Master Your Camera Controls

Short Visualisation Exercise You are driving along in the country and through the windscreen of your car you see some dramatic clouds ahead over the mountains. Now what I want you to do is close your eyes for a moment and visualise this scene…. OK, so you pull over, pull out your camera and record what you see in front of you, dramatic clouds over the mountains. If you are like most amateurs, your camera is on auto settings and the camera has full control over this scene. Now let's do this scenario again but this time, I am driving in the country, and just ahead of me I see some dramatic clouds above the mountains. So, I pull over, grab my camera bag and before I do anything else I look back at the "cloudscape" above the mountains. Did you notice I have already given this scene a name! Now the very first thing I will do is ask myself what do I want to capture here? Is it the cloudscape itself? Is that the dramatic cloudscape ominously towering over the mountains? Or is it a picture of the mountains with a little bit of cloud creeping into the frame. What do you want to communicate? Now can you see that what I'm doing is already asking myself what do we want to capture here? Quickly I decide it's the drama, and the size of the clouds majestically hovering over the mountains that I find sensational. That is the story I want to communicate to my viewer. Now my viewer could be my family, friends, my clients or my Instagram followers. So I grab my camera, take off the standard lens and choose my wide angle lens. I always shoot with my camera on manual so that I have control over the picture taking. So I decide I want incredible depth, and so I stop down to f16, increase my ISO to 800, slow the shutter down to get the correct exposure and get ready to take a test capture. Being creative, I choose to underexpose this scene by half a stop so that I can grab the rich colours of greys and reds of the cloudscape. I take the test capture, and the image is slightly overexposed after checking the LCD on the back of the camera, so I stop it down three-quarters of a stop. I take another test shot, check again and, yep perfect. Now that the science side of this capture is handled, the second part of this image making, is how am I going to compose this image to convey my message or story to my viewer? Because, I'm looking for drama and motion and so, I choose to take the picture vertical with three-quarters of the frame filled by the cloudscape and one-quarter of mountains. Click, click. Understand your camera equipment. Okay did I lose you? If you’re like most amateurs, and you said yes that’s perfectly alright, and I expected this to happen. Don't worry, it won’t take you long to understand what I’ve made “in camera” exactly and more importantly, how I created this image. We will fast track you. That short journey I took you on just now is the exact way I take pictures and create images that are impactful, stunning and sellable. So in a nutshell, a great photographer is fully integrated and has a full understanding of their camera equipment; firstly, camera controls, then asks themselves “What do I want to say with this image?” They can see “photographically” and then can convey their story or message through clever use of light and strong composition. Once you complete this book on mastering the camera controls, you will be well on your way to being in the top 10% of amateur photographers around the world. Know your tools of trade so they will serve you well.