Behind the Camera: Getting Started in Photography

Welcome back to another installment of my monthly Behind the Camera.  Each month I will talk about something photography related here and love to have questions asked which can lead to these entries.  This month, I had a plan on what to talk about, but I happened to see a YouTube video about getting started in photography which kind of changed my mind.  It wasn’t really a question that had been asked, but the more I thought about it, the more that I realized that there might be a few folks out there who might have gotten a camera for Christmas, or maybe decided that 2024 was going to be the year that they were going to learn photography.  More than anything, I try to inspire other photographers and further this artform, so it made sense to go ahead and put this topic on the roster right here at the beginning of the year.  It was also going to be nice to talk about something a little less technical for a while like lens choices or deciding between color and black and white.  So, if you are considering starting out with the hobby of photography, or maybe you have stalled out after giving it a try, this month is for you.

Photography really is an accessible craft for anyone these days.  You don’t have to have the ability to draw or paint (I certainly don’t), but you can still create meaningful images and record the world as you see it.  I know I have talked a lot about the technical end of photography in these pages, but the truth of the matter is you don’t need to know any of that to get started.  Getting started requires nothing specific at all other than a want to give it a try.

You can start at any time, so why not start now?  You don’t have a camera you say.  Remember that high tech computer that you carry in your pocket and have with you everywhere you go?  Yep, that cell phone, that’s what I’m talking about.  For a decade or more now, those phones pretty much all come with cameras in them.  I’m sure that you have used them often, and if you are getting old like me, they make for great magnifying glasses for small print.  Well, that is all the camera you need to get started because there is no need to get a highly capable although complicated camera at this stage because you just don’t need that many options to deal with just yet.

If you have a camera, that is great!  You don’t need to know much more than how to turn it on and press the shutter button at this point.  Remember, you are learning photography, you aren’t expected to know it all at this point.  The first and most important step is getting the basics down, and by basics, I’m not talking about the shutter speed, or the depth of field.  For the purpose of this discussion, the basics include things like determining what you like to take pictures of and figuring out how to compose an image.

The first part of that is learning what you like to take photos of.  This is the fun part of learning photography as you get to go around and react to the world as you see it.  Don’t try to find specific things, just exist in the places that you enjoy and let the subjects find you.  If it interests you, photograph it.  Don’t worry about the details, just record what you like.  This will serve a very powerful purpose for you over your time learning photography.  You will be setting up what you like to photograph the best.  This could be people, animals, trees, buildings, houses, cars, fences, flowers, and so on.  In a short amount of time, you will start to establish what subjects excite you, and what you are drawn to.

In my case, I started out photographing landscapes, old buildings, and historic sites.  These were the things that I felt most drawn to, and they were accessible.  For the most part, I still fall into that same pattern, but I have really learned to understand what it is about those things that I really enjoy.  It all started with that first camera and what I ended up photographing the most of when I would go out.  There wasn’t anything technical at all about this stage, it was just getting to know more about what motivated me visually.

As I progressed with finding the things that excited me visually, I started to learn the different types of visual communication.  This was the first active learning that I did with a camera, and it was as simple as working on understanding composition.  I still wasn’t worried at all about things like exposure because I had the camera set to full auto mode (actually the only mode on my first camera).  My only creative choices were in the realm of composition.  I did a little reading on the subject and found that you rarely want to center your main subject, and that layers often work well in a photograph.  There are a ton of videos and books on the topic of composition, and this is something that you can get the basics of pretty quickly.  One of the easiest methods is the rule of thirds, and that will help guide you in the right direction to add some visual interest to the compositions that you are shooting.

It is important that for this time, you don’t worry about camera settings, but it will help if you get used to seeing what the camera chooses for the settings.  See how the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed relate to each other when you are looking at the images in the review.  Don’t worry about the science behind it, just get used to seeing the numbers from a familiarity aspect.  This will come into play later on, but just keep everything in full auto as you explore what you like and learn how to place the elements in the frame to make a pleasing composition.  It is worth mentioning here that you will in no way be proficient with composition during this part, but you will be setting the stage for learning various compositional techniques later on.

An aspect of this stage that might be hard to swallow is that you have to embrace failure.  Don’t go out there trying to fail at this; but be open to the fact that you will fail more than you succeed.  This is what learning is all about, and even photographers that have been at this for a very long time still fail when they start to learn new and different techniques.  We will always learn more from our failures than we do from our successes.  Pay attention to your failures and identify why you consider the particular photo a failure.  By doing this, you are changing that failure into a learning opportunity which will then become a springboard for improvement.  All of a sudden failure isn’t that bad of a thing at all.

Remember, you are still getting to know yourself and what you might like to photograph.  You are still getting used to how to work out a composition.  Nothing has been learned yet, it is all just a creative exploration.  This stage will let you know if you want to continue with photography on a more serious level.  If you are not enjoying the process and it already seems like an uphill battle, there is nothing wrong with staying at this stage and just snapping photos of things that interest you.  However, if you are like me and see the potential for another world opening up, this is a really good sign that you are ready to move forward with things.  There is no time limit on this evolution, and you can decide after a few weeks of getting started, or a few years.

