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Bernie's Better Beginner's Guide to Photography for

Computer Geeks Who Want to be Digital Artists
Illustrated with photos wot I 'ave taken.
This is a beginner's guide for computer geeks who want to be digital artists. Specifically:

Roll over a section of the diagram.

There is a lot of material in this article, so I suggest you have your camera with you as you read it and try out
the techniques as you go along. If you don't have a camera yet then you can still enjoy this article; however if
you do intend to buy a camera sooner or later, I suggest doing so before you read. Check out the buying
advice at the end of the page.

This is the first in a series of articles on photography. If you like what you see, why not subscribe to my
feed for photography articles. I welcome any feedback, post a comment to my blog.

Introduction
An extended apology: Most authors of photography guides are experienced professionals, and speak with
the authority of the published photographer. Instead I write this beginner's guide with the authority of a
beginner. I flatter myself that I am better placed to advise the beginner geek on how to learn to use a camera
than the professional photographer is: I have just been a beginner myself, so what was confusing and what
was simple is fresh in my mind.

Speaking of my being a beginner, this is the first long article I've written. Do e-mail me and tell me what you
think of it. bernie at berniecode dot com.

</apology>

This is the guide I wish someone had written for me when I started 3 months ago. It's much shorter than
photography books that cover the same topics because it's a computer geek's guide. I skip right over the

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basics of using a camera because you can guess your way through the basics or even read your camera
manual (wimp!). I skip any advice about composition or artistic technique because there are better guides that
cover those (though I might give it a shot next month). I use terms without defining them because I assume you
can use Wikipedia if you need more detail.

For further reading covering field technique and composition I unreservedly recommend John Shaw's Nature
Photography Field Guide. Also, the National Geographic field guides are said (by my sister) to be good.

If you want to be a digital artist then you'll need to be so comfortable using your camera that the exposure
controls are second nature to you, so you can focus yourself on composing the scene that you want. This
guide tries to get you to that point as quickly as possible. Some otherwise excellent photography guides take
ages walking through the basics of exposure before gradually eking out the advanced details. This will never
do: you're a geek and can be dropped in at the deep end.

This guide doesn't even try and address how to create a composition that qualifies as art, but this one does
and the book Photography and the Art of Seeing goes further.

Onwards…

Digital SLR systems

For this article I'll be assuming that you have an SLR camera*. The distinguishing feature of an SLR is that
when you look through the viewfinder you see through the lens. This means that you can view the picture
pretty much exactly as it will look when you take it. You can also change the lens mounted on the camera body
to alter the look of the photo. The technical details are quite interesting, but you don't need to know them to
use the camera.

When you take a picture with a digital SLR you allow an amount of light through a lens, focusing it onto a bit of
silicon called a image sensor that contains light-sensitive cells that record an image.

The amount of light that you allow in is called the exposure. Getting the correct exposure is most of the effort
of learning photography, and hence the main thrust of this article. Playing with creative effects like long
exposure is much easier once you have exposure down to second nature.

Focal length
Focal length is the most obvious way in which a lens affects a photo: it controls the angle of view, and hence
how much of the scene is included in your photo. The reason that it is measured in focal length rather than
degrees, is that the angle of view yielded by a certain focal length depends on the size of the camera's image
sensor. This relationship is easy to see in a diagram of a pinhole camera, where the focal length is the same
as the distance between the pinhole and the film:

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With a drum roll to celebrate the first time in my life that trigonometry has had any practical purpose, the angle
of view is given by the formula arctan((<sensor size>/2) / <focal length>) x 2, for reasons that
should become obvious if you split the diagram above into right-angled triangles.

If you don't fancy carrying a calculator, you can visualise how focal length will affect the angle of view by
imagining looking through a piece of card with a 35mm diagonal (i.e. about two by three centimeters)
rectangular hole in it: hold the card twice as far from your face and you'll see half as much through it.

