Introduction

Let’s start with a analogy: A camera didn’t take a great photo any more than a typewriter wrote a great novel.

It’s the creativity and intent of the photographer that makes the image stunning as much as is the author of an intriguing novel. You need patience, practice and to make many mistakes from which you can learn and improve. It’s more important to capture the gazing loving looks of couple than that the photo has perfect light exposure. I love travel and photography and for me a great picture evokes an emotional reaction.

Quite a few of my friends asked me how I take such good photos and if I could give them advice on how to improve their photography. Unfortunately, it’s not just one thing that makes a photo the perfect one. There are many techniques and concepts that can help you. Obviously, I want to help my friends and so the idea of writing a blog which can also help you was born. I started off putting one blog post together, but quickly realized that this wouldn’t work. It’s just too much information to digest in only one post. Hence, I decided to divide this beginners guide into three parts. The first part will be about the technical details like aperture and shutter speed. This will be followed by the second part explaining different concepts of composition. The third and last part will then encourage you to get creative and combine the technical basics with the different composition concepts. The parts are structured so that if you already feel comfortable with the technical basics you can skip to composition or straight to the creative part. On the other hand, if you’re a novice travel photographer that just bought their first camera, I would recommend reading the blogs in the order I published them. Also, make sure that after each part you read you go and practice before moving on to the next one. Only if you feel comfortable with the exposure triangle will you be able to focus on the composition. And only once you understand how the different concepts of composition work, will you be able to play around and combine different concepts as outlined in the third part of this series.

My website and my blogs are about travelling and travel photography, but I also take photos of my friends and interesting people I meet while being out and about. Therefore, besides composition tips for city and landscapes I aim at including some tips as well for portraits. Thankfully I got permission to include some photos of friends, that you will not see on my website, for illustration.

The concepts described in the blogs cater mainly to cameras be it DSLR’s or Mirrorless ones, but also to mobile phones, especially the composition and creative part.

My assumption is that you’re familiar with the settings of your device (be it a camera or mobile phone). If not, grab your manual to learn how to change the settings while reading the blog.

Even though I might call it a rule or a guideline, feel free to break or deviate from the rule if the result is an amazing photo.

Keep in mind: without practice you will not progress, so go out and shoot as many photos as possible trying all the different ideas explained in the blogs. With time they will become second nature, and you won’t even think anymore while taking the photo. I do have a certain talent when it comes to photography, but it still took me years to get to the point where I don’t think any more while shooting.

As you will see, even though I use the photos to highlight one of the concepts discussed, I normally incorporate two or more of them to make the image really great. I will explain a bit more how in the third part of the series. Once you feel comfortable with one concept try to add another one or multiple.

This beginner’s guide is supposed to help novice travellers to take great photos for their memories but also for the more experienced ones that have the technical knowledge but want some inspiration on the creative side. Even though understanding the basic techniques can make a significant difference in the quality of the photos, following the tips of the other parts will get you one step closer to taking the perfect photo.

For almost all the photos in this blog I will include the exposure settings following this logic: Shutter speed – Aperture – ISO, example 1/250 – f/9 – ISO 160. Take those values as indications but not a given. You as the photographer should chose the right settings that fits your style.

One last thing, if you like to read up a bit more on the concepts in the next three parts I recommend two books, I found quite useful:

Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Photography by Richard I’Anson
The Unforgettable Photograph by George Lange with Scott Mowbray

Happy reading and learning. Don’t forget to practice and have fun!

Aperture

Aperture is the opening of the lens and impacts on how much light gets through. The aperture is expressed in f-stops. The jargon of wide and narrow aperture can be confusing as it’s a bit counterintuitive. A low f-stop number is called wide aperture. A higher f-stop number is considered a narrow aperture. The bigger the opening (expressed as wider aperture), meaning the lower the f-stop number, the more light gets in. The smaller the opening (expressed as narrow aperture), higher f-stop number, the less light comes in.

The aperture also impacts the depth of field, meaning how much of the photo is in focus. A bigger opening (meaning lower f-stop number) the shallower is the depth of field, resulting in more of the photo being blurry around the main subject. The smaller the opening (meaning higher f-stop number), the wider the depth of field, so more of the image is in focus.

Every lens has an aperture at which the focus is the sharpest, for my standard lens it’s f-stop 9. For Travel Photography where you want to have most of the image in focus (especially for cityscapes and landscapes) I keep the aperture at this value. I recommend you find out this value for you preferred lens.

A wide aperture (meaning low f-stop number) helps to isolate the subject, meaning keeping the important item in focus and the rest blurry. It works best if the object is in the mid-ground as the foreground and the background will be blurry. For portraits a wide aperture works wonders and is always recommended. Though, make sure the focus is on the eyes to get the whole body in focus.

A narrow aperture (high f-stop number) is great for landscapes to get everything (foreground, middle ground and background) in focus.

TIP: If you want to capture a “sunstar” go for a narrow aperture (f/16 or higher). Don’t aim at the centre of the sun as viewfinder will have difficulty to focus.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed is the exposure time of the sensor for an image. It’s expressed in seconds and fractions of seconds. Longer shutter speed (more than a second and lower denominator in the fraction) makes the image brighter and more dynamic (flowing motion). It also creates motion blur. Faster shutter speed (higher denominator in the fraction) makes the image darker and freezes objects, ergo less dynamic as it has less or no motion blur. Additionally, details will become visible.

