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.

Getting Started - A Camera

Before we go any further I just want to define one common acronym. SLR stands for 'Single Lens Reflex'. This basically means that you look through the viewfinder and you see the image through the lens itself, via a complicated arrangement of mirrors and prisms. What you see is what you shoot. These cameras almost invariably have interchangeable (removeable) lenses and other accessories available. I'm defining the term here as throughout this blog I will be using the term SLR, and it makes more sense to define it here than later on. There are other arrangements found on other camera types, such as the familiar direct viewfinder (little glass window) found on many film and digital compacts, live LCD screens found on most digital compacts and some digital SLRS, and rangefinder and Twin-Lens-Reflex (TLR) viewfinder types found mostly on vintage and professional-level equipment.

So you'll need a camera. You may own a suitable one, or you may be able to borrow or buy one. Most car boot sales will turn up 35mm film SLRs these days for pennies, especially the old manual ones where the old lenses don't fit new equipment, which is true of old canon, minolta, olympus and vintage russian (Zenit etc) stuff, or where the seller has no real interest in photography and just wants rid of their dad's old camera gear en-masse. I would argue that a manual film SLR with slide film is probably the best way to learn about photography in its purest form, just because you are responsible for everything from focus all the way down, the camera won't correct anything for you, and the processing of the film can't compensate for your mistakes as is the case with print film.

Alternatively you might already own a film or digital SLR, or a compact camera with a degree of manual control over the settings. For example, I have two digital compacts. My 'night out' camera is a Nikon Coolpix 4100 which affords manual control over basically nothing. It's very much a point-and-shoot only. The other is a Canon Powershot G5, which is the other end of the scale, affording much the same level of control as my SLRs, and only lacks the interchangeable lenses. This level of compact is often described as a 'Bridge' camera, as it bridges the gap between digital compacts and SLRs for those who want more control (or often, longer lenses) but don't want the added bulk and don't need the flexibility of an SLR. Pretty much any film or digital SLR (there are a few particularly simplistic exceptions) and any digital bridge camera will suffice for a learner.

So is your digital compact suitable for learning photography? Depends what you want to achieve. If you want to learn about photography as an art and a science, understand why shots turn out how they do, and tweak things and push the rules to creative effect, then probably not. If however you just want some basic help to be able to take better pictures, and it has at least a selection of scene modes (landscape, portrait, close-up, night-scene, night-portrait) plus ideally a flash, exposure-compensation and user settable ISO speeds, then yes. Even my Coolpix has all of these settings except the settable ISO, so I suspect if you have a digital compact made within the last four years, you can probably get started with that, and get hold of more complex gear as and when you feel you need it. Camera phones on the whole are probably not suitable due to the dubious image quality returned by most of them, though some of them are changing the rules there - most notably the Sony Cybershot phones.