So doubling the focal length is just like cropping the photo to half of its width and height and blowing up
the result to full size, except without the loss of resolution that would occur if you did that in Photoshop.
Everything else about the picture remains exactly the same.

A landscape at 18mm, the white box marking 1/5 of The same landscape at 90mm: the focal length is 5
the width and height times longer so the area marked by the white box fills
the whole scene

Focal length and perspective: OK, backpedaling time. If two photos are taken from the same position
different focal lengths, then the longer focal length photo will look like a crop from the middle of the shorter
focal length photo. However, often a photographer will change position as she changes focal length. When
you're shooting a specific subject you will use a wide angle lens and get right up close to the subject, or a
telephoto lens and stand back; either way, the subject fills the whole frame, but the perspective will look very
different:

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Using a wide angle lens means that the camera is much closer to the subject than the subject is to the
background. This exaggerates perspective and makes the background seem small and distant. The reverse is
true with the telephoto shot, which includes less of the background while making it appear closer to the subject.
This thistle was shot with 3 different focal lengths:

Stops and exposure settings: the basics

When you take a picture you allow an amount of light through the lens, focusing it onto the image sensor. The
amount of light you let in is measured in stops. Stops are a relative measure of lightness: you can't say "there
are three stops of light coming from that surface", but you can say that one surface is three stops brighter than
another. Adding one stop means doubling of the amount of light that the plate records. In fact, 'a stop' is really
just photographic slang for a doubling. On old cameras, stops were literally dents in a dial that made it easy to
stop when you reached the desired setting. We measure light like this because the human eye perceives each
doubling to be an equal increase in light.

Using a relative measure makes sense because there is no such thing as a standard amount of light that
equals grey. How bright grey is depends on how strongly lit the scene is; a dark granite rock in bright sunshine
actually has more light reflecting off it than than snow at twilight. It is not the absolute brightness of objects in
your scene that matters, but their brightness relative to each other, or how many stops apart they are. When
photographing these objects you adjust the exposure settings to make sure that the twilight snow still looks
white and the sunlit rock looks dark.

The amount of light you record is controlled by the camera's exposure settings: aperture, shutter speed
and sensitivity. Opening the aperture by a stop or decreasing the shutter speed by a stop or increasing the

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sensitivity by a stop all have the effect of doubling the brightness of your scene. However, the shutter speed
and aperture have other aesthetic effects that affect how your picture looks in a way that is very hard to
remove or replicate in Photoshop, so you must make a decision when you shoot.

Shutter speed
The shutter speed is considered an exposure setting because opening the shutter for twice as long lets in twice
as much light which increases the exposure of the whole scene by a stop. However you can also use it
aesthetically: faster shutter speeds freeze a moving subject, slower speeds record a motion blur. Neither is
'correct': a photo of a stream with a 1/800 second shutter would record each sharp sparkling droplet of water
frozen in mid-air, whereas a 4 second exposure would render the stream as a softly flowing ethereal smoke.
Either can look beautiful.

A shutter speed of 1/800 second freezes this A 10 second exposure produces streaked lines of
baseball in mid-air. headlights and a ghost of a car that was parked for
half of the exposure.

Aperture, or 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, erm, what the f***?

Lenses have an aperture to control the amount of light entering them. This is an iris that can open and close to
allow more or less light in. Aperture is measured in 'f numbers' – written f/x where x is the ratio of the aperture
width to the focal length. Low f-numbers mean wide apertures letting in more light. Aperture has a reputation
for being complicated so some guides suggest that you just memorize the f-number sequence and ignore the
internal details. Being a geek, you'll find it much simpler when you understand why it is measured like this.

The first supposedly confusing thing about aperture is that it is not measured as a width but as a ratio of focal
length to width. This makes more sense if you consider that the scene you're photographing is a light source.
Recall that doubling the focal length will half the width and height of the bit of the scene that you project onto
the camera plate. Therefore at double the focal length, only 1/4 of the scene area is providing light, so the
aperture area must be 4 times as large to compensate (i.e. the aperture width must double). A constant f
number means a constant amount of light entering the aperture regardless of the focal length.

