Mini Hint #1 - Caffeine

Avoid caffeine for (at least) two to three days before an important shoot. You'll be amazed by how much steadier your hands become.

Decent Exposure

Exposure is a term that's scattered liberally around any text on photography. It basically stands as a shorthand for all the settings and decisions that enable you to get an image on screen that has the brightness, colour rendition and clarity that matches the natural 'eye' view of the scene, or whatever version of that you have set out to create. Variables in question are shutter speed, aperture and film or sensor speed (ISO). I'll cover each of these in turn as they'll all be useful to you the very moment you start to see your camera as a creative tool.

Shutter speed
This is the amount of time the film or sensor (i'm going to use the term 'image plane' to refer to these two generically) is exposed to the light. Pretty obviously, longer time open equals more light hitting the image plane. Shutter speeds traditionally run on a doubling pattern, but generally the number displayed needs to be considered as a fraction. For example a speed of '1000' displayed means one-thousandth of a second, a relatively fast speed. '1' means one whole second, and inbetween we generally find 2 (half a second), 4 (quarter), 8 etc up to 64, which is then 'almost' doubled to 125, 250 etc up to whatever your camera maker deems necessary. Mine goes to 4000. Some go much faster than this, and many go to much slower speeds than 1 second. A shutter speed of 'B' signifies 'Bulb' exposure - a throwback term which basically means the shutter is held open for as long as you hold the shutter release. sometimes accompanied by a 'T' setting ('Time') which opens the shutter on one press of the release and closes it on a second, these settings can be used for very long exposures lasting several minutes or even hours when shooting star trails etc. Fast shutter speeds freeze action or movement, slow ones blur it. Different subjects will look good at different speeds. For example you may assume that a racing car should be shot at the fastest possible speed, but if that causes the wheels to be frozen too, the car will appear not to be moving. If you want to experiment with the effects of different speeds, find a fountain or fast-moving stream and shoot it at all different speeds. From swirling milky streaks to sparkling droplets, the effects are very different. Shutter speed also has an impact on flash photography. Your camera will have a maximum sync speed, above which the flash cannot be used. On most digital SLRs this is a respectably fast speed above 1/125 sec. On many (specifically Canon) budget film SLRs it was/is much lower, around 1/90 sec, though some flash units can get around this limitation.

Aperture
The Aperture setting controls the amount of light entering the lens in a different way to shutter speed, though the two are related. The aperture is the name for the hole or gap through which light passes on its way to the image plane. The diameter of this hole can be varied using either a ring around the lens barrel, or a setting on the camera body. For all Canon EOS SLRs and lenses and many of the modern budget nixon lenses, this is a camera body setting, if you're on an older camera, especially anything manual focus, the aperture tends to be set from the lens. Settings range on normal lenses from about 1.4 to 32, in numbers which increase by multiplying by approximately root2, thus the range goes 1.4, 2.0, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32. These numbers are often referred to as 'f-numbers' or 'f-stops' and written as 'f/5.6'. This is because they are expressed as a fraction of the focal length of the lens, and thus the same number can mean the same exposure setting regardless of the lens length. F/32 is thus much smaller than F/2.0, one sixteenth the diameter in fact. The gap between each number in the range is known as a 'stop' and setting your lens to a smaller aperture is known as 'stopping down'. One stop of aperture corresponds to one doubling or halving of shutter speed, an arrangement known as the reciprocity law. If your camera suggests, for example 1/250sec at an aperture of f/11, you could equally shoot with settings of 1/60 @ f/22 or 1/1000 @ f/5.6, and obtain the same exposure, albeit with different effects. We'll come on to aperture and shutter speed related effects in a future entry. For now I'm just concentrating on exposure and as such we can leave aperture there.

ISO (or 'film') speed
This is controlled on film cameras by physically changing the film, or sometimes changing how we choose to treat film. As such it is a 'whole roll' decision that must be lived with for up to 40 frames if we don't wish to waste film. On digital cameras it tends to be much easier, and can be set differently for each and every shot if we so wish. It is a measure of the sensitivity of the recording medium, be that film or sensor. Usually available in doubling hundreds from 100 to typically 800 or 1600, it can be treated as simply another exposure variable, allowing you greater flexibility with your shots and the conditions in which you shoot them, it does have tradeoffs however, which are perhaps not so obvious as those related to shutter speed. Suppose you are set at 1/100sec @ f/4, your lens aperture as wide open as it goes, and your ISO on 400. The light levels drop and you need just one extra stop to expose correctly. Aperture is at maximum so that leaves just shutter speed or ISO. If you reduce the shutter speed (increase the time for which the image plane is exposed) then you risk not being able to hold the camera still. If you take the other option and push the ISO up to 800, your image quality may well be compromised by increased image 'grain' or 'noise' (extra patches or blotches of colour or light where you don't want them) which is a common side effect of higher ISOs. Going one stop higher to 1600 will seriously affect your image usability on all but the highest quality SLRs. It's there to be used, but bear in mind that speeds typically above about 400 ISO will adversely affect your images in some way. One quick addendum for any pedants in the building - the technically correct definition of ISO includes both the European DIN specification and the more familiar numeric American standards. The 200 or 400 or whatever is technically called the ASA rating, but in most publications etc, ISO and ASA are used interchangeably,

