Composition is
how elements of design
relate in photos
Elements like shape,
proportion, and color make
eye-catching pictures
Move your subject
from the center of photos
sayeth rule of thirds
Try filling the frame
with your subject to make it
more interesting
Use lines to direct
viewer’s eyes through the image.
They will need your help.
Exposure is the amount of light that the image sensor collects to create a picture. If the exposure is too low, the picture will be too dark. Too high and the image will be too bright.
Exposure is a combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. If you choose your settings manually, you can change the exposure by changing any of these settings.
I believe all digital cameras are able to choose the exposure for you and will usually do a great job at it. But in some specific instances, the exposure will be incorrect and the image will not look like it does in real life. Some of these instances are when you’re photographing a lot of snow, a sunny day at the beach, or in a studio. Those are times when you’ll have to change the exposure manually either in the camera or afterwards in photoshop, gimp, lightroom, or some other photo editing program.
Most digital cameras (camera phones and point and shoot cameras included) have an option to simply increase or decrease the exposure itself. Play around with it and see what effects it has on your photography.
You’ll hear a lot of that once people start seeing that you’re pretty at this photography thing and they want you to take a few pictures at their events. The only problem is they don’t want to pay and you kinda want to get paid.
This was the biggest source of negative energy in my life for a while. Once I got past it, I ended up learning a lesson from it.
While people were telling me I was doing it for exposure, I was really practicing and gaining experience in something that I wasn’t that great at.
After weeks, months, maybe years of practice, you’ll get to the point where people won’t even think of asking you to do what you do for free.
So when someone is asking you to do your work for exposure, they’re really giving you the option to gain more experience and you can choose whether you’d like to or not. It’s really one of the greatest gifts someone can offer you while you’re building your skills.
Do it for exposure if it’s something you’d like to practice with. Don’t base your career on magical exposure.
ISO in digital photography is a measure of the sensitivity of the image sensor. ISO is measures in numbers like 100, 200, 400, 800, 1000, 1600 and higher. The higher the ISO number, the higher the sensitivity to light and more noise or static will appear in your image.
Higher sensitivity to light will allow you to use a faster shutter speed in darker conditions like indoors and at night. If your shutter speed was slower, your subject may be blurry or the image itself may be blurry from your shaky hands.
Outdoors on a sunny day, I typically set my ISO to 200 or 400. When I was taking pictures indoors at concerts and open mics without a tripod, I would usually have the ISO set to 800 or higher so that the shutter speed could be faster and I could get a picture of the performer that wasn’t blurry.
Here are examples of pictures with ISO the set at 200 and 3200. Click the pictures to see them bigger.
Clouds ISO 200
Clouds ISO 3200
Don’t be afraid to use a higher ISO (800 or so) with your digital camera. It’s often difficult to notice a difference unless the image is cropped a lot or it gets printed really large. Check out this post at the Digital Photography School website which explains how to choose the right ISO for your digital photography.
Bricks ISO 200
Bricks ISO 3200
Bricks Cropped ISO 200
Bricks Cropped ISO 3200
If you have any images with a high ISO that look wonderful, share a link in the comments!
I want to start by explaining what I believe a goal is. A goal is really just an idea. A decision that you make for something that you want to exist and that you will put some type of effort towards bringing it from inside your head to the physical world.
For a long time, my goal in photography was to take my camera everywhere I went. Then I added more goals such as taking at least one picture daily and making money from photography.
I reached all of those goals and more. I believe it was simply by having the idea in my head of what I wanted to accomplish.
Photography goals can also be specific. An example of a specific photography goal is doing one photowalk a month. Another may be to create a physical or digital photobook of an event or experience. In my case, I could make a photobook using the pictures I took of the spoken word scene during my time in Las Vegas.
If you’ve ever had or currently have a goal that is related to photography in some way, let me know in the comments and maybe we can find a way to work together and reach all of our goals together. 
