Guides

Beginners Guide from a Beginner.

Overview

Starting out can be confusing.

Some supprising things to note...

All images on this website are less than 2 megapixels (1600x1200 pixels 1.92mp)

Basics

Photography is both Artistic and Technical

Artistic

Composition, a tough one to explain... so I won't here... some general tips

• Get at the level of your subject. The camera typically should be somewhere between eye and chest height if photgraphing a person
• Avoid very bright things like windows in the background, try and have the main light source behind you where possible (not always possible)
• Sub frames, this is where you use things within the image you are capturing to frame the subject
• Even lighting in faces
• Eyes should be in focus

Technical

You are capturing light, exposing a sensor to light. Hense exposure in photography refers to the lightness of an image. Exposure has 3 basic elements, the Exposure Triangle;

• Shutter Speed,

• Aperture (f stops),

• Sensor Sensitivity (ISO)

More detail below.

Both Artistic and Technical

Editing is a big part of photography, this is where you can adjust images e.g. crop, lighten (bring up the exposure), darken, adjust tones, and many other things. 

A veriety of software solutions both paid and free are available

Kit

You can start out with a phone, most phones have a manual mode where you can choose your technical settings, but your phone can apply some auto digital edits. Idealy you should consider moving to an interchangable lense camera. The lense is what has the biggest impact on the feel of the images you capture.

You can get lost in a mine field of information, on topics like Mirroless vs DSLR, Full frame vs Crop Sensor. Think carefully before spending on your first camera.

The majority of my kit is used from trusted retailers both high street and online, who provide grading structures, giving clear condition descriptions to help you choose.

Advice on Preparing Photographs for Club Competitions

The following notes should help members submit entries for the monthly competition nights in a uniform manner. 

The requirements are as follows. 

PDI’s:

Images should be resized to have no more than 1600 pixels horizontally and 1200 pixels vertically (this is the pixel size of the Club’s digital projector). 

Images may have smaller dimensions than this (e.g., portrait format images, ‘letterbox’ images), but, if so, they will be projected without filling the screen.

Images must be in a .jpg format.

Images should be saved with a quality setting which does justice to the image but does not make the file size so large as to be inconvenient for emailing.  Most images at 1600 x 1200 pixels will be OK at around 1mb.

Images should be saved in the sRGB colour space.

Each image should be given a file name which is the same as the title of the image. 

The image naming format is important and should be as the following example:

pdi-author’s name-image title.jpg 

example: (pdi-Joe Bloggs-Frosty Morning.jpg)

When prepared, images for an internal competition should be emailed as an attachment and not in the body of the text to: 

competitions-internal@boltoncameraclub.co.uk  

You should receive an auto reply to confirm your image has been received.

Please put the word ‘competition’ in the email subject line.

The deadline for receiving images is midnight on the Sunday 11 days before the competition evening. 

Competition dates are shown on the Syllabus page of this website

Prints:

For a print competition, the image can be of any size as long as it is within the constraints of the mount size which is 500mm x 400mm.                                   

Please note this is not 20” x 16”.                                                                                                                

No tape of any description should be on the back of the mounts. The maximum mount thickness must not exceed 4 mm and backing boards should be of a similar size to the front mount.

Each print must display on the back and to the top right-hand corner of the mount the authors name and title of the print.

Prints can be brought to the club on competition night or given to another member to bring in if the author is unable to attend the competition.

Please send an email to: competitions-internal@boltoncameraclub.co.uk  before the midnight deadline on the Sunday night 11 days before the competition evening with the details using the format: print-author’s name-print title (for example: print-Joe Bloggs-Misty Morning.)

Please put the word ‘competition’ in the email subject line.

The deadline for receiving print titles is midnight on the Sunday 11 days before the competition evening

Competition dates are shown on the Syllabus page of this website.

Happy submitting, and good luck in the competitions.

Kit

Budget, budget budget...