ISO

ISO represents the standard defined for the sensor’s light sensitivity by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and is a numerical value. The higher the number the more sensitive the sensor becomes. Lower sensitivity captures less light, while higher sensitivity captures more light. The drawback of the ISO is the grain effect it creates at higher ISO numbers. Up to ISO 640 or 800 grain is not a problem, above you have to arbitrate between capturing more light and the amount of grain in your photo. Low ISO’s are perfect for sunny daytime images and creates the highest image quality (no grain). Higher ISO’s are good for low-light (candle light) and night situations, but results in lower image quality (a lot of grain). I try to keep the ISO at the lowest natural setting, normally between 100 and 160.

Exposure Triangle

The exposure of an image is the result of the combination of aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings. The camera calculates the perfect exposure and represents it as a bar in the viewfinder of display on the back of the camera. Perfect exposure is at 0. Above 0 means the photo is overexposed. Below 0 means the photo is underexposed. As a general rule it’s better to have the photo slightly underexposed as it will give more contrast. Small under exposure still ensures enough detail is captured and can be recovered in post-processing. If you overexpose the image, you will lose detail that can’t be recovered. The bar for the calculated exposure should always be between -2 and 2 (my preference is at -0.3, meaning one bar below the 0).

Different combinations of aperture, shutter speed and ISO can result in perfect exposure. It’s important to know what you are trying to achieve, to define which is the more important setting to focus on. If you want to freeze motion, you focus on a high shutter speed (above 1/250) and will adjust the Aperture and ISO accordingly. If you want shallow depth of field, you will focus on a wide aperture (low f-stop number) and then adjust shutter speed and ISO. ISO I always touch last and never go above 800.

Most modern cameras have different modes to manage exposure. I recommend Manual Mode as you will have full control for all settings. In that sense I am a control freak as I want to be the one who screws up the exposure and I don’t want to blame my camera. Other Modes are the Aperture mode where you control the Aperture setting and the Shutter speed Mode where you control the Shutter speed. Automatic Mode defines all the settings for you to get the perfect exposure, and you have no way of adjusting the exposure. Newer cameras have also Program Mode which is basically Automatic Mode but it lets you adjust exposure with the “Exposure Compensation”-button, so you can make the image brighter or darker. Needless to say, to take advantage of creative possibilities with your camera the best is Manual Mode, if you don’t feel confident enough use Aperture Mode or Shutter speed Mode as a starter and then transition to Manual Mode.

**Three examples for perfect exposure with different settings for Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO.**

TIP: The Exposure triangle can also help to remove unwanted (moving) objects in the photo. With a very long exposure (more than a second) you get rid of moving cars or people. The challenge is in broad day light as this setting would let in too much light. Here a ND-filter can help, that artificially limits the light that get through to the lens. I used it for a photo of Cibeles in Madrid and the round-about in front of it. I kept some trails to emphasize that the round-about was not empty.

1sec - f/22 - ISO 100 - In this photo of Cibeles in Madrid and the roundabout in front of it I used a ND-filter to get a very long exposure and remove the traffic from the roundabout. I left some blurred traffic in the frame to highlight that there was traffic that day.

Focus and Sharpness

The exposure triangle will influence how much light will get to the sensor. But there’s another item that I would like to highlight here as a technical basics: Focus. Focus in this context here is about the sharpness of your image. Areas of sharp focus will draw the viewers’ attention, while unintentional blur can ruin an otherwise perfect photo. Intentional blur as I will explain in part two of this series is a creative concept. Sharpness can be enhanced in photo editing software, but almost never be recovered.

With modern cameras, you can either focus automatically (auto focus) or manually (manual focus). I always use auto-focus as my eyesight is not the best. It’s one of the only technical features I trust my camera with. If you use auto-focus, make sure the little switch on the lens is set to AF, otherwise it will not work.

The auto-focus can either have a single focus point or multiple focus points. For travel photography I would use either multiple (my camera uses 9 focus points) or the full frame. For portraits I would recommend a single focus point, especially when you get close up. Put the focus point on the eye that’s closest to you.

The two photos below show how the single focus point is working. In the first one the focus is on the figurine further away. In the second one the focus is on the closer one. I used a wide aperture to enhance the blur and make the depth of field shallower.

TIP: I guess most of you use the release button focus as this is the standard setting for cameras. I prefer the back-button focus. This setting allows you to focus once on an area and the focus is locked until you refocus. This is useful for example if you have a moving object, and you want to follow it. Or if you take a photo in the Serengeti of a lion in the grass. While the grass moves in the wind between shots it might distract your auto-focus. With the back-button focus the focus is locked and you will not have this problem. I admit it will take some time to get used to, but it’s worth it.

Summary

This is the end of the first part of the series on how to take great photos. I explained how aperture, shutter speed and ISO work individually. Then I introduced the exposure triangle and how it’s influenced by those three settings, and at the end I explained focus and how it works. These basics per se don’t make a great photo, but unless you understand them it will be difficult to focus on the composition and the creative side. I encourage you to take your camera and try different settings before moving on to the next part: Mastering Composition.

How to Take Great Photos: A Beginner's Guide for Travel Photography – Part 1: Technical Basics