The next supposedly confusing thing about aperture is that the f-number sequence goes in stop increments: 1,
1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32. There is a logic to this. A 50mm lens with a 50mm aperture will have an f
number of f/1 (the ratio of the focal length to the aperture diameter: 50/50 = 1). If you want to halve the amount
of light reaching the sensor you must halve the area of the aperture. To half the area of a circle you divide the

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diameter by 1.4 (give or take), and since diameter is the denominator in the f-number equation, this means that
the f-number is increased by a factor of 1.4. Each f-number is 1.4 times the previous one and lets in half
as much light. When someone says "close", "reduce" or "step down" the aperture, they mean increase
number.

Like shutter speed, aperture affects the look of the photo, specifically the depth of field. At narrow apertures
the whole of a scene will be in focus, whereas at wide apertures only the bit of the scene that you focus on will
be on focus; as is clear in the case of these cheap fake flowers:

At f/16 the background is distracting At f/1.4 the background is reduced to a blur, but not
all of the subject is in focus either.

The nature of the out-of-focus blur that an aperture produces is called bokeh, a term coined by a magazine
editor sick of hearing people mispronounce the Japanese word 'boke' (meaning blur) to rhyme with smoke.
Good on him, but I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to pronounce it.

Long focal lengths and bokeh: Using a long focal length lens appears to make the background more blurred.
In fact the background is just as blurred, but is larger. This is easier to see in a photo that only contains the out
of focus background:

A blurred leafy background at 30mm, f/2.8 The same shot at 85mm, f/2.8.

In both shots each leaf is just as blurred relative to its own size, but in the wide angle there are more leaves
and each one is smaller. In either shot you would reposition the camera so that the subject filled the whole

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frame. The long focal length therefore increases the size of the background relative to the subject, increasing
the apparent blur. This is useful in portraits, when background detail only serves to distract from your subject.

Depth of field in greater... ahem... depth (sorry)

Depth of field is a huge topic, so I've written another article exclusively about it.

Sensitivity
The sensitivity of the camera's plate is measured in ISO sensitivity units which were originally used to
measure the sensitivity of chemical film. Most digital SLRs offer a range from 100 to 1600, with 100 being the
least sensitive. Some offer lower or higher ISOs; as of September 2007 the champion is the £3,400 Nikon D3
with a maximum ISO setting of 25,600.

Sensitivity is a very useful exposure setting, because it (almost) doesn't affect the look of the final image, so
can be used to help you achieve a combination of aperture and shutter speed that gives you the look you
need. Take this shot for example:

The extreme depth of field required a narrow aperture of f/22, ensuring that the grass and mountains were
sharp, and my camera's meter decided that a shutter speed of 1/15 second was required to correctly expose
the image. A breeze was causing the grass to sway so much that a shutter speed of 1/60 was required to
freeze it. 1/60 is 4 times faster than 1/15, so the scene would be underexposed by 2 stops. I increased the
sensitivity by 2 stops from 100 to 400 and the scene was correctly exposed.

There is a caveat: noise. At very high sensitivities the picture becomes noisy. This is because at higher
ISOs you are making an image from a smaller amount of light, so the signal to noise ratio drops. As a last
resort you can try to remove this noise in Photoshop, but this can also remove fine detail so it is better to get a
clean photo in the first place.

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The following set of magnified images show individual pixels from a photo of a lamp fitting at various ISOs.
These results will hold true for most digital SLRs. However, top of the line professional models will have lower
noise at high ISOs.

At ISO 100, no noise is visible At ISO 400 the picture is still excellent

At ISO 800, noise becomes visible At ISO 1600 the image is very noisy

However, noise is less obvious in print than it is on screen, so you may well be able to get away with high
sensitivities.

