A picture is worth a thousand words. A picture you have to edit in multiple places is a pain in the arse. Today we’ll discuss what to consider before you actually press the shutter button. This subject takes a while to really understand and requires experience so be patient with this one.
As a photographer you move around taking all types of pictures. If you happen to photograph an event, people smile at you with excitement and suggest, “hey over here”. The excitement is driven from you being a professional. No pressure of course.
That’s all great and dandy, but as a photographer after taking an image, you sort of want to be done with it as much as humanly possible. In other words, you don’t want to have to do additional work after transferring it to your computer.
In order to do reduce the additional work, you must process as much as possible prior to pressing the shutter button. Do you want to do additional work up front to make the back end a breeze? Or just go with the flow when the back end could be a nightmare? I’ll go with the former.
The first thing we’ll cover is the perspective of the image. The perspective matters for everything because it dictates other things that you also don’t want to have to do in post processing. The perspective, the way you move left, right, up, down, forward, backward, and tilt to capture the subject matters a lot. You don’t want any distractions because you don’t want to have to crop them out later. You can actually remove a distraction by angling your camera in 3 planes that can still capture your subject but can also simultaneously not capture the distraction. Just give it a shot and maneuver your camera or feet by practicing on a subject with a known distraction in the frame. Think 3 dimensions and use all of them 🙂
Also, with the distractions, you might be above your subject. If you’re above your subject then you dominate the subject. After all, you are above/hovering over it. This means the subject has to look up towards the camera lens if they want to face you. And that might be the goal of your image. If you are just doing event photos, then being level or slightly above your subject is probably good enough.
Sometimes though you actually want to evict emotion or a feeling so you may want to get below them. If you’re below your subject, that means they must look at a downward angle towards the lens, which puts them in a superior position. When someone views the image, the same thing will be communicated that the subject is more powerful than they might be otherwise. So based on what you visualize with the photograph, you’ll want to make those adjustments prior to pressing the shutter button.
In addition to perspective, you’ll also want to have all of your settings set for the idea of your photograph.
So let’s assume we’re in aperture priority mode, then we must decide whether we want to have blur in front of and behind our subject or whether we want it to be fairly sharp throughout the image. As a recap, if you want the image fairly sharp throughout, you set a small aperture opening (or large aperture number); on the other hand, if you prefer sharp focus on the subject and blur on the background, you’ll set for a huge aperture opening that let’s in a lot of light, but based on where you focus, behind and in front of the subject will have blur. So you’ll want to have that already in mind prior to pressing the shutter button.
Another note on the aperture, just because you have a 1.4 lens that is capable of taking phenomenal images at night time, doesn’t mean you need to use 1.4 opening for your image. The 1.4 has a large opening and creates awesome images but you need to know what your concept is. For example, if you have some shoes that are not too far off from the subject but you want the viewer to know they are shoes, using a 1.4 may not necessarily achieve that since you might not be able to tell they are shoes through the blur. You may need to increase a couple stops to say 2.2/2.5 so that the photograph can actually come to your vision and doesn’t throw the image off. Another easy scenario where this may occur is a group image. Let’s assume you are taking single shots and getting amazing blur on your subjects. Then all of a sudden a group of people get together and say “take our picture”. At precisely that moment, you should probably be stepping up your aperture a few stops so that most of the group appear sharp and not just the individual you focus on.
These are all things you’ll want to consider in aperture priority mode. Additionally, if it’s approaching night time in aperture priority mode, you can easily forget to switch to shutter priority mode. Because what happens at nighttime? Things get dark and shutter speed decreases to let in more light, which means if you have a descent aperture your shutter speed might decrease quite a bit in a matter of minutes and before you know it you’re at 1/10 shutter speed which is not a great holding the camera shutter speed and all of your pictures are blurry. You can’t necessarily tell in the viewfinder but once you go and see the actual images on your computer, you’ll realize you’ve missed all kinds of shots.
So you want to keep in mind what’s happening, obviously if you have a studio none of those things will impact you, but as the time is moving and the light conditions are changing you want to be making adjustments to the aperture and shutter priority to ensure all of your images are looking good and you can do little editing after the fact.
So I highly recommend having a good overall knowledge base of how photography and your camera works. Once you’ve acquired a good working knowledge base of that, then you want to do in real time all the things you might have to do while editing. For example in editing you might say we need to focus the subject and blur out the background in this image. If you’re thinking of all those things already you can get a great image in real time by decreasing your aperture so that you only have to auto contrast to take out the gray afterwards and you’re good to go. That’s how it should be. You don’t want to be editing forever as that adds many more hours to your time and work. When I was much younger in my journey I used to do things like that where I’d spend so much time after the fact on my images that eventually I felt significantly underpaid.
Always keep in mind your aperture as the lighting conditions change. You also want to keep in mind your ISO setting if it gets dark at night time, your ISO will be important to raise it up a few stops and keep the images sharp.
Settings to consider so far
- Aperture
- Shutter Speed
- ISO
- White Balance
- Picture Style
On a sunny day, shade may come at any time then it can get sunny again because of a moving cloud. So for my camera that setting is pretty easy to change because if it goes from sunny to shade, then I’m not going to run 100 feet to find the sun. So if I’m taking a picture, I’m probably going to have to change the white balance to shade then back to daylight as conditions change. It’s also better to have the correct white balance vs auto white balance. Auto white balance is also good and has its uses but if you know what the white balance is, it’s better to choose it. We all know, auto is for beginners 🙂
Finally, one last thing is picture style, which has auto, standard, neutral and landscape settings amongst others. So I usually shoot neutral or faithful, however, if someone will view the image right after I take it, I’ll switch to standard etc, since those images are usually more impressive with more pop etc. I shoot neutral so I can edit the image how I want to and fill it in etc. Of course it is very simple editing like one button click.
Your white balance, aperture, shutter, those are all things you want to keep in mind. How you compose the image, are you above the subject, same level as subject, below the subject. What are you trying to communicate. What blurs what doesn’t blur. Also with the shutter speed, let’s make sure as it becomes later in the day, you want to switch to shutter priority mode. Also with shutter, do you want a fast or slow shutter speed. You can only use a slow shutter speed when you don’t have a ton of light since too much light will white out the image. You may also want a slow shutter speed for creative reasons, however, to communicate movement. Car panning, bulb mode images and the likes are in this category.
If this is overwhelming, then I hope you take more time to learn photography basics and your camera basics. Also, note what was said earlier. Do you want to do the work up front, get a great image in camera and do little work later, or get a mediocre image in camera and do much more work after? I choose the former. To be able to do the former, it takes much more work both through your brain and making actual adjustments, but then the results are always great and if anyone is around, they are usually impressed by your photo taking skills. I find this to be priceless. And the more you’re able to adjust and say to yourself, yes these are the settings I want, the better pictures you’ll be able to take.
Composing pictures will take practice and some cell phone cameras have BEST shot guidance. This feature can greatly improve how you compose an image and get rid of distractions by just moving the perspective of the camera. Look to use a majority of the frame and take an interesting picture. Once you learn these skills, you’ll get much better results in your camera live and when you move to your computer to edit, it will be very simple and everything will be happy and good. Hopefully this was helpful. Please comment below or give a thumbs up if so.
