera is a tool. You press the shutter and an image is captured.

That's it.

That part of the photographic experience won't take you a full day to master. What will take time, however, will be to consistently create photographs that reflect your creative vision.

One of the ways that I take photos is to remind myself to "love my camera". To me, it means to learn about the camera, its capabilities, how it operates.

Your camera is like a car. You don't operate your car without gasoline, do you? In much the same way, operate your camera with a full battery.

It sounds silly but one of the things that can make a bummer of a day is to find out that you have a dead battery just when you were getting into the groove of your photos.

This brief feeling of disappointment doesn't sound like a big deal but it does cut the flow of your creativity.

When your creativity is temporarily blocked, you will find it much harder to take consistently good photos.

As with the battery, make sure to have a fresh memory card. Running out of space on your memory card is a surefire way to disappoint yourself. If this happens, you have two choices:

Delete photos or
Go home

These aren't the best choices because for one, your camera's LCD is much too small to make a judgement call on whether to delete a photo or not.

And going home just when you were just getting into your creative flow is not a nice way to end your day.

Learning digital photography is also about learning about the capabilities of your camera. Once you are comfortable moving around the menus and changing dials and whatnot, you become more proficient.

All of this doesn't have to be learned in a single day. Although it won't take you much time to read through the manual, it will take you a bit more time to apply what you have learned to your photography.

So you take it a day at a time and now you take it...

A Photo At A Time

Learning digital photography is very rewarding because it is always a delight to capture an image just the way you want. It is possible to take several hundreds of photos in a day with a digital camera.

In the beginning, this may be a goal but you will find that it is not nearly as rewarding to process hundreds of "OK" images when you'd rather be tweaking a handful of "Awesome!" photos.

What I would suggest when learning digital photography is to just take some photos. Take as many photos as you please during a time frame you set.

When you get home, make yourself comfortable and then begin to go through your photos. When you are relaxed as you process your photos, you will be more objective.

As you do this, please ask yourself the following questions:

What about this photo do I like?
What about this photo don't I like?
How can I improve my shot?
Are there distracting elements in the background?
What did I intend with this photograph?
Do I like the way the shot turned out?
Should I crop?
What should I crop?
What were the light conditions like?
Do I need flash with this?

Depending on your photo, you may need to ask all of these questions. Or some. Or none.

The questions you ask yourself will be more specific as you become more objective when viewing your photos. Comfort with your camera and objectivity are important in this review process.

However, the top three questions in the list above are the questions that I ask of all my photos.

Once you make this a habit, you will find that within a short period of time, your photos and photography skills will have improved significantly.

A single photo, an image, speaks to people in many different ways. Once you know what you want your image to evoke, you will have a better way of relating your creative vision to others.

The first step in learning digital photography is to take a photo. This is the beginning of your learning.

Love your camera. Love yourself. Love your photos.