Definition of Photography
What it means to capture something wonderful that says it is yours
I have been waiting long enough to write about photography and what this means to me. This article is more of my mindset about what I think of photography. I am a kind of my own when it comes to photography and principles of it. Whenever I capture something, I do it with my intuition and perfection. My photography is about storing memories of nature and activities of it. I would like to discuss ways we can make our photography skills better even we never touched a camera before.
I have seen three types of people, Who give poses to be captured, Who hates photography and the people who love photography. If you hate photography, please read this article completely. Why it is important to make your life better? What makes photography so special? Why most of the travelers are great photographers?
Here are several purposes to learn photography and to do it in the right way. In this list, we will discuss purpose, ways, concept and getting started in photography.
Photography is the best companion:
Have you ever wondered or went for a solo trip? Did you ever try to discover the advantages of going solo? Take it from my personal experience, I have a friend who travels a lot and he goes for a solo trip without any plans. He just loves to explore the world and see the beauty of it. He is a fantastic photographer and he loves to travel solo instead of traveling with friends or companions. Wherever he went to this date, he has friends all over the place. How did he get so many friends? I use to wonder about it for a long time. A few days back, I found out the answer after listening to other traveler stories.
Each one of them prefers to enjoy the loneliness and meet people on the go and capture the memories which feel new to them. It may be of a different culture, color, memories, experiences, places, and discoveries. Everything they capture in their camera is authentic and the effort they put on taking those pictures is quite inexpressible. The beauty of photography is that it helps you to freeze time and remember the moment you spent whenever you see the photo.
Capturing memories, different lifestyles may be one cause for us to take photos. Photography is more than just those moments. It is a part of our life where a dead person comes alive, we get to a place we visited 10 years back in a flash, we relive our best moments as well as important moments of life through a photograph. Alfred Stieglitz says about photography,
“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
He got that perfectly and we see the reality in every moment we capture. We must capture the photos to experience that perfect satisfaction instead of looking at the photos that others captured. You don’t need bigger cameras to capture adorableness. Just focus on the important memory and click the trigger. When your mind is clear and you got perfect creativity, your photo looks awesome.
According to Ansel Adams, he sees photography as an expression. When we fail to express the beauty in words, we do it in photography. It is like an artist painting the beauty he imagined in his mind. Ansel says, “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
What are the ways of photography?
I am going to give some technical advice here, there are many ways to capture a photo that starts from your smartphone to a higher range of DSLRs. Getting the best results is completely depends on how you shoot images in the given device. It doesn’t matter which location you are in. Initially, consider yourself that you are in the best possible location to take the photo. The location factor comes when you master creativity and start you see the moment in your way.
If you even need to take a print out of the image and store it in your album, 2MP resolution is more than enough to have a good photo. You can capture portrait images of a person or Landscapes that determine the place and location you are in. For beginners in photography, the main thing you need to concentrate on is, what you are capturing. Keep clicking photos and don’t hesitate about how it might look like. All you need id the photo to remember and a face to see in the next coming years whenever you open the photo.
Quality of Image or enhancing the moment via photography is the next step. Of course, the possibilities of capturing the beauty of an object or a person is infinite. The first step is to make sure that you capture something to remember on. As you go on, you can improve yourself.
How to capture the perfect moment?
After the first step, your mind starts to observe the things to be captured by ignoring those which matter less. As you start to do something about photography, your right side of the brain starts working in its way. It starts to tell us to capture beautiful objects or moments as we encounter. Being creative helps to unlock our minds in a whole new direction. This helps us to witness our life in an aspect that it can be expressed by capturing in a photograph.
Capturing moment which is perfect starts there. Ir doesn’t matter with the device you own. The only thing your mind sees is the smile that is present in the situation. Automatically you start to take photos of those moments. A person beside you who has the flagship DSLR camera without his creativity is like a piece of shit. The camera gets the value to it only when you have your style of capturing the picture. Faking or Imitating in photography is never a good idea and also it just slows down your learning. Always remember to be creative to capture perfect pictures of the perfect moment.
The perfect picture is that, which you look at it every time and you see you, your camera and the place as a dream and makes you say it to yourself, “Yeah! This is my picture and captured by me.” It makes you proud every time and throws you to that perfect commemoration.
“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” — Aaron Siskind
Concept of Photography
There are 3 concepts of photography that I want to talk about here.
- Optics (Science of Photography)
- History of Photography
- Modes in Camera
Optics
Digital cameras look very much like ordinary film cameras but they work in a completely different way. When you press the button to take a photograph with a digital camera, an aperture opens at the front of the camera and light streams in through the lens. So far, it’s just the same as a film camera. From this point on, however, everything is different. There is no film on a digital camera. Instead, there is a piece of electronic equipment that captures the incoming light rays and turns them into electrical signals. This light detector is one of two types, either a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a CMOS image sensor.
If you’ve ever looked at a television screen close up, you will have noticed that the picture is made up of millions of tiny colored dots or squares called pixels. Laptop LCD computer screens also make up their images using pixels, although they are often much too small to see. In a television or computer screen, electronic equipment switches all these colored pixels on and off very quickly. Light from the screen travels out to your eyes and your brain is fooled in to see a large, moving picture.
