You just bought a DSLR. Youre excited at the possibilities this large camera brings. Youve probably already taken a few shots and have had a few shots that make you goOh, thats nice! Maybe youve had a few where you think, Yes, this is good - but my phone does better sometimes.
This is written with the intention of giving you just enough information to help you get a few basics down with the camera so youll be in a better position to take better photos more often than not.
Im also writing this as if I was writing this for me --- but the me from five years ago, when I bought my first DSLR. It took me a couple years of trial and error, reading, youtubing, and asking questions to get to these points Im going to lay out in a very succinct way for you.
To be clear, this isnt going to teach you everything about your camera. This isnt going to spend time going over the exposure triangle (although Ill touch on pieces), nor will it address the much broader topic of composition - where composition is the act of taking a well put together photo.
So, I said this would be succinct so lets get started.
Focusing.
Your camera has a very sophisticated focusing system that gets it right most of the time. And when it gets it wrong, you probably dont know why. Smartphone photographers frequently dont worry about focus because they simply tap on the area of their screen they want focused, and *snap* the photo is taken with the area they touched in focus. Unless you have a newer DSLR with a touch screen that mimics this behaviour, your camera has to have another way to focus.
First: Learn how to use your shutter button to activate focus
You need to know that your shutter button ( the button that you press to take the photo ) has two steps to it. The first step, called the half-depress, is what activates the focus mode on the camera. When you completely depress the button (the second step), that actually triggers the shutter and your photo is taken. This is a really important point, and if you were not aware of this, I urge you to put your camera up to your eye and practice half-pressing the shutter button and see what happens when you do that.
Second: Set your camera to Single-Point (Nikon) or Manual-Point (Canon)
When you take your new DSLR out of the box, its focusing option will be set to Auto-Area (Nikon) or Automatic AF Point Selection (Canon). In this mode, the camera uses complex algorithms to look at the scene and pick which thing in the scene is most important, and focuses on that. Most of the time, if you have your child with a tree behind him, the camera will focus on the child and you have a correctly focused photo. Sometimes, the tree has a more interesting pattern that the camera find more important, and the tree is in focus and your child is blurry. Definitely not what you want.
Setting your camera to Single-Point focus removes your camera from Auto-Area, and puts YOU in control of where focus occurs. Notice that when you half-depress your shutter button to activate focus, in your view-finder youll see a red box light up. That red-box defines the area that the camera will focus. You can typically use your D-Pad / Circle-Pad to select a focus point. When you want your child in focus, the idea is that you put the focus-box on your childs eye, then half-press to activate focus, and then fully depress to take the photo. In this way, you are always in control of what is in focus. The camera is never trying to guess for you. This focus point that you now control is analogous to the area you tap on your smartphone screen for focus.
Third: Set your camera to continuous auto-focus AF-C (Nikon) AI-Servo (Canon)
Your camera comes out of the box set to single auto-focus mode (AF-S Nikon, One-shot AF Canon). This means when you half-press the shutter button to focus on your child, the focus is locked on that location and does not update. If your child ( or dog ) were to move while you take the photo, your photo will be out of focus. Your camera has a continuous auto-focus mode - you want to set it to that to ensure when you are photographing any possible moving subjects (including you!), that the focus system is continuously adjusting based on your subject.
Photos of your running kids, crawling babies, little league players, kids in band, moving birds anything that isnt a wall as a target can benefit from this. Even when Im taking photos of landscape, I still use continuous auto-focus! I typically will set my focus point on the subject Im interested in photographing, and hold down the shutter-button half-way, keeping it half-pressed. With the shutter-button half-pressed, the camera is continuously focusing on the subject Im following . when the subject gets to where I want, I fully depress the shutter to take the picture.
Fourth: Set your camera to use auto-ISO
Next to learning to set your focus spot manually, Id argue this is the single most important thing you can set on your camera to get better photos more consistently. This is also a setting where smartphones have it right and DSLRs dont. Out of the box, your smartphone uses auto-ISO. What this means is that as the area youre taking a photo gets darker, your phone will automatically boost your ISO up, therefore ensuring you have a bright/correctly exposed photo. The downside to boosting ISO is noise and grain. If you dont use a flash on your phone, youll notice that photos taken indoors are much grainier and noisier than photos taken in good light. This is where the strength of your larger DSLR sensor gets to flex its muscle. While your DSLR will have to boost the ISO in darker area just as your smartphone does, due to your DSLRs larger and more sophisticated sensor, the noise will be less - typically much less.
