Four Tips for Better Photography

This article is dedicated to the late Terry Murphy who ran the Kommune studio in Melbourne and who I was lucky enough to be taught by when I signed up for a CAE photography course very early in my photography journey. These four tips were all things I learnt on that CAE course with Terry, and all of them have helped me a lot.

Most modern cameras offer a plethora of ways to customise the operation of your camera to suit your photography. You can usually customise the functions of the buttons and dials of your camera to better suit your needs, or to make certain functions more accessible. You can also turn off certain functions if you want to.

Some examples that I have used to setup my camera are;
-    Back Button Focus (as described in last month’s article)
-    Configuring the joystick to move the focus point without requiring the press of another button first (which is the default behaviour)
-    Turning off the touch screen “touch to focus” and “touch to shoot” features (I am a viewfinder shooter and found I was accidentally touching the screen to set these off)
-    Turning on the histogram view in viewfinder

Read your camera’s manual or watch YouTube videos to learn how to best set up your camera. Watch multiple YouTube videos from different photographers to get different ideas.

Practice using your camera enough that you can perform all the basic functions without taking your eye away from the viewfinder (eg changing shutter speed, changing aperture, changing ISO, moving the focus point, focusing the camera, changing exposure compensation settings etc).

This is all about “muscle memory” – actually sitting down at home just practicing with your camera and changing all the common settings enough so that you can do it “blindfolded” (those were Terry’s words). He made us try this in the course session and set homework of “ten minutes practice every day” between sessions. 

Being able to quickly change settings without looking at the camera controls or back screen will mean you will miss far less shots.

How many times have you gone to take your first few photos of a session and missed the shot because some camera setting is set incorrectly. 

Performing a “Start of Session Check” will stop this happening. Basically it means simply having a list of things to check on the back of your camera as soon as you take your camera out of the boot of the car, or out of your camera bag, before you start shooting.

If you practise many different types of photography, you might need a “Start of Session Checklist” for each, as the settings will likely be quite different. For example I do a lot of bird/wildlife photography, and I also do a lot of street art photography (usually with tripod). These two genres are completely different, my “Start of Session Checklists” might look like this.

Setting                                   Birds/Wildlife              Street Art
Mode                                     Manual                        Aperture Priority
Aperture                                f/5.6                            f/8
Shutter Speed                       1/1000 sec                  N/A
ISO                                         Auto                            100
Image Stabilisation               On                               Off (shooting on tripod)
Exposure Compensation    -2/3                               0
Exposure Bracketing            Off                               -2, -1, 0, 1, 2
Shooting mode                     High-speed burst    2-second delay (shooting on tripod)

You may need written lists for a little while, but if you get into the habit of doing this you will quickly just be able to make the appropriate settings changes depending on the type of session you are about to start.

Obviously these settings are just a good starting point for your session, you will change them frequently during your session.

The most important thing here is to just get into the habit of checking through the various important settings before you begin shooting.

A related tip for those that have cameras that allow it, is to utilise the Custom Settings modes where you can save away different camera “configurations” that you can then easily recall whenever you want them.

This is a compositional tip and is one that can really improve your photos. 

As you are looking through the viewfinder to compose your image, run your eye completely around the edges of your frame. This is a “border patrol”.

You are looking for things that are included in your frame that are not important to your image (or are distracting) or looking for things that are “chopped off” by the edge of the frame. Recompose (or zoom in/out) to exclude unwanted items, or to include fully required elements that were “chopped off”.

Another good time for a border patrol is when you are post-processing your images, here though you are usually just looking for unwanted items or distractions that can be easily removed in post-processing.

I hope you find these ideas useful in improving your photography.