If you’ve just bought your first camera and want to get started taking decent looking photos quickly, the first thing you need to do is improve your composition.

Almost all modern cameras use very sophisticated metering techniques, so in 99% of situations you can rely on the camera to do the exposure correctly, so the part of photography you need to concentrate on first is composition. So, my advice is:

Keep it R.E.A.L.

Use the mnemonic R.E.A.L. to remember four of the more important composition techniques.

Rule of Thirds
Entire Frame
Angles
Leading Lines

1. Rule of Thirds

To use the Rule of Thirds for composition you have to imagine, superimposed over your frame, a noughts and crosses board:

Place the most important bits, the things you want people to see in your picture, where the lines of the grid meet or use the horizontal lines to place your horizons in landscape shots — never put your horizons in the center of the frame, always use the rule of thirds!:

For example:

2. Entire Frame

When taking pictures of people and animals, never put heads in the centre. This leaves a lot of empty, “negative” space and makes the picture look cluttered instead of showing an actual study of the subject:
Better:

Really Bad:

3. Angles

When you’re confident using the Rule-of-Thirds grid, try adding new angles. Strong diagonals lines, or bold geometrics create drama and tension.

4. Leading Lines

Strong lines that start at the foreground or from behind the photographer and keep going deep into the frame are known as Leading Lines. These lines quickly draw the viewer’s gaze straight to the heart of the photo or to interesting elements you want to emphasise.

Memorise and start to practice Keeping it R.E.A.L.– the basics of composition — and I guarantee you will quickly develop photography skills and take photos that will impress your viewers. It takes time, patience and practice, but that’s exactly why we love photography — to learn new skills and stretch our creativity.

© Text and All Photos Copyright Lisa Singh

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A while back, for no particular reason, I decided I wanted to expose photographs using exposure value or Ev. Exposure value works like the Sunny 16 Rule - a table of different aperture and shutter speed combinations for different situations.

To help me learn I put together a spreadsheet of the shutter speed and aperture combinations and a clear explanation of the actual exposure values for common lighting situations.

Here’s an HTML version of the table.

How It Works

It looks and sounds a bit daunting at a first, but actually works better than a camera’s meter. Modern meters measure light very accurately, generally much better than our eyes. But meters still mostly guess what sort of subject you want to shoot. I say mostly guess, because many cameras now have face detection software, and will meter accordingly.

Since cameras only concern themselves with light, scenes with both distinct highlights and shadows can easily fool meters, even the sophisticated multi-segmented averaging calculations of modern cameras. Dark nights with bright lights, for example, still pose great difficulty.

When we use things like Ev or the Sunny 16 rule, we employ far greater processing power than any camera - human judgement.

Looking at the bottom Ev table, we see a list of scene lighting conditions, ranging from dimmest at the top and brightest at the bottom.

1. Pick one (that best matches your shot obviously).
2. Note the number in the same row at the far left of the table.
3. Find the diagonal row in which the number, or Ev, repeats.
4. Pick one and note the shutter speed and aperture on the column and row headings.
5. If you need to stop action - that is, increase the shutter speed, move further down the diagonal row and note the aperture / shutter speed combination.
6. If you need to increase the depth of field — that is, increase the aperture, move to an Ev futher up the diagonal row and note the new aperture / shutter speed combination.
7. Set your camera’s metering mode to manual and use the aperture / shutter speed combination you selected.
8. To bracket exposure, select higher and lower shutter speeds or increase and decrease apertures; do not change both.

A couple of days ago, while out for a wander with my Sony Alpha 200 and my dog Riz Inevitably, I ended up looking at the Christmas lights and wondered if I could work out a decent manual exposure.

A while back I printed out a copy of my Ev tables and put it in my camera bag, then never really used it. I knew camera meters don’t cope well with Christmas lights and thought I’d give Ev metering a go.

I looked at the bottom table and decided exposure value 4 would work for most houses with Christmas lights, give or take a stop, and manually set my camera’s aperture to f5.6 and the shutter speed to 1 second. I bracketed one stop on either side by changing the shutter speed to 0.5 seconds and 2 seconds. The 1 second at f5.6 exposure was spot on!

Full-sized version of the above.

I thought that worked pretty well. I left the camera set on manual in hopes I can get into a habit of relying mainly on manual exposure. It might take me a while to memorise the majority of exposure values and corresponding lighting situations, but definitely worth the effort, if only for scenes that normally fool camera meters.