Fifth: Put your camera in (S)hutter priority (Nikon) Tv (Canon)
This will likely be the most debated setting Im suggesting, but I think as a first step its a good one. Using (S)hutter priority in conjunction with auto-ISO is going to ensure youll maximize your chances of having non-blurry, correctly exposed photos - even when zooming in on your son in the gymnasium from 100 ft away.
Shutter Priority means youre controlling how long the camera leaves the shutter open - how long the camera sees the scene. The longer you leave the shutter open, the more light the sensor sees and the brighter your image will be. The downside to having a shutter open for a long time is that you risk a blurry photo.
Using the example of a child in a gymnasium doing a school play: In a typical, well-lit gymnasium, your camera is going to hate you. Your eyes think the gym is fairly bright, but your camera doesnt. If you leave your camera in auto, it will likely want to leave your shutter open for 1/10th of a second maybe even ½ of a second. 1/10 of a second is considered a LONG exposure to the camera, and when you are hand-holding your camera - this is long enough to introduce blur. The blur comes from the fact that you cant possibly hold the camera still for that entire 1/10th of a second.
The beauty of Shutter priority is youre going to tell use your dial to set the camera shutter to 1/100 of a second in this indoor scenario. That should be fast enough to not have shake from you, and your auto-ISO from step 4 will guarantee that the image will appear correctly exposed (bright).
Now, when you move outside during the day to your childs soccer game, you have a lot more light. You can set your shutter speed to 1/500 or even 1/1000th of a second to really freeze the action.
Bonus sixth: Change your camera from single-shot to burst mode.
By default, your camera comes setup to take a single photo when you fully depress the shutter button. If your son is just about to make his first soccer goal, and your timing isnt quite right, you might miss the shot! Luckily, with a single setting change, your chances of getting the perfect photo will shoot up - and that setting is Burst Mode. The idea with burst mode is that when you press and hold the shutter button fully, and you dont let go, that the camera will take photos as rapidly as possible - some cameras that can be 5 photos in a second.
.
.
.
So, the next time your child is on the soccer field running towards the goal, your camera is now setup so you can ensure its
-focused on him
-continuously focusing on him
-iso is setup to ensure you will have a bright photo no matter what
-shutter speed is fast enough to freeze him in action
-just as he kicks the ball, your continuous burst of shots will ensure you get that perfect shot!
This is written with the intention of giving you just enough information to help you get a few basics down with the camera so youll be in a better position to take better photos more often than not.
Im also writing this as if I was writing this for me --- but the me from five years ago, when I bought my first DSLR. It took me a couple years of trial and error, reading, youtubing, and asking questions to get to these points Im going to lay out in a very succinct way for you.
To be clear, this isnt going to teach you everything about your camera. This isnt going to spend time going over the exposure triangle (although Ill touch on pieces), nor will it address the much broader topic of composition - where composition is the act of taking a well put together photo.
So, I said this would be succinct so lets get started.
Focusing.
Your camera has a very sophisticated focusing system that gets it right most of the time. And when it gets it wrong, you probably dont know why. Smartphone photographers frequently dont worry about focus because they simply tap on the area of their screen they want focused, and *snap* the photo is taken with the area they touched in focus. Unless you have a newer DSLR with a touch screen that mimics this behaviour, your camera has to have another way to focus.
First: Learn how to use your shutter button to activate focus
You need to know that your shutter button ( the button that you press to take the photo ) has two steps to it. The first step, called the half-depress, is what activates the focus mode on the camera. When you completely depress the button (the second step), that actually triggers the shutter and your photo is taken. This is a really important point, and if you were not aware of this, I urge you to put your camera up to your eye and practice half-pressing the shutter button and see what happens when you do that.
Second: Set your camera to Single-Point (Nikon) or Manual-Point (Canon)
When you take your new DSLR out of the box, its focusing option will be set to Auto-Area (Nikon) or Automatic AF Point Selection (Canon). In this mode, the camera uses complex algorithms to look at the scene and pick which thing in the scene is most important, and focuses on that. Most of the time, if you have your child with a tree behind him, the camera will focus on the child and you have a correctly focused photo. Sometimes, the tree has a more interesting pattern that the camera find more important, and the tree is in focus and your child is blurry. Definitely not what you want.