Once you have an idea what you like to photograph, you understand that composition matters, and you have started to learn from your failures, you are ready for that next step.  This is going to be one of the most important steps and one that you will likely return to over and over throughout the process. This is the stage where you look for feedback.  For most, this will be the hardest stage of the entire process because it involves opening yourself up and being very vulnerable.  When I talk about feedback, I am talking about honest and real feedback from someone who’s opinion you trust.  Reread that last sentence again.  When I was learning, I would show my photos to my mom, and she would without question love everything that I shot.  She was the type of mom that would go and buy a second refrigerator just so she could hang more of whatever art I did.  She meant well, and it is always nice to have that kind of support.  It was not the type of feedback that I needed to grow as a photographer though.  These days, we have YouInstaFaceChatX to share our photos and we can get likes and comments on those posts.  While you will get varied reactions and responses, this is never going to be honest feedback because you haven’t vetted the sources.  There is no telling what their motivation or background might be, which puts whatever they say into question.  You are also at the mercy of the algorithm, so you won’t be getting the same exposure for each example that you post.

When I talk about getting proper feedback, I am suggesting that you find somebody that knows at least more than you do about photography to look at your photos.  This person needs to be able to offer advice and suggestions on how to improve, or identify areas where you are already strong in.  When I am critiquing other’s work, I will talk about what I think works in the photo and things that don’t work nearly as well.  That isn’t a critique though unless both are followed up with reasons for the opinion and suggestions on ways to improve.  This is where proper feedback is different from what we might expect.  It is one thing to say that the composition looks great.  It is another to say that the composition works because you have a leading line that brings your eyes to this area in the frame while visual tension is shown through this element.  It is one thing to say that the composition isn’t pleasing.  It is another to say that the subject is centered in the frame with the edges clipped making it feel too crowded and haphazard.  It would have been a better composition if you had backed up and included a bit more of the surrounding to tell the story and allow the subject to breathe a bit.  You see how those examples show what proper feedback looks like?  In regard to the photo above, I’ve torn it apart many times in this feature, so I won’t go into any detail on it here.  However, at this stage, make sure that the feedback is concentrating on the subject and composition.  There is no need to get caught up on exposure, color, or other technical aspects.  Those will come into play later on.

If you don’t have someone in your life who knows more about photography than you do, find someone that understands art on a more in-depth level than you.  If you still can’t come up with anyone, look for a photographer that offers critiques or portfolio reviews.  This is a service offered by many photographers, including myself where we can offer constructive feedback on your photos.  This is supposed to be a positive experience, so keep that in mind as you listen to the feedback.  At this stage, there will be a lot of points to improve on and you will be hearing lots of suggestions to improve on the weaker aspects of your photos.  Take them to heart and learn from them, but don’t dwell on the negative aspects.  See it as a growth opportunity and if the feedback is done correctly, there will be suggestions on how to improve.  Make an effort to try those suggestions the next time you go out.  Also, pay attention to what works with your photos.  It might be something you did on purpose, it might have been a happy accident, but in either case, file that idea away to use again and again.  Repeat what works, improve on what doesn’t.  That is where the feedback comes into play.

Now that you are starting to have a handle on the basics of a photo, it is time to start learning about settings.  This is where you need to begin understanding the exposure triangle.  Remember when I said to get used to the exposure settings on the photos that you were shooting in auto?  This is where that is going to come into play.  You don’t need to have understood what those numbers meant, but it will be very helpful for you to recognize things like ISO320, 1/50, and f/5.6 at this stage.  Now is the time to learn what these numbers mean, and you have already seen how they change with different environments if you have been paying attention.

By getting used to what the camera chose, and after doing some reading, I had a pretty good understanding of the three exposure choices known as the exposure triangle.  I was able to think about it like the shutter speed was very much like the eyelid, while the aperture was like the size of the pupil in the eye, and the ISO was how fast the brain had to work to remember what had been seen.  At this stage, learning the settings isn’t terribly difficult, but by learning them, you will start to have a lot of control over how the photo is captured.  Remember, you have been in full auto at this point and the camera has been making all the decisions that affect things like depth of field, showing motion or not, and the amount of grain in the image.  These are all the creative choices that should be left to the photographer.

Once you have a handle on subject and composition, you are ready to start making your own choices on how the camera records the scene.  For this step, you will need a camera that allows you to control at least some of those settings with a Program mode, or Aperture/Shutter Priority mode.  If you want to get into full manual mode, now is a good time for that as well, and it is easier than most realize.  The main thing is, you want to be able select an ISO that allows you to work out a shutter speed or aperture choice on your own.  You will find that the quality of your images will improve greatly once you get out of full auto, and you will start to understand how the exposure settings affect the overall photo.  This can be the brightness of the image, how motion is represented, or how much of the frame is in focus, or blurred.  This is the truly creative aspect of photography and the part which allows you to present a scene in your own way.

