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    Improve Your Photography: How Budding Photographers Can Get Pro Results
    Improve Your Photography: How Budding Photographers Can Get Pro Results
    Improve Your Photography: How Budding Photographers Can Get Pro Results
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Improve Your Photography: How Budding Photographers Can Get Pro Results

    By Jim Harmer

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    About this ebook

    "Improve Your Photography" has been purchased by thousands of beginning photographers across the world and has been recently updated in this second edition.

    The book is packed full of quick and easy tips to encourage budding photographers to improve while learning concepts and technical information on photography. Jim explains this book this way, "This is what every photographer needs to know to take clean and stunning photos. If I would have had this book when I started, I would have been two years ahead of everyone else in just 100 pages."

    The book covers topics such as tips for taking better portraits of people, instruction on choosing lenses, tips for landscape and sunset photography, and HDR.
    Unlike most photography books that confuse beginning and intermediate photographers with difficult concepts and too much technical data, this book is designed specifically to teach photographers who are just learning how shutter speed, aperture, and ISO work together.

    "If I would have had this book when I started learning photography, I would have been two years ahead in learning."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJim Harmer
    Release dateJun 11, 2010
    ISBN9781452364766
    Improve Your Photography: How Budding Photographers Can Get Pro Results
    Author

    Jim Harmer

    Jim Harmer is an entrepreneur and founder of several massive online companies including Income School.Mr. Harmer, is also a world-renowned photographer and educator. He was recently ranked in the top 20 photographers in the United States (#37 in the world).His photography blog, Improve Photography, has attracted tens of millions of visits from photographers around the world. His runaway success Improve Photography Podcast has been a staple of the photography community.Mr. Harmer's first book, "Improve Your Photography: How budding photographers can get pro results" sold rapidly throughout the world for its ability to explain the basic concepts of photography in a way that is simple to understand.Subsequent to the first book, the author wrote "Improve Your HDR Photography" and then "Improve Your Wildlife Photography." All of Mr. Harmer's books are written in a casual writing style so as to aid readers in understanding difficult concepts without struggling to understand the author's language.

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      Book preview

      Improve Your Photography - Jim Harmer

      IMPROVE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY:

      How Budding Photographers Can Get Pro Results

      Fourth edition

      by

      Jim Harmer of ImprovePhotography.com

      Copyright 2011 © Improve Photography LLC. All Rights Reserved

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      * * * * *

      PUBLISHED BY:

      Improve Photography LLC via Smashwords

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      * * * * *

      Table of Contents

      A (Very) Brief Introduction

      Chapter One: Exposure

      Shutter Speed

      Aperture: Depth of Field and Brightness

      ISO

      How to Control the Exposure on Your Camera

      Exposure Compensation

      Chapter Two: Case Studies in Exposure

      Person Standing Still Indoors at a Party

      Kid Playing Soccer on a Sunny Day

      Landscape Photo of a Beach at Sunrise

      Family of Five Grouped Together for a Portrait in the Shade on a Sunny Day

      Group of Five Friends Outside on a Dark Night

      Basketball Player Running Down the Court Indoors

      Chapter Three: My Photos Aren’t Clear

      How to Properly Hold a DSLR Camera

      Holding the Camera in Horizontal (Landscape) Position and Vertical Position

      Lens Limitations and the Shutter Button

      Chapter Four: How to Shoot Sunsets That Will Make Jaws Drop

      Chapter Five: Action Photography

      Chapter Six: Shooting RAW

      Chapter Seven: How to Buy a Camera

      Chapter Eight: Purchasing Lenses

      The Benefits of Professional vs Consumer Lenses

      Deciphering the Labels

      Chapter Nine: Portrait Photography

      Portrait Photography Fundamental #1: Lighting

      Portrait Photography Fundamental #2: Depth of Field

      Portrait Photography Fundamental #3: Capturing Emotion

      Portrait Photography Fundamental #4: Posing

      Chapter Ten: Composition

      The Rule of Thirds

      Simplicity

      Perspective

      Chapter Eleven: An Introduction to Night Photography

      Chapter Twelve: Focus

      Focus and Recompose or Compose and Focus?

