Guide to digital photography

Guide to digital photography

In the following piece, I am going to be presenting a guide to digital photography in which I am going to be breaking down all aspects of photography. This will include breaking down and explaining how your standard digital camera works and what is inside it. I will then be going through the history of photography and the technology behind it. I will then cover the rest of the rest of the general basis and this includes lighting, iso, shutter speed, aperture, exposure and more. So, without further ado lets begin this piece by talking about your usual digital camera and how it works.

  To begin with I will be providing a breakdown of the camera itself, how it works, settings, externals, internals and so on. To begin with lets quickly go over the externals of the camera. First, you have the body. Now the body of the camera is the main part of the camera. The body as you can see contains a series of mirrors. This is how the light goes from the front of the camera to the sensor at the back. Below this we have a screen where you can see the image better and this allows you to see the affects of altering the settings on things like shutter speed and aperture. As you can see there are a variety of buttons and dials all over the camera. All of these can be used to select and alter the settings on the camera which affect the look of the image. Now you may be wondering about the lens. Well, see when you try and take a picture with the camera without the lens on all you will see is a blank image.

The lens is needed as it allows for only a certain amount of light to pass through. The lens concentrates the light. As you will see in the upcoming videos the lens is probably one of the most important parts of a camera if not the most important. So, i think that just about covers the basics of a camera, i will be covering more specifics like ISO, aperture etc. in a later video. So to conclude, a camera is made up of a series of mirrors angled so that light passes through and reflecting an image into the sensor.

Now that this has been established I will be moving on to going through the history of photography and the technology behind it. Lets start at the beginning, the year is 1824. The first photographic process known as heliography was invented by a man named Nicephore Niepce. He achieved this by laying bitumen of Judea spread on a silver plate and waiting for several days for exposure time. By the time Niepce died in 1833 he had shortened the exposure time to one day. Niepce had also had Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre work on his research. After Niepce's death Daguerre invented a new kind if photography. This was the first process including a development stage. The process is as follows, a silver plate coated with a very thin silver iodine layer is exposed in a camera obscurer which to describe in the simplest way possible. is when you have a room in complete darkness with no light at all, and then you make a small hole which allows for a certain amount of light to pass through and allow for an image to be made.

In 1839 John Hershell discovered a way to fix images by dipping them in  a sodium hyposulfite bath which is the same mix used today. The mix allows for you to manipulate the paper to alter the image. In 1841 a man named Henry Talbot patented the calotype which was the first negative to positive process which made it possible to multiply the same image. The biggest issue now was to decrease the exposure time. A physicist by the name of fizeau replaced silver iodine with silver bromide, his reason for doing this was simple. The sensitivity of light was far higher. After this, exposure times were decreased to just mere seconds. By 1848, Edmond Becquerel creates the first full colour photographs. However there was an issue, the exposure time lasted hours and sometimes even days. In 1854 Andre Disderi used a camera with multiple lenses which are able to take eight different photographs and was able to take eight different photographs with different poses on one large negative. Once printed the images are cut apart and glued to smaller mounts. In 1878 two major developments take place, The first is sensitivity is increased and exposure time is decreased and the second is Eadweard Muybridge uses a row of cameras attached to trip wires to make a high speed photographic analysis of a galloping horse. This is the first form of film ever made. In 1887, celluloid film base is introduced and the next year Kodak releases the number 1 box camera. In the same year the first ever motion picture on film is made, titled (Roundhay Garden scene). 

Jumping forward a bit in July of 1893, Hippolyte Bayard discovers the way to obtain positive images directly on paper. A sheet of paper covered with silver chloride is blackened by light then exposed in a camera obscura after having been sensitized in silver iodine. The exposure time would be anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. By the beginning of the 20th century, Kodak introduces the 120 film format, Wire photos are introduced and the auto chrome plate is introduced which then becomes the first commercially successful colour photography product. So, let’s take a look at war photography and how it affected the technology of cameras. During the first world war, cameras were finally small enough to be carried around easily by just one person. However during the first world war the war photography was focused on glorifying the war however some photographers like Canadian solider Jack Turner would illegally take photographs of the more horrific side of the war.

During the second world war a similar thing happened however the more horrific images were more common, this is in part to the variety of images from big events like the landings of d day. Post second world war the way war was seen in the general public shifted, in part due to the photographs showing the true horrors of war. By the time the Vietnam war rolled around the general public were very much against war and by this point the "Glory" of war had very much perished. When it comes to war photography in the Vietnam war, one of the more popular cameras was the M3 which you may recognize from Kong skull island. These cameras where quite small and mobile which allowed for war photographers to easily use and maneuver to get the best pictures. 

