Photography Tips for Beginners: 9 Essential Questions Answered

Nine questions most beginners ask when they're starting out — the kind of thing we cover early on in 1:1 training here in Berkhamsted and across Hertfordshire. No fluff, just the basics.

1. What type of photography do I like?

Worth working out before you spend any money. Try a few things — portraits, landscapes, street, wildlife, whatever — and see what actually holds your attention. Some people know straight away, some don't. Your personality plays a part too. Whether you're introverted or extroverted tends to pull you toward certain areas. That doesn't mean an introvert can't be a portrait photographer — it just means you'll do it in a different style. Neither's better or worse, but it will affect how you actually take the pictures. What you like changes what camera, lens and settings make sense for you, so it's worth sorting this one out first.

2. Which type of camera should I buy?

Depends what you're shooting and how much you want to carry. Sensor size matters more than people realise. Smaller sensors — Micro Four Thirds, APS-C — mean smaller bodies, and that means the lenses are smaller, lighter and cheaper too. Handy if you're carrying gear around for hours, wildlife being the obvious example. Sony's the exception, they've managed to get full frame into small bodies, which is clever. There are advantages and disadvantages to both types. Removable lens cameras mean you can put whichever lens you want on there to get the shot you're after — you're not restricted. Hybrid or bridge cameras have the lens built in, so you're stuck with what you're given. That's fine for most situations, but if you're doing a lot of photography, or want wide-angle landscape or architectural work, you might struggle.

If you want something simple and contained, with the lens built in and nothing to think about, look at a hybrid camera — the Sony RX10 V (following on from the exceptionally popular RX10 IV, and you're likely to find one cheap on eBay) or the 1-inch sensor Fujifilm X Half are worth a look. Canon's rumoured to have a PowerShot V3 coming too, aimed more at photography than video. Micro Four Thirds bodies have been used for years by Panasonic and Olympus (OM System) shooters, and they're still a solid, lighter option if you want removable lenses in a smaller package. Full frame gives you more resolution and better image quality, and it's what you'd want if you're after a shallow depth of field — that fuzzy background look. Smaller sensors can make that harder to get. So it's a genuine trade-off: carry less and spend less, or carry more and pay more for the image quality and that fuzzy background look with full frame, or medium format if you're going further still. Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fuji — they're all solid at beginner level. Go and hold a few before you buy.

If you're still not sure what suits you, that's exactly what a 1:1 photography course is for — bring what you've got, or come with nothing, and we'll work it out together.

3. Is the standard kit lens okay or do I need something else?

Kit lens is fine to start. But if the camera came with the lens included in the price, you're often better off putting that money toward a proper lens instead — it'll be sharper, better in low light, and less annoying to use. It depends what you're shooting. Family stuff and holiday snaps — the kit lens is fine. Landscape, portrait, or wildlife — you'll want something specific to that. Prime lenses (fixed focal length, no zoom) tend to be sharper and give you more of that fuzzy background look. Good quality zoom lenses, usually around ƒ2.8, do a similar job but they're expensive and heavy. For landscapes, where you often want everything in focus rather than a fuzzy background, you'd be looking at something more like ƒ11 instead.

4. Best settings to start using.

If you're completely new, stick to Auto and just practice taking pictures. Once you're comfortable, moving to Program or Aperture Priority will help — they're still fairly automatic, just giving you a bit more control. It's worth leaving a lot on auto to start with — auto white balance, auto ISO, auto focus — and just learning the camera itself. Once you're comfortable, start changing each one individually rather than all at once, so you actually understand what each change is doing to the shot, rather than everything moving at once and you not knowing why the photo looks different.

5. PSAM — what do the settings on my camera dial mean, and is it important?

P — Program. Semi-automatic. You still control things like white balance and ISO yourself, but the camera picks the aperture and shutter speed. Suits most images and is great for beginners.

S / Tv — Shutter Priority. You control the shutter speed. Use this for fast-moving things like cars or animals — 1/1000th of a second or faster. For motion blur — panning shots, blurred moving water — slower shutter speeds, anything from around 1/30th of a second downwards, will start to show it. Most brands mark it S, but Canon calls it Tv (time value).

A / Av — Aperture Priority. You control the aperture size. Use ƒ2.8 or ƒ4 for a fuzzy background with just your subject in focus. Use a higher number like ƒ11 or ƒ16 to get everything, or nearly everything, in focus.

