So you want to know how to take better photos? Well one way you can do
that is by looking at and learning from the photos you've already taken.
Doing this can turn your photos from this....into....this
Don't go away
So if you're just starting out with DSLR photography you're
probably using your camera on auto mode - would I be right? Yeah, right because manual
mode is that dark scary corner and you don't want to go in there. But it really
shouldn't be, with manual mode you can get so much more creative control over
the look of your image. Because your camera doesn't know the shot that you're
seeing in your head. Your camera is never, ever going to take the shot as you see
it, through the viewfinder, on auto mode - it's just not going to do that. But auto
mode gives us a good starting point or a blueprint for the settings that we need
for correct exposure, so we can learn from that. So let's jump onto the
computer and we'll have a look at ways we can study our camera settings and
start to learn from using that auto mode.
okay so first up if you don't have Lightroom or Photoshop
or any of these fancy editing programs, you can still do
this. What you do is just go to your File Explorer on your computer here, find the
hard drive that all your photos are on. I'll choose this one here. Then what you
do is choose a folder, you grab a photo that you want to look at, right click on
it. Go all the way down to the bottom there to Properties, click that, click
your Details tab and scroll down and you'll see here, down here in the Camera
section, are all the details about your camera settings. So you can see this
photo here was taken at an aperture of F 5.6, exposure time of 1/60th of a
second, and ISO of 200. I had the exposure compensation up 0.7
there. I had, I was at a focal length of 55 mils. So that tells you a lot of stuff
And it tells you that I was using flash there as well. So that's how you do that
using your file explorer. So in lightroom, it's super simple you just go
to your library double-click the photo that you want, and if your settings are
not displayed up here, just hit the I key on your keyboard,
that'll cycle through the information that's displayed up there. And you can see
that this particular shot here was taken at 1/200th of a second, f6.3, ISO
640, at 200 mil, with my 55 to 200 mil lens. So that is how you find your settings...
So now let's have a look at a couple of examples using photographs of
mine, and I'll show you the signs or the footprints that your photos are leaving
that you can use to learn to get better. So I'll start by having a look at this
series of photos here that I've taken of my dog running around outside. Now the
best of these photos for me is this one right here because if i zoom in to 1:1,
you can see that his eyes are sharp, he's heading straight towards me,
none of him is blurry, there's no motion blur there. So that tells me that my
shutter speed is correct 1/320th of a second
is a...is a decent enough shutter speed to get pets...to freeze motion on
your pets when they're running around. Of course, the higher the shutter speed
the better really when you're photographing animals like that anyway.
My f-stop was 5.3, so my aperture is at 5.3, which
means the whole image itself is going to be quite soft.
The wider your aperture is, the softer your image will be, so if you want more
sharpness you could stop that down to 6.3, 7.1, whatever
you want there but I think five three is good for it here. Cause I can see from my
histogram that the photo is exposed well, I'm not touching on the right hand side,
I'm not touching on the left hand side, it's perfectly exposed. And my ISO was
800 so it is going to be a bit of a grainy image and you can see some noise
here in the bark on the log there and in the log there but it's fine because I've
got the exposure that I needed. Now if you have a look at the other photos here
like this one here you can see his eyes are not focused there, he's moved. But his
ears and the hair on his back is in focus, so obviously...because we know from
the last shot that my shutter speed was enough to freeze his motion, obviously
what's happened here is he's just moved too close to me too quickly for the
camera to be able to focus on him, so that's not a fault of our settings, it's a fault
of the focal abilities of the camera. So... and the same thing has happened here in
the next shot he's just far too close and he's blur...he's can completely
blurred out - his head and his ears and everything there. But you can see his
tail is in focus, so that's all that's happened there. But if you find that y'know
you're photographing a pet for example, or any moving object, and you're
getting motion blur - obviously your shutter speed is going to be the first
problem. You need a faster shutter speed in order to freeze the motion.
Now if the subject of your photo is stationary and you've still got a blurry image, that
might mean that you've got a bit of camera shake, you've been a bit jittery
while you're taking the photo, so maybe use a tripod, or just up your shutter speed.
I'm going to use this photo here as an example of depth of field which
relates to your aperture setting here. So you can see this photo here I've taken
at f/10. Now...and the background is not, it's blurry, but it's not probably super-
blurry because I'm trying to obviously draw your attention to these nice
droplets of water on the blade of grass here. But this background for me is far
too in focus, it takes your eye away from this area here. So what you need to do in
that case is stop down to a lower number with your aperture, so down to f/5.6,
f6.3, down around that area there, or even less, to get a better blur
in your background. And also use your old photos as learning curves for your
composition of your photograph. Let's have another look at another photo and
I'll show you what I mean. Okay, so with this shot here what I've obviously tried
to do is take a photo of this awesome moss that fascinates me. Now...
unfortunately what's happened is I haven't really paid attention to these
blades of grass in the foreground and they've completely ruined the shot. So what
I could have done there is just moved the camera around to the right a little
bit more so that those blades of grass went out of shot, and had a clear view of
the moss itself. So look for things like that when you're taking photos, look at
your foreground and the background behind your subject and see what looks
good. Look at it from all angles. Get down low, get up high, get to the right, to the
left, around the back, up...down underneath it whatever you have to do to look for
the best framing of your shot. Now another thing you'll notice with this
shot also is that it's probably a little bit underexposed because the histogram
is all pushed over to the left-hand side. It's not completely underexposed but it
probably could be a little bit more towards the middle. And you can see that
I've taken this at f/10 as well and...so making...this photograph would be much
better if I had of a) moved around to the right to get these blades of grass out
of the way. Or pulled them out and got them completely out of the way!
And I could have also used a larger aperture to blur this background a
little bit more and that would have upped my exposure as well. I could have
also raised my ISO to get a better exposure but because the background is
not blurry enough, I would have probably adjusted my aperture in that case.
So there you go, there's just one way that you can up
your photo game and start to take better pictures. So learn from your old
photographs, study them, and the next time you go out try to improve on what you
did the day before or the week before. Don't just keep clicking away wildly and
filling up your hard drives with blurry, underexposed photos. Have a look at your
old ones, learn from them, and next time you go out shooting actively try to
improve upon what you did last time. Trust me, it will have you taking better
photos in no time and it will put a smile on your dial. So if you enjoyed
this video please give it a like. If you have any questions about anything I've
said or done in the video, or you just want to say hi, there's a comment section
down below for that so get typing. Hit that subscribe button up on the left
hand side if you want to get more videos from me
I'm Barry Callister for Barry Callister Photography. Get out there, take some
wicked shots and I'll see you soon.