As a rule of thumb you should shoot in the lowest ISO that gives you the shutter speed and depth of field
that you need. If you need more depth of field but don't want to reduce the shutter speed, increase the ISO
and reduce the aperture. If you need a faster shutter speed and don't want to lose depth of field by opening up
the aperture, increase the ISO and the shutter speed. If you're shooting a still landscape on a tripod at ISO 800
and 1/100 second shutter speed, you're just wasting image quality: reduce the ISO to 100 and the shutter
speed to 1/12 second. Some SLRs and most Point and Shoot cameras have an Auto ISO setting, which

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selects the lowest ISO that will give you a reasonable shutter speed. What qualifies as "reasonable" is an
exercise left to the manufacturer, so you may still need to set the ISO manually if your camera's choice isn't
appropriate.

I find that far more of my shots are ruined by motion blur caused by slow shutter speeds than by noise so
hesitate to crank up the sensitivity if you need to. In addition, it is often possible to remove much of the
noise on in processing. The following crop is from a picture that had to be taken at my camera's highest
sensitivity. The top half is processed with the Photoshop plugin Noise Ninja.

Metering
Digital SLRs have built-in light meters that calculate the required exposure settings to expose the object you're
pointing the camera at as a medium tone. However, the camera doesn't know what you're pointing at, and will
happily expose a white subject as grey unless you correct the exposure settings. You use the exposure dial
tell the camera to render the object that you are pointing at as a lighter or darker tone.

There are 5 stops between black and white, so black is 2.5 stops below mid-toned and white is 2.5 stops
above mid-toned (take this as read for now, I cover it in more detail in the next section). Strangely, my Canon
30D's exposure dial only covers 2 stops, so I have to use manual mode if I need absolute whites or blacks.

The dial at the default setting: The metered object will be The metered object will be
the metered object will be mid- near-white. near-black.
toned.

You can set your camera to spot metering which meters a small area in the centre of the scene, centre
weighted metering which meters the whole scene but pays more attention to the middle, or evaluative
metering which meters the whole scene. Especially for evaluative metering, check the histogram (see the next
section) right after shooting to make sure that the exposure came out correctly.

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The metering lock button lets you meter a specific object, lock the exposure settings for that meter reading,
and then point the camera somewhere else to take the picture. This is how you meter an object that is not right
in the middle of your composition.

This waterfall looked white, so I
spot-metered it and dialed in 2
stops of overexposure to make sure
that it looked like it appeared in real
life.
You can also change the suggested
exposure values for creative effect. This
moody nebulous image was actually a
bright cloudy sky. I metered the cloud at
the bottom, used the metering lock button
to record that reading, then dialed in 2
stops of underexposure to render it near-
black.

Digital SLRs have four useful exposure modes that work with metering. Program mode chooses an aperture
and shutter speed for you, leaving you free to think about composition. Aperture priority mode lets you
choose an aperture, and the camera will set the shutter speed to correctly expose the scene; this is the most
useful mode because it makes it easy to get the best depth of field possible (set to minimum aperture) or the
fastest available shutter speed for the current lighting (set to maximum aperture). Shutter priority mode
you pick a shutter speed and the camera will set the aperture. In all of these automatic modes, you point the
camera at an object and then use the exposure dial to tell the camera how light or dark that object should be.

In manual mode the exposure dial works the other way round: you choose an aperture and shutter speed, and
the metering system will set the exposure dial to tell you how light or dark the object you're pointing at is:

The exposure dial indicating

that with the current settings,
the metered object will be 2/3

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of a stop above mid-toned.

When I'm taking time to work a subject, carefully setting up shots with specific effects in mind, I like to use
manual mode since it forces me to think about the exposure settings. When I'm walking around looking for
interesting moments to take snap shots of, I stick to the automatic modes.

Histograms
Digital SLRs come with a histogram display so that you can tell how an image is exposed. Set your camera to
show you an RGB histogram of each shot after you take it so you can tell if it is correctly exposed and retake
the shot if necessary. Later in this guide I show you how to correct a poor exposure on a computer, but you'll
get better results and a smug feeling of competency if you get it right in the field.

