What Makes a Photo?

Before you read about the specific techniques of landscape photography here, I want to make sure that you know exactly how to create a photo. If you just bought an SLR camera but do not see much of a difference between your new photos and the ones taken with your compact camera, then you’ll find great benefit in the following articles as they’ll help you get the most out of your digital SLR.

Once you learn the basics, you can start capturing some stunning images.

The next few postings I write will be aimed towards those who have no clue how to shoot in manual mode or know the general functions of their digital SLR. If this pertains to you, don’t worry – every photographer has been in your shoes at one point in their career, no matter where they stand now. You’re taking the first step towards knowing the manual functions of your camera which is absolutely essential if you want to shoot landscapes on the professional level. So if you have a sincere interest in photography and want to know how to create stunning images, but have no idea how to use your camera outside of full-auto mode, then continue reading.

How Your Camera Works

The first concept of digital photography that you need to grasp is how your camera creates a photograph.

The word “photography” literally means “to draw with light”. This should tell you something right away about photography – light is very, very important.

In order to create a photograph, your first step is to expose your digital sensor (the digital equivalent to a film negative) to a certain amount of light, which is then recorded by your sensor thus creating what you see on your LCD screen. Think of this: if you print a film negative that has not been used, it’s completely black. The same thing goes for your digital sensor – if you don’t expose it to light then you’re not going to have a photo to print. Light is the key concept here.

It might be easier for you to grasp this concept if you think about a black and white photo. When you take a b/w image, the whitest white of your photo will be the part where the most light was exposed onto your sensor. In contrast (literally), the black areas of your photo show you that no light was exposed onto your sensor (or negative).

Now envision a scale where one end is completely black and the other is the brightest white, with all varying shades of grey in between. When looking at a black and white photo, you can see this scale spread out across your entire image, with the bright whites representing the brightest part of your image and the dark blacks showing you that no light was shown on that particular section. So essentially, a black and white photo is a varying scale showing how much light was exposed onto your digital sensor.

The same concept goes for color images, but I think it’s easier to understand this while thinking in black and white. If you’ve taken any sunset color photos, you’ll probably notice that the sun is completely white, indicating that a vast amount of light was exposed onto your sensor for this particular area.

So needless to say, the most important part of creating a stunning photograph is to first think in terms of LIGHT. How much light do I need to let into my camera in order to take a good photo? What will this kind of light do to my image? What can I do to change how the light creates my photo? These are all questions you’ll be able to answer once you know a bit more about your digital SLR.

How Does Your Camera Compensate for Different Lighting?

This is a very good question. As you’re probably already thinking, the amount of light can change drastically depending on your environment – think of standing inside a darkened hallway compared to being outside on a sunny day. How does your camera adjust itself automatically for these different circumstances?

The main adjustment your camera will make is by changing your shutter speed. I’m going to dedicate an entire posting to shutter speed soon, but to familiarize yourself right now all you need to know is this: your shutter speed determines how long your digital sensor is exposed to your environment – in other words, it controls how much light is let into your camera by timing your photos. A darkened environment will call for a longer shutter speed and a bright environment will produce a faster shutter speed. Your camera’s light sensor determines how long your shutter needs to open for in order to expose your image properly so that is not something you need to worry about when shooting in full-auto mode.

The exact shutter speed is displayed on your camera when you prefocus your image (press the shutter button down half-way) in fractions of a second. When in full-auto mode, you’ll notice this number increase (go faster) as your light increases. For example, you may have a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second indoors (shown as just “100″ on your camera), but that could easily increase to 1/4000th of a second once you step outdoors depending on the strength of your light. Outdoor light will almost always be brighter than indoor light.

If your image is exposed for too long, you’ll notice bright white spots completely masking out your photo – this is considered to be an overexposed photograph. Alternatively, an image that was not exposed to the light long enough will be darkened, thus giving it an underexposed appearance. These concepts will be explained more thoroughly soon.

Below are three identical images taken with a tripod, but all exposed at different shutter speeds to illustrate how a photo can easily get over or under exposed:

Notice how the sky here is completely white with many white areas throughout the image – not to mention that it’s hard to look at. The shutter speed was too slow, thus letting too much light into the camera.

In this photo, the shutter speed was much too fast and did not let enough light into the camera; this is an example of an underexposed image as noted by the vast amount of blackened areas.

This image, when compared to the previous two, is exposed perfectly. There is not an overwhelming amount of bright whites or dark blacks present – except for around the sun. Taking photos of the sun is very tricky in photography and requires specialized gear, but it can be done. However for this image with no special equipment, the photo is at the perfect exposure.

There are other elements that contribute to exposing your image properly – your aperture and ISO setting will affect your shutter speed, thus affecting your exposure time. These have their own certain sets of guidelines which will be explained in later articles.

For now, all you have to take away from this article is that photographs are created by light, and your camera is essentially a tool that records the light and can automatically judge how much light is needed to expose your image. That – in a nutshell – is how a photograph is created.

While the automatic adjustments by your camera can be beneficial, there are many times where you’ll need to adjust them manually in order to create the photo you want.

In the next posting, I’ll explain how to adjust your aperture. You can use your aperture to not only create special effects with your camera, but also control your exposure time a bit.