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The Digital Photography Technique and Skills Hub
With digital photography techniques becoming more desired, I decided to create this page as a kind of hub for a variety of these. You will find more links on this page as time goes on, 'one-off' techniques that you can add to your repertoire. These are not the same as the thorough photography lessons you will find in the tutorials section. Those are based on a particular subject matter of photography (such as wildlife, sports and so on), or the smaller digital photography tips you will find scattered throughout the blog. These digital photography techniques and tips, will be focused on a specific technique that can be applied to almost any area of digital photography; this, as you will see, will bring a whole new angle and energy to your dslr digital photography shots. Make sure you thoroughly understand
Digital Photography Basics
first. “What can Digital Photography Techniques do for me that the tutorials here can't?”
What exactly is a 'story'? Well, it's a rather abstract way of saying the photograph seems to have some kind of extra element to it that the majority of other images do not. This is still a rather abstract way of saying it gives you a certain mood, feeling or even plainly alludes to something in the picture. Take a look at the following as an example...  So from this 'soft-focus' technique picture you may get something like: You get the picture. Some one else, on the other hand, may read something totally different into it. This is what I mean by 'telling a story with a technique'. Tell Me a Story
Does it sound interesting? No right? It's a shot you've seen a million times before, it says nothing really. Now, give grandma a burger to hold up and the shot has just got about 20% better, not much better, but still a bit better. Now we will think that grandma, or the photographer, is trying to tell us something about grandma and the burger... perhaps she made the burger? Maybe she likes burgers? Or depending on the look on her face, maybe it was a bad burger.... Who knows, but the point is we begin to think about it and question it in some way. There's something there. Digital Photography Techniques – Grandma Vs. Burger Story
Now if we use this with grandma and her burger, and we take the same shot of grandma yet this time as she is bringing the burger upwards in her hand we take the shot on a shutter speed of 1/30 or less. Now we can see a blur of grandmas' arm and burger, yet the rest of her, interestingly, may be sharply in focus. The shot just became perhaps an extra 30-40% more interesting, adding to that our previous 20% burger addition interest, and we have gone from a 0% interest shot, to an average of 55%. Of course this is quite a subjective number, but this framework serves a purpose. Thinking of the shot of grandma and the burger, one person may think 'that's a super-buger that is!', another person may get the impression that grandma can eat like, really fast! Still another person may have a totally different view. But the main point is we 'think' and 'feel' about the image. We have become engaged in it, due to the technique. Now we are in the area of 'art', a form of 'subjective art', to be precise. Using Digital Photography Techniques
If you are a beginner I highly recommend you read the basics first and then take one of my tutorials before using any of the digital photography techniques below. If you are not a beginner, then use some of the techniques linked to from this page that add that extra dimension you are looking for, and try to apply them to the different digital photography areas where applicable. |