Incorrectly exposed images produce histograms with large spikes at either end; correctly exposed images look
like smooth bell curves. There is an example of each in the next section.

Looking at the histogram after each shot is the fastest way to get a feel for correct exposure.

Stops and exposure: advanced stuff

Every device for capturing light has a dynamic range – the number of stops between the darkest black and
the lightest white that can be captured. Shades outside this range will be clipped, appearing featureless black
or white. This is why, when somebody shines a torch at you at night, you can't see their face – the human eye
can perceive 15 stops of dynamic range, and the torch bulb is more than 15 stops lighter than their face.

On a film camera there are 5 stops between the darkest black and the lightest white. This is a much smaller
dynamic range than the human eye can detect. This means that if you have a scene with say a bright cloudy
sky and a dark shaded valley, you can see both in detail at the same time but a camera can not. If the
shadows in the valley are more than 5 stops darker than the white of the clouds, then either the clouds will be a
wash of overexposed white or the shadows will be a mass of underexposed black.

Digital SLR camera sensors actually capture much more information that just the 5 stops that you see on your
screen. My Canon 30D captures 9 stops in total: 2 stops on each side of the 5 stops you can see. It uses this
information internally to adjust white balance, but in order to reproduce the rich, high-contrast look of
traditional film the 9 stops are clipped down to 5 to produce a JPEG file that looks like a traditional film print.

Traditional film photographers got around the 5-stop limit by using graduated neutral density filters –
attachments for the front of a lens that shaded the sky, decreasing its brightness so that the sky and shadows
could both be properly exposed. Don't bother: the digital artist has two tools not available to the film
photographer that are far more flexible. By using RAW image adjustment and combining multiple shots
Photoshop, you can create your perfect exposure back in the office, leaving you free in the field to focus on
choices that can't be changed later like motion blur and depth of field.

RAW image adjustment

Digital cameras actually capture 9 stops of dynamic range and then clip it down to 5 stops when the image is
converted to JPEG. However, if you set your camera to shoot in RAW, all the clipped information will be saved
so you can change your mind about how you want it to be clipped later.

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Here's an example of a tree that I shot against a bright sky on a sunny day:

The camera's automatic metering set the aperture to f/10 and shutter speed to 1/250 second which recorded
the sky correctly as a light blue with bright white clouds. However when I looked at the scene in person the tree
was a brilliantly backlit bright green, but here it is a dark silhouette – around 2 stops too dark compared to how
my eyes saw it. This histogram of all individual red, green and blue pixel values shows the problem clearly; the
spike to the left is caused by all the detail darker than the lowest of the 5 stops being clipped to plain black:

If I manually increased the exposure of the whole scene by 2 stops, say by decreasing the shutter speed to
1/60, the sky would have lost all detail and become a wash of white. The solution is to use a RAW adjustment
program to selectively lighten the underexposed shadows without lightening the correctly exposed highlights.
Your camera should come with a program that does this, but if Canon's program is anything to go by it won't be
nearly as usable as Photoshop's RAW file import dialogue. Canon's program is said to produce a higher image
quality; personally I can't tell the difference.

Photoshop gives you a 'Fill light' slider that increases the brightness of the shadows selectively:

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And as you can see from the new histogram, the spike at the left is gone and replaced with a nice smooth bell
curve:

Of course there is a cost – loss of contrast in the highlights, which had to be compressed to make room for
the shadow detail. Compare the second histogram to the first. The three peaks for red green and blue to the
right of the graph correspond the gradient across the sky. They exist in both histograms, but in the second one
they are narrower: the difference between the lightest and darkest bit of sky is smaller than in the first
exposure, and hence the gradient across the sky is less dramatic. In this case, the trade-off is easily
worthwhile.

Combining multiple shots

RAW image adjustment works well when you have no more than a couple of stops underexposure or
overexposure, because if you go more than 2 stops past the 5 stop limit of a scene's dynamic range, you
exceed the 9 stop dynamic range of your camera's sensor and any detail in the poorly exposed areas is lost for
ever.