      Pre-focusing

      Chapter Thirteen: Support

      Chapter Fourteen: An Introduction to Landscape Photography

      Chapter Fifteen: Filters

      The UV Filter—and its Replacement

      The Polarizer

      The Neutral Density Filter

      Chapter Sixteen: High Dynamic Range Photography (HDR)

      The Step by Step Approach to Tonemapped HDR

      What Software Do I Need to Create an HDR Image?

      Pseudo-HDR

      Chapter Seventeen: Digital Image Editing

      Conclusion

      A (Very) Brief Introduction

      This is the book I wish I had when I bought my first DSLR. At that time, the camera knew much more about photography than I did, and it punished me severely with blurry pictures, confusing buttons, and an undecipherable manual.

      In the next 100 short pages, I will explain the most important concepts of photography that usually take beginners two or more years to learn. Since we have only 100 pages together, I will forego trying to impress you with complicated technological jargon, and will simply explain what you need to do to take great photos. Throughout the book, I will explain concepts and then we will go on an imaginative photo shoot together and apply the concepts from the chapter to common shooting situations.

      After mastering the concepts in this book, I would encourage you to join the Improve Photography community at ImprovePhotography.com and participate by reading my (free!) daily photography tips and asking questions on our Facebook fan page. I make myself available to each person in the community and personally respond to any photography questions you may have.

      As you capture life at 1/100th of a second, don’t forget the Creator of the beautiful things you record.

      Sincerely,

      Jim Harmer

      * * * * *

      IMPROVE YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

      HOW BUDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS CAN GET PRO RESULTS

      FOURTH EDITION

      * * * * *

      chapter One: Exposure

      By far, the greatest divide between the knowledge of a beginning photographer and that of a professional is their understanding of exposure. Nothing will impact your photography as quickly as spending a few minutes to learn how to use this principle properly. These next few minutes will immediately make you more knowledgeable about photography than 99% of the world’s camera owners.

      I have attended many photography classes where the instructors made exposure seem so difficult that even I became confused. No need to worry, though. I have taught many, many photographers the basics of exposure and every single one of them catches on—and I don’t anticipate failing on you!

      Simply put, exposure is the amount of light that is captured by a camera during the process of taking a photograph. That is why we say that some photos are overexposed, which means too much light was gathered, or underexposed, which means that the camera did not gather enough light.

      Digital cameras have three tools to control the amount of light captured on the sensor---shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. I will explain what each of these do so that you will be able to adjust the settings on your camera, and start taking pictures that are properly exposed.

      Shutter Speed

      Shutter speed is the measure of the length of time that a camera allows light to enter into it. This is measured in fractions of a second. The longer that the camera allows light to enter it, the brighter the image becomes. An exposure taken in the black of night might last 30 seconds or more, while an image at the beach on a bright day might only last 1/2000th of a second or less.

      The shutter speed does not only control how bright the image is, but also how blurry the image is. My guess is that one of the reasons you chose to purchase a nice camera and learn photography is that you want to learn to take pictures that look clear and not blurry, right? Well, you’re about to learn the #1 secret to capturing crystal clear pictures.

      The shutter is a small piece of metal or plastic that covers the camera sensor and prevents light from being recorded except during the instant that you take a picture. When you take a picture, the shutter quickly flips up and allows light to reach the sensor for a tiny fraction of a second. Knowing that a shutter works this way, you can already see why some pictures end up blurry. If the shutter stays open for too long, something in the scene could move, and the sensor would record the moving path of that object.

      So why, you might ask, do pictures end up blurry even when taking a picture of a stationary object like a tree or a building? The answer is that, even if you don’t feel it, your hands are constantly trembling. If the shutter speed is too slow, this small movement of your hands is enough to blur a photo. However, if a faster shutter

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