Great Digital Photography Tips For Beginners

Buy large enough camera bag

When you start out, you might be happy with the lens you got and only need a small camera bag. However, as you become a better photographer, you want more lenses. My recommendation would be to get a bag that can hold your camera and 3 lenses. This will usually be enough for the average photographer.

Learn what RAW is and how to get the most out of it

RAW is a file format that saves all the information from the camera’s sensor. This is more information than what is visible on the screen.

What this means is that you can load a RAW picture into the computer and often be able to save wrongly exposed picture and correct the white balance. This is extremely useful for beginners, as you are very likely to make these mistakes in the start.

Experiment!

The best way to learn how to use your camera is to simply experiment with different settings and see what happens. Try to take the same picture with a high and low aperture and see what happens. Try to experiment with shutter speed when shooting moving objects.

An example of this is light painting below.

Always prefocus

The camera needs a few moments to adjust the focus. It’s a good idea to always push the shutter button halfway down, let the camera focus, adjust the composition and then fully push down the shutter button.

Use your camera manual

I’m not a big fan of manuals, but you want to always keep your camera manual handy when you first start out. I’ve sometimes spent a long time looking for how to do a specific thing on the camera and then looked it up in the manual and found the solution in no time.

Protect your lenses with a UV filter

Even though most lenses are made from high quality glass that doesn’t scratch very easily, you don’t want your lens ruined by a big scratch in the middle of it.

Buy a UV-filter for all of your lenses. It only costs a fraction of what you paid for the lens and is easily replaceable if you scratch it. Also, make sure you get the right size filter for your lenses!

Learn the basics of photography

The best advice I can give you is to learn the basics of photography. Here I’ve only covered a few photography tips for beginners.

Photography Tutorials For Beginners

One of the best ways to learn is from tutorials. That’s why I’m going to show you how to find the best photography tutorials for beginners.

However, before we get into that, it’s crucial that you have a basic understand of how the camera and composition works. Otherwise you would end up simply following the steps in the tutorial without really knowing what you do, or learn things that you don’t know how to apply in a real life situation.

What is the first thing I need to know?

The first thing you need to know is how to use your camera. Just knowing how to push down the shutter button is not enough.

If words like aperture, shutter speed or ISO sound like Greek to you, then these are the first photography concepts you need to master. For beginners, these terms often seem a bit complicated, but once you’ve learn what they do and experimented a bit with them, you will have the basic understanding to enable you to benefit from most tutorials.

Composition

Once you’ve mastered the camera, the next thing you need to learn is composition.

All though there are rules and guidelines for composition, the best way to learn how to compose a picture, is to take a lot of pictures. There is only so much you can learn from just reading about it.

To help you get started, keep the following things in mind:

- Avoid distractions in the picture that can draw the attention away from the subject

- Experiment by taking some vertical photos

- Remember that you can use software like Photoshop to crop your pictures on the computer.

Lenses

One of the greatest advantages by owning a DSLR is that you can easily change lenses. The reason why this is important is that the lens greatly determines how the image will turn out.

If you want to do landscape photography, you want a good wide-angle lens. If you’re more a fan of portraits, you should get a good telephoto lens. And if you want to get really close, like taking a picture of an ant, you need to make sure that your lens is capable of macro photography.

However, even if you’re stuck with a fixed lens camera, you can still do some cool stuff.

Now that you know what you need to know to get the most out of photography tutorials for beginners, let’s get started.