Now that you have a good understanding of what you like to shoot, you have spent some time learning how to compose your photos, received proper feedback and progressed in your craft to the point that you are now getting proficient with your settings it is time to do what most photographers think is necessary at the beginning.  Yep, now is the time to start investing in gear.  Now this doesn’t mean that you need to go hog wild and mortgage the house.  I’m just talking about getting gear that will help make things better for you.  If you have been working with a basic point and shoot camera like I had been, it might be time to upgrade and get a DSLR or mirrorless camera body.  If you have been using one already, it might be time to think about a different lens choice.  You will know if you need a new lens if you are finding yourself constantly at one end of the zoom range or the other.  Maybe you are always wanting a wider angle, or more reach.  By this point, you will know what you are needing and what will make your life better behind the camera.

This stage is also a trap and is easy to get sucked into because you are probably watching a lot of videos and reading a lot of opinions that say to do such and such type of photography, you must have these five pieces of kit.  There are also all the “game changers” that can be bought which guarantee to make you a better photographer.  Most of the time, these claims are not valid.  Current camera bodies are all fantastic with the only main differences being the usability which is up to how your brain is wired.  The same goes with lenses.  Even kit lenses are better than what was used back in the heyday of film photography.

The best bit of advice that I can offer in regard to gear is make your gear purchase decisions based on what isn’t working for you and your photography.  Find something that does work for how you work.  It doesn’t have to be the latest and greatest out there, and it certainly doesn’t have to be the most expensive.  As you find areas where your kit is letting you down, consider the upgrade at that point.  Also, be honest with yourself as to whether or not you are using your gear at the fullest potential.  I promise that buying a new camera or lens will not improve your photography.  How you use what you have will determine how good your photography is.  The gear just makes it more efficient and will allow for more polished final images.

The final step of the process is to realize that there will always be learning opportunities, and you will never know it all.  This is truly the fun of photography because if you keep an open mind there is always going to be room for growth.  Even when you create photographs that exceed your expectations, there are always little things that can be learned to improve on them for the next time.  Remember that feedback stage from earlier?  Well, this step is still very relevant to your continued growth.  Keep those mentors around as they are also growing in their own knowledge which will allow them to continue to be beneficial in your own growth.  Look for new sources of feedback continuously and try to niche down with the types of feedback you are looking for.  You might decide that you need less feedback on the process of capturing the photograph, and more on the processing end.  There might be a certain style of photograph that you are wanting to capture but aren’t sure how to do it.  This is where finding another photographer that does that kind of photography might be beneficial.  The thing is, every photographer has knowledge that is unique to them.  By this point, you are included in that statement.  Communicating our ideas is what furthers the art of photography, and we end up making each other better at what we do in time.

Something else that is worth mentioning is, there are plenty of photographers out there that jump into the technical end of things and bypass the creative/compositional portion of things.  They learn how to create technically well executed photographs, but they fail to communicate the ideas that the photographer wanted to.  In these circumstances, you can look at this list of steps to get started in photography and see that you might have missed a step.  If you never just went around with a camera on auto and shot photos of things that excited you, as you learned how to communicate your vision in a two-dimensional world, it is never too late.  Just slow down with what you are doing, put the camera in Auto, or Aperture Priority if you must.  Shoot in jpeg only because we are not looking to do any post processing to the photos.  We just want to see the photo.  Leave the camera in auto ISO, auto focus, and auto white balance.  From here, just go around and photograph scenes that you enjoy.  Don’t try to make the photo perfect, just be reactionary to what you see.  Look at things like a child with a sense of wonderment.

The idea behind this is, you end up shelving that technical knowledge that you have gained, and you strip photography down to the fundamental task of capturing an image.  By not being weighed down by things like the exposure triangle, depth of field, where to focus, and things like that, you are left to really concentrate on the subject and where it resides in the frame.  In short order, you will start to find the compositions that work for you, and the “art” of photography will start to make as much sense as the skill of photography.

That is really it.  When you want to learn photography, this is the most direct path that you can take.  I don’t think I have mentioned it yet, but the more you shoot the better you will be, and the quicker you will arrive at the different milestones.  Don’t take the shortcuts because you are robbing yourself of the experience of learning which is what makes photography fun.  Ask questions, try things, experiment, fail, succeed, and learn.  Make photography your own, and let it become a visual voice for you.

I hope you have enjoyed this latest installment of Behind the Camera and that it has inspired you on your journey.  I’m here to help in any way that I can.  I invite you to check out my current workshops, look at the mentorship options, and just read through the blogs to learn tips and tricks.  There are tons of resources out there for new photographers, just watch out for the gate keepers that make it sound like it is overly difficult.  There are also no quick educations in photography, so be wary of those educational programs that promise to teach you everything in photography in seven days.  Learning 80% of photography is simple but won’t make you a photographer.  It is that last 20% which you learn through time and getting to know yourself that will make 80% of the difference in your photos.

Let’s get out there and make some photographs!