 Due to the pictures that came out of the Vietnam war the horrors of war became glaringly apparent and really helped people love the already very popular Vietnam war. And that brings us to the last 30 years in which digital technology has developed and has lead to digital cameras which rather than needed to be refilled with film instead it just piles it all onto an SD card.  In 1975 kodak released the first digital camera and then 9 years later in 1986 Fujifilm released the first disposable camera and in 1987 canon introduces the first dslr camera. In April of 2010 the next big development in cameras is made with the release of the first 4k camera. In conclusion cameras have evolved from giant boxes into tiny square things that fit into your pocket.

So, before i explain what an F stop i need to first explain what aperture and exposure are. The simplest way to explain aperture is that it is a hole in the lens of your camera which allows for light to pass through it. Aperture allows for you to control how much light enters the camera at any one time. On the other hand, exposure is the amount of light which enters through the lens and into the camera. Now that we have established that, we are now going to be talking about f stops. Now, this is where having a camera on hand gives you a small edge here. See when you change the size of the aperture on your camera you may notice that at the top right of the screen you will see a lowercase f and a number. The f stop will most likely look like one of the following. F/1.8, F/3.5, F/5.6, F/8, F/16. These are the most common types of f stops however these aren't all of them. Ok, so now that we have covered that. You may be wondering is why aperture is written as an f number and what exactly do the f numbers mean? See, the best way to look at aperture and f stops is to look at it as a fraction. 

A good way to think of aperture and f stops is to think of for example f/8 as 1/8. As another example picture f/2 as a half. Using the same logic of fractions, you can understand how f stops relate to the level of aperture in the lens. So, for example we know that 1/2 is higher than 1/8 so using that same logic you can work out that f/2 is higher than f/8. Now you may be thinking, what does the f stand for? Basically, the f in f stop simply stands for focal length. When you subtract focal length into the equation your basically solving the diameter of the aperture blades in your lens. As an example, let’s say that you have an 18-50mm lens, your standard lens with most cameras. If your f stop is set to f/10, turning this into an equation it will look like this 50mm/10 = five millimetres across. To summarise the lower the number next to the f, your aperture blades will be open much wider. Now, before we conclude this video i just want to make one thing clear. You are unable to set any f stop that you want. Your f stop is limited depending on the lens that you have attached to your camera.

So, in this section of the essay we are going to be talking about lighting. More specifically we are going to be covering the different types of lighting, it's importance in relation to both the subject of the image as well as the image itself. To begin with i am going to talk about the importance of lighting in photography. Lighting is a key factor in creating a successful image. Lighting allows you to not only control both the brightness of an image but also the tone, mood and the atmosphere of the image. The direction of the light source has a profound effect on your perception of the image and how an object in a scene will appear, light has a dramatic effect on our moods and feelings.

Next, i am going to over some lighting techniques and these include: Split lighting, Butterfly lighting, Loop lighting, Rembrandt lighting, Short lighting and broad lighting. These lighting techniques are used to evoke different emotions from the audience as well as providing a new perception of the image. Moving on from this i am going to be talking about the different types of lighting that are used by a lot of photographers. Firstly i am going to list of the different types of lighting and then i am going to discuss them. so types of lighting are as follows: Hard lighting, Soft lighting and bokeh. Hard lighting sources cast deep shadows, the smaller the source of light, the harder the lighting is. Hard lights casts very dark shadows which adds some edge to the subjects to the image. hard light makes you pay less attention to the black area of the image and more on what is illuminated and highlighted in the image. Soft light refers to light that tends to wrap around objects, casting diffuse shadows with soft edges. The softness of a light source can also be determined by the angle between the illuminated object and the length of the light source. The larger this angle is, the softer the light source. Soft light is used to cast shadow less light and fill lighting which reduces the amount of shadows in the image without adding any more. Finally, i am going to be talking about Bokeh and how the affect is achieved. Bokeh is defined as "the effect of a soft out of focus background that you get when shooting a subject, using a fast lens, at the widest aperture". To put it simply, Bokeh is the pleasing or aesthetic quality of out of focus blur in a photograph. 

To achieve bokeh within an image, you need to use a fast lens, the faster the better. Many photographers like to use fast prime lenses when shooting photographs that they want visible bokeh in. Now, you may be thinking what can you do with bokeh? Well some creative things you can do with bokeh lighting are: shoot stopped down for a more defined bokeh effect, change your position, using points of light for your out of focus subjects and make the image more out of focus.