This has become something of a monster post, so I'll leave it there for now. Once you've digested the settings, I'll try my best to explain how and why and most importantly when to use them.

Point and Shoot

I think it's about time we got fully acquainted with our cameras. You know how to aim and shoot, what else does it do?

Well working our way around the camera, and first of all going back to that pointing and shooting thing. The part you point is the lens, obviously, and the button is the shutter-release or shutter button, commonly (albeit technically incorrectly) known simply as the shutter. What else you have depends on the camera. I'll start by describing the various controls on a digital slr (DSLR) as they're becoming extremely common among those who have an interest in photography.

Close to the shutter button there is usually a wheel, turned by the index finger (i'll call it the finger-wheel whenever i refer to it), which changes settings depending on what mode the camera is in, and what option is currently active. For instance, on my camera this wheel controls either shutter speed or aperture in the appropriate modes, or both (kind of) in shiftable program mode. It also changes focus mode, iso speed, drive mode, and a host of other things depending what i press before i turn it. The finger wheel is complemented by the thumb-wheel on the back of my camera, whose main shooting purpose is to adjust exposure compensation, while it also allows you to go through the images saved on your memory card. Working back from the finger-wheel on the top of my camera we find the information screen, though this may be on the other side, or even use the main screen on your camera. On this screen we can check and adjust settings governing most of the common things we might change, plus info about the shot we're about to take, number of shots remaining, etc. Around the screen there are usually buttons to control the aforementioned modes and these will govern what the two wheels affect when adjusting settings.
To one side of the screen on top of the camera you'll often find a flash hotshoe, commonly with the built-in pop-up flash beneath and in front of it. Then on the opposite side of the top plate, most DSLRs and bridge cameras will have the main exposure mode dial, including the four main modes on any modern camera - M, A or Av, S (sometimes shown as T or Tv) and P, plus normally a host of 'scene modes' such as close.up, portrait, landscape etc and sometimes some other options such as a full-auto-everything 'green' mode, or on canon cameras, DEP or A-DEP. All the abbreviated modes will be covered in a future post, most of the scene modes are pretty self explanatory as to when to use them.

The back of the camera varies so much between brands that there are only so many generalisations i can make. On any digital camera this is the home of the main LCD screen, used for viewing and sometimes composing images. There will usually be buttons and extra controls around this screen to get at extra menus for advanced features, and to control viewing or playback of images. And so to the front. Not much extra is found here in the way of controls etc, though if you look on the lens and lens mount this is where you find switches to control autofocus on SLRs and the catch to remove the lens. Also depending on brand, you may have a depth of field preview button. Check your manual, but if you have one of these it'll make understanding apertures a lot easier. If you're shooting film I'd go as far as to say it's a near essential feature of any film SLR, much more than for digital.

Finally on the bottom of the camera we have things like the battery door, the tripod screw socket (1/4 inch whitworth or UNC if you're into your screw threads or want to make your own supports), and if you're on film and an older camera, the film rewind release catch.

And that's it for the tour. In the words of a well known russian meerkat, Simples.

Composition: Getting it all where you want it.

Everyone who takes photos does some level of composition - it's one of the few things the camera really can't help you with. We're talking about the act of pointing your camera towards something or someone, thus making it or them your subject. Sometimes you'll change your zoom length or raise or lower the camera to emphasise your subject against a background, sometimes you'll physically move position so as to stop that lampshade looking like it protrudes from your sister's head. All of these actions allow you to change or improve the composition of the image, make it look neater prettier, more dramatic, or even stark and unattractive if that's the effect you're going for. Giving a little thought to composition can make the difference between an uninteresting snapshot, and a picture you print large and hang on your wall.
There are a number of compositional 'rules' that i'll come to later. These give you a conventional starting point when putting together a new image. For now we're just introducing terms so learning, following and most importantly, breaking the rules can wait.