Photography Introduction and Basics

Source: google images
The key to creating a great picture is not the equipment you use; it's about finding your own way of seeing things using photography

What makes a photograph?
Creating a photograph involves the consideration of lighting, focus, colour, contrast, quality and what can be seen sharply. Controlling these elements is what makes an image photographic.
  • Photographs get the essence of things
  • They have the power to evoke, inform and inspire
  • Photography is a democratic medium – global, inexpensive and accessible
  • Photographs are seductive, they feed our imagination about what we want to look like and how we want to live. They fire our aspirations
  • Also allow us to treasure things – ‘you don’t lose anything again’ – Nan Goldin
  • ‘photography has image impact – a single image can say things beyond words, carrying meaning and feeling.’ – Vincent Lee, photographer
  • camera obscura: a small hole in the wall of a darkened room, acts like a lens and project images of the scene outside onto the opposite wall
                                                                            (source: Ingledew - Photography: Loading - 2005)
How do we read a photograph?
Whenever we look at a photographic image we engage in a series of complex readings which relate as much to the expectations and assumptions that we bring to the image as to the photographic subject itself.
  • we read a photograph not as an image but as a text
  • The photograph achieves meaning through what has been called a 'photographic discourse': a language of codes which involves its own grammar and syntax
The photograph is one of the most complex and most problematic forms of representation.
The photographs is itself the product of a photographer. It is always the reflection of a specific point of view. (aesthetic, polemical, political or ideological)
  • denotation (literal meaning) vs connotation (imposition of a second meaning)
                                                                                             (source: Clarke - The Photograph, 1980)
Photography Basics

composition: (n) giving form by putting together or combining various elements, parts or ingredients
‘What you see in the photograph isn’t what you saw at the time. The real skill of photography is organized visual lying.’ – Terence Donovan (photographer)
  •     composition is the process of identifying and arranging the elements to produce a coherent image. Everything in an image forms its ‘composition’

‘Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.” – Garry Winogrand (photographer)
  •          composition is the mental editing process a photographer applies as they work on an image to make its message easier for the viewer to read

  rule of thirds: the focus of interest must be placed at the intersection of lines that divide the frame into thirds from top to bottom and from left to right
dynamic symmetry: uses diagonals rather than a grid – diagonal from one corner of frame to other

Styles / Themes
landscape, still life, portrait, documentary, figure, action / sports, fine art, advertising
  • composition is the process of organising space
  • framing is the most important part of the process of composition - the proportions and orientation of the frame dictate how the process of composition proceeds
  • exaggeration is one of the photographer's most powerful tools
(source: Basics Photography - Composition, Space)

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