Outside the window of my Norwegian holiday cabin where my wife is sunbathing it is a bright day; inside where
I am hunched over a laptop it is much darker:

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In order to get a good exposure of Exposing the outside correctly

the inside, I needed a shutter required 1/80 second at the same
speed of 1/3 second at f/4 aperture

This 5 stop difference is far more than we can hope to recover with RAW image adjustment. If you shoot both
exposures, you can combine them in Photoshop using a layer mask to create an image that would be
impossible using a film camera:

Using a mask used to combine the ... in Photoshop ... ... Yields an image that looks more

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2 exposures ... like what my eyes saw at the time.

I created the layer mask by inverting the dark image, blurring it, increasing the contrast and retouching a few
areas with the brush tool.

Make sure you shoot with a tripod so that the two exposures overlay accurately (unlike in my hurried attempt,
where blurring from hand-holding shows up in the interior shot and rotating / resizing was necessary to realign
the images). Then take both photos into Photoshop as layers, add a layer mask, and use the brush tool on the
layer mask to literally paint detail into the shadows. It's surprising how well it works.

White balance
Artificial light is much warmer than sunlight, with more red and less blue in it. Your eyes adjust to the current
light temperature and after a while you won't notice it. Cameras do not automatically adjust however:

This portrait was taken under dim Adjusting the white balance to the
street lighting, rendering it unusable lowest temperature that
without correction. Photoshop's RAW import dialogue
supports was enough to correct this
extreme lighting.

Cameras have a setting to correct white balance as you take the shot, but I find it easier to leave the camera
alone and correct the white balance on my computer.

For a detailed technical explanation of what's actually happening, check out this article: Understanding White
Balance.

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Filters
Filters were an important part of the prehistoric photographer's equipment. Coloured filters could enhance a
scene, warming or cooling it to compensate for different kinds of lighting. Graduated neutral density filters
decreased contrast within a scene, allowing a bright sky and dark land to be captured in one exposure.

The digital artist doesn't need most of the filters because the effects can be applied digitally – white balance
settings on your camera or in Photoshop affect the scene warmth, and the advanced exposure techniques
covered above are much more flexible than graduated neutral density filters.

There are a 2 filters that are very useful however, because they change the image in ways that can't be
reproduced by a computer:

Polarising filters
If you take any photos outdoors, you need one of these.

Light scattered through the upper atmosphere becomes polarised by ice particles, or something like that, I
forget the details. This polarisation survives being reflected off shiny surfaces like sweaty foreheads. However,
when light is absorbed and re-emitted from a surface as coloured light, it loses its polarisation. Because of this
a polarising filter can do two things: remove white haze from the sky rendering it a deep blue, and remove
white reflections from surfaces revealing their true colour. Alternatively, if it is the reflections you are trying to
photograph, you can rotate the filter 90 degrees to increase their brightness.

Photography on sunny days can sometimes be disappointing because the scene never looks as colourful as it
seemed to when you were there. Polarising filters help capture bright scenes as they appear to the human eye.

A photo without a polarising filter. The same shot with a polarising filter. The sky is

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darkened, and the reflections from the petals are

removed.

Neutral Density filters

Neutral density (ND) filters are dark filters that reduce the brightness of a scene. You may need them if you like
to play with long exposures for artistic effect. Even at the narrowest aperture, a 5 minute exposure will
overexpose anything but the darkest night scene. Adding a strong ND filter can allow you to use these extreme
settings. An ND filter can also allow you to take photos of very bright subjects without hurting your eyes.

An ND filter allowed me to get the 30 second Taking a photo directly into the sun would have hurt
exposure I needed to render this babbling brook as a my eyes without an ND filter.
serene glassy flow.

