Technique

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Outdoor Photography Fundamentals

1 Module 0 Chapters 3 Lessons Beginning to Indermediate

About this course

THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

*Practice Examples after each section.

*Pro Tips

Good photography doesn’t just document the scene, it has the power to tell stories, evoke emotions, and even transport your viewer to places they’ve never been before.

However, in order to create photos that carry this kind of impact, you will need to learn, and ultimately master a few fundamentals. You need to understand how the camera sees and responds to light, how different lenses reproduce the scene, and how to select the right compositional technique that will give your image the most visual impact.

And, you need to learn to anticipate and recognize the right moment when to press the shutter .

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If you don’t have a solid grasp of these fundamentals, your imagery will fail to translate the same level of excitement that you had for your scene, and it won’t hold hasting impact with your viewer.

Usually, this is because the picture focuses on contents over style. In other words, the emphasis lies with WHAT’S inside the frame and not HOW it’s portrayed. With the vast majority of pictures, once your viewer identifies the contents of the shot, they move on.

Great photographs play much more to the HOW than the WHAT. Instead of being rooted in REPRODUCTION, they’re rooted in IDEAS that provoke the viewer to imagine the scene for themselves.

Great photos don’t just copy real life, they abbreviate the world according to our own ideas and creative style. Instead of giving the viewer everything; photographs give our audience just enough to make them imagine the rest.

The goal of this course is to help you create images that will not only excite you as the artist, but that will also be remembered by your viewers long after they’ve turned the page or clicked the next link on your website or blog.

WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?

Created for novice to intermediate photographers, this course will show you how to see and compose visually exciting photographs. In a few concise lessons, I’ll give you the tools you need to start improving the visual quality of your images immediately.

This is by no means a comprehensive tutorial on photography, it’s an introduction to some necessary skills that you can being to apply to your own style right away.

Keep in mind, photography is a lifelong process. You’ll probably get frustrated in the beginning when your shots don’t turn out quite as you hoped. However, if you keep at it and take pictures on a regular basis, I guarantee, you’ll improve and make some great looking images

WHY LEARN FROM ME?

There are a lot of outlets for learning available, so why should you choose my course? Because I am an experienced instructor who is dedicated towards helping my students reach their full potential with their cameras.

As a 20+ year pro shooter, I have a great deal of authority and mastery with photography. As a top rated blogger and author, I have a proven track record for teaching my students in a friendly and inspiring way and motivating them with my high level of energy, enthusiasm and expertise.

Now let me help you.

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Course Structure

ONLY FOR LOGGED-IN USERS

3 Lessons

Using Light

Despite the wide range of skills and experience we all possess as outdoor photographers, we all operate on a level paying field with regards to our primary light source, which is, of course, The Sun.

However, as I’m sure you know, sunlight doesn’t always look the same. Variations in geography, latitude, air quality, humidity, weather, season and time of day allow the sun’s rays to appear with an infinite amount of variation with regards to intensity, brightness, direction and hue.

For this reason, it’s actually the light which is the basic ingredient of all photography. It’s what fuels our process and excitement for the craft, even more than the subject matter itself. Just like your eye, the camera sensor doesn’t “see” the subject, it only measures the intensity and color of the light that’s being reflected back from the subject.

The Quality of Light

Intensity: Is the light hard or soft? Direct, full sunlight is hard and intense, while light that is diffused by clouds or that’s partially blocked by some object tends to be softer. Neither is necessarily better or worse, for photography, and as you’ll see in this chapter, which one you use depends largely on what you’re shooting.

The Direction of Light

DIRECTION OF THE LIGHT

Front Lighting

In most situations, shooting straight-on will generally give you good results, especially in especially pleasing light. Of course, that’s not the only approach, nor is it necessarily the best approach. When you shoot with the light off to your side, you start to accentuate your shadows, which highlights shape and texture. Sidelighting and even backlighting can be very effective photography techniques that can produce dramatic results.

Assignment #1

Assignment #1: Shooting in different light

For your first assignment, I want you to experiment with different kinds of lighting techniques. Photograph two or three separate scenes under at least two different lighting conditions, using the examples that we’ve covered above. The subjects can be landscapes, people; whatever sparks your interest, and you might need to visit the scene more than once to get your desired results. Try to make shoot at least one of your scenes during the “magic hours.” When you’ve completed the assignment, upload eight images for critique.