M — Manual. You control everything yourself. Harder to learn than the others, but once you're used to it, it can actually be quicker and easier.

There's more detail on all of this in the Beginners Photography course notes, if you want something to refer back to.

6. What ISO should I be using?

ISO controls how sensitive the sensor is to light. Low ISO — 100 or 200 — gives you the cleanest image, but needs more light to work with. That's fine outdoors in daylight, but indoors, at dusk, or anywhere the light's dropping, you'll need to push it up to keep a usable shutter speed.

High ISO lets you shoot in darker conditions without everything turning to mush from camera shake or motion blur, but the higher you push it, the more noise creeps into the image — that grainy, speckled look, especially in shadows. Modern cameras have got much better at handling this though. ISO 1600 to 6400, which used to look pretty rough, is often perfectly clean on newer sensors. Sensor size plays a part too — full frame handles noise noticeably better at high ISO than 1-inch sensors or Micro Four Thirds, so the same ISO number can look very different depending on what you're shooting with.

The trick is using the lowest ISO the light allows for the shot you're after, and only pushing it up when you genuinely need to. Most cameras will do this for you automatically with Auto ISO, which is worth using if you'd rather not think about it while you're learning everything else.

7. Do I need to worry about white balance?

White balance is how the camera works out what "true white" looks like under whatever light you're shooting in, so colours don't come out too orange or too blue. Different light sources throw different colour casts — tungsten bulbs and candlelight push things orange, shade and overcast skies push things blue, fluorescent lighting often adds a green tint. Your eyes correct for this automatically without you noticing, but a camera sensor doesn't, unless you tell it to.

Auto white balance gets it right most of the time, but it can guess wrong, especially indoors, under mixed lighting (daylight through a window plus a lamp, for example), or under coloured lighting like fairy lights or stage lighting. If your photos are coming out with an odd colour tint that doesn't match what you actually saw, white balance is usually the first place to check.

Most cameras have preset options beyond Auto — Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten, Fluorescent — each one correcting for a specific type of light. If you want more control, white balance can also be set manually using Kelvin, a number representing colour temperature: lower numbers (around 2000-3000K) correct for warm, orange light, higher numbers (around 7000-10000K) correct for cool, blue light. Shooting in RAW gives you the safety net of adjusting white balance properly after the fact, without losing quality, which is one more reason it's worth using over JPEG while you're learning.

8. RAW vs JPEG — what's the difference?

JPEG is the standard photo file — small, ready to share straight away, no editing needed. The camera processes the image itself and compresses it down, but that means some detail gets thrown away in the process. RAW is the unprocessed version — everything the sensor captured, nothing thrown away. The file's much bigger and needs editing before you can share it, but you've got far more room to fix mistakes afterwards — recover a blown-out sky, correct the colour, pull detail out of shadows — things a JPEG often just won't let you do. Shooting RAW is worth it once you're planning to edit your photos. If you just want to shoot and share straight away without touching it afterwards, that's shooting SOOC (straight out of camera) — see below.

9. What's SOOC?

SOOC stands for "straight out of camera." It's always a JPEG, since that's the file the camera's already processed and finished for you — there's no RAW SOOC, because RAW by definition needs processing afterwards.

Shooting SOOC doesn't mean you can't get a specific look though — most cameras let you shape the image before you even press the shutter. Film simulations (Fuji's especially well known for these) can give the image a filmic look straight away. You can adjust colour, protect highlight detail, pull out more shadow detail, and balance the exposure across the shot — Sony calls this DRO, Canon calls it Auto Lighting Optimizer, Nikon calls it Active D-Lighting, every brand's got their own version. Get all of that dialled in and you can take the photo, post it and share it there and then, no editing needed afterwards. It means getting your exposure, white balance and composition right at the point of shooting, since there's nothing to fix later.

Some photographers shoot SOOC deliberately, as a discipline to get better in-camera — and with the tools cameras have now, you can get a genuinely finished-looking image without touching a computer at all.

Finding it hard to learn on your own? Learning via Google, YouTube, blogs and books can be confusing and give conflicting advice. Why not book 1:1 time or come on a course at www.melentraining.co.uk? With years of experience, providing fun training session with easy to learn exercises.