Setting your camera to Single-Point focus removes your camera from Auto-Area, and puts YOU in control of where focus occurs. Notice that when you half-depress your shutter button to activate focus, in your view-finder youll see a red box light up. That red-box defines the area that the camera will focus. You can typically use your D-Pad / Circle-Pad to select a focus point. When you want your child in focus, the idea is that you put the focus-box on your childs eye, then half-press to activate focus, and then fully depress to take the photo. In this way, you are always in control of what is in focus. The camera is never trying to guess for you. This focus point that you now control is analogous to the area you tap on your smartphone screen for focus.
Third: Set your camera to continuous auto-focus AF-C (Nikon) AI-Servo (Canon)
Your camera comes out of the box set to single auto-focus mode (AF-S Nikon, One-shot AF Canon). This means when you half-press the shutter button to focus on your child, the focus is locked on that location and does not update. If your child ( or dog ) were to move while you take the photo, your photo will be out of focus. Your camera has a continuous auto-focus mode - you want to set it to that to ensure when you are photographing any possible moving subjects (including you!), that the focus system is continuously adjusting based on your subject.
Photos of your running kids, crawling babies, little league players, kids in band, moving birds anything that isnt a wall as a target can benefit from this. Even when Im taking photos of landscape, I still use continuous auto-focus! I typically will set my focus point on the subject Im interested in photographing, and hold down the shutter-button half-way, keeping it half-pressed. With the shutter-button half-pressed, the camera is continuously focusing on the subject Im following . when the subject gets to where I want, I fully depress the shutter to take the picture.
Fourth: Set your camera to use auto-ISO
Next to learning to set your focus spot manually, Id argue this is the single most important thing you can set on your camera to get better photos more consistently. This is also a setting where smartphones have it right and DSLRs dont. Out of the box, your smartphone uses auto-ISO. What this means is that as the area youre taking a photo gets darker, your phone will automatically boost your ISO up, therefore ensuring you have a bright/correctly exposed photo. The downside to boosting ISO is noise and grain. If you dont use a flash on your phone, youll notice that photos taken indoors are much grainier and noisier than photos taken in good light. This is where the strength of your larger DSLR sensor gets to flex its muscle. While your DSLR will have to boost the ISO in darker area just as your smartphone does, due to your DSLRs larger and more sophisticated sensor, the noise will be less - typically much less.
Fifth: Put your camera in (S)hutter priority (Nikon) Tv (Canon)
This will likely be the most debated setting Im suggesting, but I think as a first step its a good one. Using (S)hutter priority in conjunction with auto-ISO is going to ensure youll maximize your chances of having non-blurry, correctly exposed photos - even when zooming in on your son in the gymnasium from 100 ft away.
Shutter Priority means youre controlling how long the camera leaves the shutter open - how long the camera sees the scene. The longer you leave the shutter open, the more light the sensor sees and the brighter your image will be. The downside to having a shutter open for a long time is that you risk a blurry photo.
Using the example of a child in a gymnasium doing a school play: In a typical, well-lit gymnasium, your camera is going to hate you. Your eyes think the gym is fairly bright, but your camera doesnt. If you leave your camera in auto, it will likely want to leave your shutter open for 1/10th of a second maybe even ½ of a second. 1/10 of a second is considered a LONG exposure to the camera, and when you are hand-holding your camera - this is long enough to introduce blur. The blur comes from the fact that you cant possibly hold the camera still for that entire 1/10th of a second.
The beauty of Shutter priority is youre going to tell use your dial to set the camera shutter to 1/100 of a second in this indoor scenario. That should be fast enough to not have shake from you, and your auto-ISO from step 4 will guarantee that the image will appear correctly exposed (bright).
Now, when you move outside during the day to your childs soccer game, you have a lot more light. You can set your shutter speed to 1/500 or even 1/1000th of a second to really freeze the action.
Bonus sixth: Change your camera from single-shot to burst mode.
By default, your camera comes setup to take a single photo when you fully depress the shutter button. If your son is just about to make his first soccer goal, and your timing isnt quite right, you might miss the shot! Luckily, with a single setting change, your chances of getting the perfect photo will shoot up - and that setting is Burst Mode. The idea with burst mode is that when you press and hold the shutter button fully, and you dont let go, that the camera will take photos as rapidly as possible - some cameras that can be 5 photos in a second.
.
.
.
So, the next time your child is on the soccer field running towards the goal, your camera is now setup so you can ensure its
-focused on him
-continuously focusing on him
-iso is setup to ensure you will have a bright photo no matter what
-shutter speed is fast enough to freeze him in action
-just as he kicks the ball, your continuous burst of shots will ensure you get that perfect shot!