To control your photography, control your camera.

I see a lot of questions from beginning photographers about how to improve their photography skills. It’s a broad question with a lot of different answers. Today I decided to tackle a few of them. Most of these have been covered a million times, but they are important enough to make it a million and one.

The first rule is: To control your photography, you must control your camera. While that sounds kind of self explanatory, lets discuss it briefly. Controlling you camera means using it in such a way that it yields the results you expect. The idea is that when you see a photo opportunity, you can capture the image on your camera that you had in mind. Often people will take a photo and think to themselves it’s going to be a great photo, only to be disappointed when they view it on the back of the camera.

This disappointment usually occurs because the camera doesn’t yield the image you observed or your observation was faulty and the photo op wasn’t that good to begin with. Or, both things happened. Today we’ll address the first situation and next week I’ll address the second one.

A camera has 5 main control points. They are aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focus, and direction (where you point it). When all of these things work together, you can have a thing of beauty. When they don’t, you have a really bad photo.

First things first. In most instances, shoot with your camera on manual exposure. It will allow you (not the camera) to select aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. This give you control over image noise, depth of field, motion blur, and ton of other components of your image.

Camera set to manual exposure.

Focus. Most of us shoot with auto-focus. There’s a good reason for that, it’s considerably faster than trying to manual focus. A problem with auto-focus is that the camera decides what it wants to focus on. To gain control, change your camera’s auto-focus points to just the center one so that just whatever that little red dot is pointed at with be the focus point for that exposure. Most camera’s default is for the shutter release to be trigger for AF. You push it half way down and the camera focuses. In most new cameras, that is programable and can be changed to other buttons on the back of the camera. Pick a button that you can access with your thumb and do that.

The * button is being used for activate the autofocus on my Canon 5D Mark III.

While it sounds counter intuitive, using a different button for focus gives you a lot of control. For instance, you can pick an object to focus on using the alternate focus button, then compose the image and then take the photo. Then you can shoot more photos varying the composition without having to refocus every time. More control. It will seem weird at first, especially if you are really used to the half press shutter to activate your AF, but you will quickly get used to it and prefer it.

The last control is direction. This is where you point your camera. I won’t getting into a discuss of composition here, it is really a topic of it’s own. However, realize that, since you now have control over all the aspects of your camera’s performance, point it in a direction that makes for the best photos.

Thanks for reading!

-Ken.