Basic Photography Principles

CSE: Composition, Sharpness, Exposure

The quality of your images grows as you improve your mastery of basic photography technique

To put photographic concepts in perspective, it helps to think of photography as a way to paint pictures with light. The camera is your paintbrush, and your digital camera sensor, a special computer chip, is the canvas. In reality, a computer monitor or photographic print is your final canvas, but the initial painting takes place on the sensor inside your camera.

The camera lens collects and focuses light from the subject onto the digital sensor. Inside the camera is a tiny computer that converts what the digital sensor "sees" into a file on a memory card. Plug that card into your computer or printer to view the results. (Later, we'll see how to use your computer to touch-up and alter a photo, and we'll explore many options for viewing and sharing your digital photographs).

Digital Photography - Painting with Light

As with an oil painting, you start by choosing your subject and, looking through the cameras viewfinder, you decide how to frame the subject on the “canvas”.

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Give careful thought to which camera is best for you

ImproveYourDP is a great website, but it doesn't cover camera equipment in detail. So, take a look at these DSLR camera reviews to learn about the range of cameras available to meet your needs.

For more comprehensive reviews of the widest range of digital cameras, check out dpreview.com.

Using the camera's focus control, you decide which parts of the painting warrant precise detail because they are part of the main subject. For less critical elements, such as the background, you may choose a less precise or abstract painting style – in photographic terms, you leave these areas out of focus.

As you work your painting, you use camera exposure controls to emphasize important parts of the image with bright highlights while you may deemphasize background and distant parts of the image with darker colors.

The photographic analogies to these painterly activities are:

Composition – choose and frame your subject
Sharpness – emphasize the detail of your subject
Exposure – balance the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows

The C, S, and E basic photography principles break down into many supporting concepts – the most important are shown below. [Click on each one to learn more].

Composition, sharpness, and exposure are the first concepts to master for improving your photos and keeping your photo critique objective.

As you explore these three “CSE” basic photography principles, you'll find that they do not stand alone - instead, they influence one another in very predictable ways, which you can use to your advantage. For example, you'll see that aperture and shutter speed affect both sharpness and exposure. In more subtle ways, they also impact composition, which more detailed ImproveYourDP pages talk about.

At first, however, it is best to understand how C, S, and E work independently before looking at their interactions. Click here to begin improving your photo critique skills with composition.

As you become more familiar with these principles, you'll be in a better position to evaluate your progress as you improve your digital photography. Photo Critique - The CSE Critical Eye helps with that by providing a framework for objectively looking at photographs.

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