In a digital camera, exactly the opposite happens. Light from the thing you are photographing zooms into the camera lens. This incoming “picture” hits the image sensor chip, which breaks it up into millions of pixels. The sensor measures the color and brightness of each pixel and stores it as a number. Your digital photograph is effectively an enormously long string of numbers describing the exact details of each pixel it contains.
History of Photography
The basic concept of photography is around 5th century BC but it was made true by an Iraqi scientist who invented first-ever the camera in 11 century. The device named Camera Obscura. The camera concept what we have known at this time is around 200 years old. Photography, as we know it today, began in the late 1830s in France. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable camera obscura to expose a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly.
Photography was only for professionals and the very rich until George Eastman started a company called Kodak in the 1880s.
Modes in Camera
There are 2 primary modes in a camera, Automatic and Manual. Apart from both, it has several different modes like Aperture, Shutter, Effects, Panorama, etc.
Automatic Mode
This is the mode for beginners who want to start learning photography with Digital cameras. It is like a camera functionality that is available in our smartphones where software present in the device process the image depending on the light condition. Automatic mode is also helpful in capturing photos when u are ignorant of manual mechanism. The camera sets the brightness, exposure and focal length of the lens for you. In this mode, you will be having less control over the camera in capturing. It may not help you in all situations like low light, bright light, and cloudy conditions. I have used only Automatic mode for the first 3 years in my photography career.
I was capturing macro shots, group photos and in low light — I was using flash to compensate light. They all seemed well and great at the time since I was only inspired in capturing memories and I had point and shoot digital camera which has a fixed lens. Automatic mode is the best way to start with to learn the basics of photography but to go further in it, you need to learn Manual mode.
Manual Mode:
The most powerful mode of all in any camera where we have every control of the Image we capture, from brightness to focussing particular object. It is difficult to master and beautiful to play with upon learning. 4 important aspects control the capturing of Image in any cameras, they are Aperture, F/Stop number (Shutter Speed), ISO and Exposure. Zoom of the image depends on the focal length of the lens.
In manual mode, the beneficial factor is that we can capture images in RAW format. Which holds more details about each pixel and that helps in post-processing of the images. Since we have control over every click, we can capture beautiful images.
I have been using manual mode from the past 2 years and still, I am not a great pro to be called for. The perfection in this mode is impossible. We can learn every day to take better pictures and become good at using this mode.
Getting Started with Photography
Getting started with photography is pretty easy. To be good at it, start using any of the cameras available and concentrate on Macro photography that will boost your confidence in taking pictures. As per experience, I started with Macro photography. Which boosts the confidence.
Try to capture a single flower, butterfly sitting on the leaf. Visit flower parks around you where you can see different plants. Capture the green, this makes you feel comfortable in capturing images. The more green you start to capture, the better you feel at yourself. There are 3 ways to capture pictures, Smartphone, Digital Point and Shoot Cameras, DSLR cameras, Mirrorless cameras. These days smartphones are a good source to start learning photography. You can build a pretty good partnership with them and macro.
As soon as you learn macro, you can gently move on to Landscapes which are found while you travel in hill stations, agricultural lands, beaches, temples, architectures, and cityscapes. Try to concentrate on capturing pictures under better light conditions. It helps you feel good about yourself. Here are some steps that you need to follow in your journey,
- Start with Macro Photography
- Gently move on to Landscapes
- Concentrate on environments with good light condition
- Capture Portraits of your friends
- Experiment with Manual Mode (Macro)
- Keep practicing
- Never get tired and don’t lose patience
- Wait for the perfect picture
- Record the view in your mind and capture it with heart.
I saw people capturing photos and then later they edit according to their wishes in Post-processing software, but the truth is upon first capture itself your photo should look like a perfect shot. Here and there brightness, exposure, and lighting conditions can be edited but not the whole concept of it. The more you edit, your photo loses its beauty. There will be situations where edits are required but changing the whole perspective of the picture doesn’t make sense. Feel free to share your learning experiences with me in response or to my mail. I am happy to know your learning curves.
Conclusion
We capture memories every day in the form of pictures. We go to team lunches, we travel solo, we spend time with family, we enjoy ourselves with friends. All of these moments we capture in pictures so that we can remember those happy times we spent and has been a part of. Being present in other’s happiness is the most satisfactory thing in our lives and to see the people around us happy.
I saw so many people capture pictures just to post on social media and to show off. Photography is not about that and never will be. It is all about preserving the precious moments we spent throughout our lives and to live on even after our death. Our eyes are the best camera we have naturally with a whopping 573 megapixels of resolution with unlimited storage capacity.
When we visit places to see its real beauty, no matter how hard we try, we cannot capture the exact beauty of nature so, it is better to take a breath and enjoy that moment and being thankful for nature is the best feeling you can ever have. As you feel happier and dedicate yourself to nature, better your pictures will be.
