7 Things You Can Do Today To Fall In Love With Photography

The thumb rule is – you fall in love with things that you can do right. If you can get some astounding pictures you’ll fall in love with your own art. But just in case you haven’t made it there yet here’s a list of things you can do today and see yourself shooting like a pro.

1. Shoot a low-light scene

   Your camera still can see everything in the night when you play blind. It’s just a matter of getting the settings. Go out of the city from where you can see all the city lights. Place your camera on a stand or steady surface. Set your camera to ISO100 and aperture priority mode. Set the aperture to your liking… you may want to open up the full aperture. Compose and shoot. The shutter will take some time to do it’s thing but the results will be beautiful.
   

2. Shoot wild colors

   If you look around, you’ll find at least one object that has wildly saturated color(s). These subjects stand out real well in photographs and form a point of interest.
   

3. Shoot black and white

   Sometimes colors tend to add unnecessary complexity to an image. If you have more to your composition than colors, wash them out. Black and Whites look classy.
   

4. Shoot from a weird angle

   Unusual angles always create interest in a photograph. They showcase the subject in a new perspective.
   

5. Use an effect to create interest

   A blur and bokeh are two simple effects you can achieve by shooting in Shutter priority and aperture priority respectively. Adding some blur gives the effect of movement or motion in the photograph. Bokeh gives some surreal beautiful effects in portraits. When you shoot in aperture priority, using a low f-number gives you a very narrow depth-of-field thereby eliminating your subject from the background. And if you’ve got a good portrait lens, the background is even beautified.
   

6. Use the magic light to your advantage

   Here’s what magic light looks like at an extreme.
   And this is how it lights up the subject.
   
   Magic light will give you wonderful effects, color and pictures. Learn to use it.

7. Tweak your camera settings

   People go crazy spending time reading the camera specs and doing the noise and sharpness comparision of their equipment. But the main flexibility that your DSLR allows is that you can always tweak the settings to your liking. Learn to saturate the colors and to alter the white-balance. Depending on the kind of scene and lighting that you shoot in you will almost always need to change these settings. Go for it and get creative while you are at it. Explore and discover what works best for you.

Shoot these and share your pics with us in our Flickr pool.