PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG

Every photograph we make is part of a learning process. We turn our lens on our respective worlds, on the people who inhabit it, on the new places we discover, and on the scenes we’ve created. We find truth and we create fiction with our cameras. It seems a natural thing to turn the camera around and examine ourselves, or even to recreate ourselves.

Why Self Portraiture?
The photographer’s presence is implied in every photograph taken. With self portraiture the implication is made overt.

If you have a camera, the first person available to photograph is most obviously yourself. Whether it is a narcissistic impulse, or a convenience, using the self as subject allows us the most freedom we can take with a model. We are completely aware of our own intentions. It also offers the most control we can exert over our own self-image.

Presenting ourselves photographically is an intimate act. It can be a call for attention, a flirtation, a flaunt, a gauntlet dropped, a confrontation. By creating our own image we can assert our identity on the viewer, create a new persona, indulge in our narcissism, or engage our audience in a more intimate manner … full article.

It’s very important to know your camera. Read the manual, then get out your camera and try a few things, then read the manual again, and again, and AGAIN. Try keeping your camera and the manual on you lap while watching TV, reading and experimenting, and taking shots of the your surroundings even the TV.

Simplify your photo as much as possible, remove unwated elements and be aware of the background. A photo with too much going on wont grab the viewers attention and keep it. If the eye wanders around the picture trying to look at all the elements that are there, it will loose its effectiveness. Make sure your subject is the most prominate feature of the photo and the background is not distracting.

See articles Know Your Equipment and Better Composition.

Have you even considered changing the ISO sensitivity on your camera? If you don’t know what ISO sensitivity refers to, you may want to consult your camera manual for a base point understanding about that and how it works. In short, changing the ISO setting on your camera changes the sensitivity to light, the lower number that you set the less sensitive to light (and conversely the higher the number the more sensitive it becomes).

Why change ISO?
You may wonder why it is necessary to make change of the ISO sensitivity; in fact, your camera just picked a suitable ISO sensitivity probably the best for your pictures when you are shooting in automatic mode. When you discover the limitation of the automatic mode, you will start to care about what ISO sensitivity should be used when shooting in other modes.

This is useful when you are shooting in different lighting situations - particularly when there is low light and you might not be able to use a flash (you’d bump up your ISO setting in this case), and this is just the beginning why you would want to shoot at higher ISO.

The Inside Story
The only cost of increasing ISO is that as you do it you’ll notice that the “noise” or “grain” in your shots also begins to increase. Thus, the rule is simple - choose the lowest ISO possible for smooth and grain-free shots. The latest generation DSLR cameras today has very nice result at ISO 400 and lower sensitivity, you may consider the output are “noise-free” setup. You have start to concern about anything above ISO 400 … full article.