Throughout this next section we are going to be discussing composition, framing, rule of thirds, mise en scene and more. So, to begin with i am going to be talking about composition and framing in general. Composition is the placement or arrangement of visual elements or ingredients in a work of art. Simply put, composition is where things are located in the picture. Framing on the other hand refers to using elements of a scene to create a "frame" within your frame. There is something you need to think about when framing an image and that is the rule of thirds. The best way to explain the rule of thirds is to imagine breaking an image down into thirds, this being both horizontally and vertically. This creates 9 parts. With this grid you can see that there are four important parts of the image that you could place items of interest within. The theory is that if you place items within these four points you will create a balanced and natural image. The reason behind this is that the human eye will usually go to one of the intersection points rather than the centre of the image. Framing doesn't necessarily mean you must shoot through an object in the foreground. Background elements, like a white door, can put a frame around your subject while also making use of drawing the eye to the brightest part of the photo.

 Taking advantage of concentric frames makes for an interesting photo. As an example, you might use a fogged up window first to frame your image, and then use an even smaller spot that's cleared of condensation to lead your viewer to the main subject. Inanimate objects however aren't the only sources of framing. Some of the people in a scene can be thrown out of focus to highlight your main subject while giving your audience context If you're having trouble finding inspiration with naturally occurring frames, try taking pictures through household objects as an experiment. Doodads that make for interesting pictures include rings, funnels, toilet paper tubes, picture frames and magnifying glasses. Framing your subject with unusual items can make for interesting and abstract results. Next time you're out taking pictures, look for frames or bring your own objects to shoot through. With practise, you'll notice natural framing elements quickly and improve your photography composition. Framing your subjects will give your subjects added appeal and show your audience what you want them to see. Finally, i am going to be talking about mise en scene. Mise en scene basically just means the things that are shown within the frame of the image. Mise en scene ranges from the subjects in the image, all the way to the items in the background as well as the background and scenery shown in the image.

In this next section of the piece i will be talking about exposure, Aperture, Iso and shutter speed. To begin with i am going to be talking about exposure. Exposure is the amount of light per unit area. There are two types of exposure. Long exposure and short exposure. Long exposure, time exposure or slow shutter photography involves using a long-duration shutter speed to sharply capture the stationary elements of images while blurring, smearing or obscuring the moving elements. Short exposure however is where two images are digitally merged together to make a single image. Moving on, i am going to be discussing aperture. The aperture stop of a photographic lens can be adjusted to control the amount of light reaching the film or image sensor. In combination with variation of shutter speed, the aperture size will regulate the film's or image's exposure to light. Depth of field is one thing that aperture controls, affected by the size of your aperture, your lens and your distance from the subject. Aperture often called f stop, is important to the exposure of your photograph, but it also affects how much of your image is in focus, or the depth of field. This is an important stylistic choice and impacts the look and feel of the image.

Wide Aperture is when the image background becomes blurrier and contrasts with the foreground, resulting in a shallow depth of field. Narrow aperture however is when the aperture opening is narrow, the background and foreground stay in focus. Striking distance is when you move either closer to or further away from the subject. The depth of field will alter. Next, i am going to be talking about shutter speed. Shutter speed is the length of time when the film or digital sensor inside the camera is exposed to light, also when a camera's shutter is open when taking a photograph. The amount of light that reaches the film or image sensor is proportional to the exposure time. Finally, i am going to be talking about ISO. ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The same principles apply as in film photography. The lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. By choosing a higher ISO you can use a faster shutter speed. ISO means sensor brightness. Lower numbers mean lower brightness and vice versa. Basically, the higher the ISO the higher the shutter speed.

So, this brings us to the final section of the piece and that is image editing and the software used. To begin with i want to talk about image editing in general. Image editing is the process of altering images to look different than they did when originally taking them, whether they be digital photographs, traditional photographs or illustrations. There are a lot of different things that you can do when editing an image. Since there are nearly endless possibilities and options when editing an image, i am going to list some of the bigger options. These are the following: Colour grading, image manipulation, colorizing, blur, removing parts of the image and cropping the image. I am now going to be talking about some software programs used for image editing, more specifically two. The first is photoshop and the second software is lightroom, Both made by adobe. Photoshop was created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll and officially released in February 1990. Adobe photoshop is a graphics and image editor developed and published by Adobe. Photoshop is available for both MacOS and windows computers. Photoshop is probably the most popular image and graphics editing software, Photoshop is very much like a digital version of a dark room which is used to edit analogue images, photoshop contains things like the burn and smudge tool which are both things used in the image editing process in a dark room.

The other big image editing software is Adobe lightroom. Adobe lightroom is primarily used to colour grade images, adobe lightroom was release in February of 2007. Adobe lightroom allows you to quickly colour grade an image using either presets or custom tool bars. Before the invention if both digital photography and image editing software. When editing analogue images you would develop and edit the image in a dark room. A dark room is basically just a room with red light where you dip your image in some chemicals and then develop it. The process of editing images has developed drastically in the last few decades, we went from having to get the shot first time and not messing it up in the development stage. It was all in one go, whereas now you can cycle through hundreds of images to find the perfect one and if you make a mistake then you can just undo it and try again. This brings me to the end of the piece.