Photography!

Looking for a new hobby? Try Photography!

Photography is the process of capturing images with a camera. It isn’t very difficult and there are many different types of cameras out there tailored to fit beginners, average photographers, and professionals.

Yosuke Takada resting by Horseshoe Lake Rd.

There are many reasons to take a picture. People snap shots to document their life, create art, spread a message, or for their job. For example, dentist use x-ray photography to diagnose the oral health of their patients, baby photographers uses photography to capture the beauty and vulnerability of children, and paparazzi use their cameras like machine guns to shoot down stars.

Bryan Grant posing on a fountain in Central Park, NYC.

Some people use photography as an art to express personal beliefs, to share an idea, or to aesthetically please.

Ronell Cohill walking along the Coney Island Beach.

Personally, I find photography to be stress relieving and gratifying. I enjoy taking a photo and enhancing it’s qualities in a photo editor. It always feels good to see the completion something you’ve worked on, and photography provides that feeling within minutes (or hours, depending on how long you shoot and edit).

Editing photos is fun and a way to let out your creative juices! You can enhance, distort, or make reality completely unrecognizable. My favorite photo editing program is Adobe Lightroom, but I also have fun on Google Picasa (which is free).

I think anyone can have fun with photography. There is some basic information about how a camera works that would benefit potential photographers.

Shutter Speed – How long your camera takes to take a photo. Your camera has a shutter, think of it as a door. When you take a picture, the door opens, and when the picture is finished being taken the door closes. If your camera takes 1 second to take a photo, then the shutter will be open for 1 second. Easy to understand right? Now get this, when the shutter is open, light comes into the camera. This is important because without light you can’t see. So the longer your shutter is open, the more light enters you camera AND the brighter your pictures will be. (People who take pictures of the stars at night have to let their shutter stay open for 15 – 60 seconds to capture as much light from space as they can. Cool huh?) Shutter speed can be as fast as 1/4000th of a second.
Aperture – How wide open are your eyes? You camera lens is like an eye, and the wider open it is, the more light comes into the camera. Yay! But squinting your eyes has its’ benefits too doesn’t it? When the camera lens is narrow, things that are further away come into focus, and less light is let in (which helps on a sunny day). Have you ever seen a picture of something close up and clear with a beautiful blurry background? The camera’s eye (lens) is wide open and only the closer subject is focus. Also, a lot of light is let into the camera. The opposite happens when the camera’s eye squints, or is narrow, things that are close up and far away are in focus. On most camera’s and their lenses, aperture can be set from 2 – 22. Now you’d think 2 would be narrow, and 22 wide, but it’s the opposite. 2 is wide open, and 22 is really narrow.
ISO – Sensitivity. The brighter your environment, the less you need ISO because ISO brightens your images. If you are indoors, chances are you have to bump up your ISO setting. It ranges from 100 – 6400 on most cameras, 100 being the weakest (you set it here on a sunny day). ISO can really help if you need to set your Aperture small (squinting) or your shutter speed fast, but it can backfire. If your depending on your ISO too much, you can see it in your photos, they will look grainy and snowy.

Even if you keep your camera in auto mode, without fuss with the settings, taking photos is still a fun hobby! I encourage you to get out there and start shooting! I started taking photos a little over 5 years ago on a very basic point and shoot camera, and the hobby grew into something I am very passionate about today. All the photos you see here were taken by me, Iesha DeLesline.