Beginner Digital Photography

This guide to beginner digital photography will help you learn the digital photography basics you need to start taking pictures with your camera today.

You've gotten your first digital camera and now you're ready to start taking pictures. That's great! I remember how excited I was when I bought my first digital camera.

The first thing you need to do before you even start taking pictures is familiarize yourself with your digital camera. Your camera came with a manual. Read that manual thoroughly. Yeah, I know it's ridiculously boring, but trust me, it's necessary. When I got my first camera I went for as long as I could without reading the manual and my pictures definitely suffered because of it. I didn't know how to adjust my camera to take good pictures in the various situations I found myself in.

The Flash

The first beginner digital photography tip is about how to deal with your flash. Many people just leave their flash on all the time. They let the camera figure out when to use the flash and don't really pay much attention to it. That's not always the best idea. There are times when you should use a flash when your camera won't think it needs one. There are also times when you shouldn't use a flash when your camera may decide to use one. Let's look at these situations.

In low light situations, your camera will always use a flash if set to auto mode, but sometimes you may want to use the light and shadow in that environment in your picture. If you want to take pictures in low light situations without a flash the best thing to do is turn off your flash and set your camera to a higher ISO.

ISO determines how sensitive your camera's sensor is to light. The higher the ISO setting the more sensitive the sensor is to light. Try setting your ISO to 400 or above. The higher the ISO setting the more grain will appear in your picture so it's important to keep the setting at as low a number as possible to give you good picture quality. If you don't know how to change your ISO look it up in your camera manual.

You can also change your aperture setting to increase your camera's sensitivity to light. The lower the f-stop number the wider open your camera lens. If your lens is wide open when you take the photograph more light will get in on your sensor.

There are also times when you should use a flash when your camera wouldn't automatically register the need. When you take pictures outside in the middle of the day often times harsh shadows appear on the face of the person you're photographing. To get rid of these shadows you can use your flash.

Here's another handy tip about your flash. Try taping a piece of wax paper over the flash to lessen it's intensity a bit.

White Balance

The next beginner digital photography tip is about white balance. White balance is great to tool to make sure the colors in your picture turn out right. The white balance on your camera is shown in the setting that represent differently lit environments you may find yourself taking a picture in. For example there is a setting with the picture of the sun for taking pictures outside on sunny days.

Generally it's fine to keep this setting on auto but you do want to experiment with white balance to find out what the settings mean. Once you know what they mean you can start experimenting with them.

Like I said before, using the auto setting for white balance is fine, but there may be instances when you want to set the white balance manually to achieve an artistic effect. For example, if you set the camera to tungsten light (the setting shown as a lightbulb) and take a picture outside the picture will have a blue cast.

Focus

Some cameras allow you to set your focus to manual and some don't. If your camera doesn't don't fret. You don't have to use manual focus to take great pictures. Most of the time I have my camera set to auto-focus because it saves me time, but there may be times when using manual focus will help you get a sharper image. Sometimes the camera doesn't know what to focus on in the picture. Because the camera relies on contrast to determine the focus it may have propers in low contrast situations. This is when manual focus comes in handy.

I hoped these beginner digital photography tips have helped you. Check out the related articles section below for more tutorials to get you started.

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White Balance - Here's a better explanation about white balance.