ND filters are just another way of affecting exposure, so it should come as no surprise by now that they're
measured in stops. How strong a filter you need depends on your requirements. I just metered a daylight
scene at my camera's minimum sensitivity of ISO 100 and minimum aperture of f/32 and was told that I needed
a shutter speed of 1/50 to expose it properly. That is therefore the longest shutter speed I could achieve
without an ND filter. If I wanted to take a 5 second exposure, I would need an 8 stop ND filter (1/50 doubled 8
times = 5). If I wanted to do a 5 minute exposure, I'd need a 14 stop filter.

Some filters are sold as, e.g. "8x" filters, which reduce brightness by a factor of eight. This is equivalent to
three halving of the brightness, so it is actually a 3 stop filter.

ND filters can be stacked together and their stop values add together.

A warning about filters

With digital cameras it is especially important to buy filters with non-reflective coating, because otherwise
light reflected from the sensor can bounce back onto it, causing ghosting. If you spend a lot of money on
lenses, the best way to ruin their quality is to put a cheap filter in front of them. I use the Hoya PRO1 super
hard multi-coated range (over £50 for a polarising filter) and have no issues with them.

Accessories

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Tripod
You can hand-hold a photograph at a shutter speed of around 1/focal length, i.e. with my Sigma 30mm lens on
my 1.6x crop factor body, I must have a shutter speed of at least 1/50 second to reliably hand hold it, and even
then the occasional shot may have noticeable blurring from camera shake. Buying an image stabilised lens
(and they aren't cheap) can let you hand-hold a photo at 2 or 3 stops slower than usual. For shots that require
slower shutter speeds, you'll require a tripod and a remote shutter release button to avoid shaking the tripod as
you press the shutter (though you can use the camera's self timer for this).

Monopods are one-legged tripods (unless tripods are three-legged monopods) that offer less stability but
greater freedom of movement that makes them more suitable for action and event photography.

Another benefit of a tripod is that it makes it easier to compose a shot. Especially in low light and with telephoto
lenses, framing and focusing a shot is hard. Using a tripod lets you carefully set up the shot so that you don't
accidentally clip off part of your scene or introduce a wonky horizon.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you don't have a good tripod, you are wasting your money buying
expensive lenses. I have a Manfrotto 458(B) Neotec (£215) and 468 MGRC2 head (£165). This is expensive
stuff, but it increases the proportion of my usable shots far more than a new lens five times that price.

Macro dioptres
Macro dioptres are magnifying glasses that screw onto the filter thread at the end of a lens and enable it to
focus on very close objects. They are called dioptres because Jessops wouldn't be able to charge £50 for a
magnifying glass, but for a dioptre, now that sounds like a bargain. Long zoom lenses typically have a
minimum focusing distance of 1 to 2 meters. With a Macro dioptre attached they can focus much closer,
enabling you to fill the whole photo with an insect for example.

When working with small subjects An 'actual pixels' crop from the

http://www.berniecode.com/writing/photography/beginners/ 19/09/2009
Bernie's Better Beginner's Guide to Photography Page 19 of 19

close to the lens the depth of field is
very narrow - note how only the
petals at the front of the flower are
in focus.
image shows that it is extremely
sharp. I thought that you would
need a macro lens for this kind of
quality. I was wrong. Score 1 for my
philosophy of trying to get away
with cheap kit before getting
expensive stuff.

Make sure you buy a dual element dioptre, like those from Canon or Nikon. They are optically far superior to
the single element ones, and don't cost much more. A good macro dioptre mounted on a sharp lens produces
results just as good as a dedicated macro lens, for a fraction of the price.

The end!
I hope you've found this article entertaining. Think of it as the first section of a book: now that we've covered
the basics, we can have some fun. Every month (hopefully) I'll publish a new chapter based around a certain
technique. It might be long exposure, flash, portrait photography or anything really. As always, I'll be writing
from the position of a beginner. If you have something you'd like me to write about, or any questions or
comments, post to my blog.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

http://www.berniecode.com/writing/photography/beginners/ 19/09/2009