When is your ISO setting too low?

I have been asked by Mick, on my post showing an example of noise, how do you know if your ISO is set too low? A good question. The idea with ISO is to keep it as low as you can to get the best image quality, but setting your ISO too low will mean [...]

What is the Rule Of Thirds

I mentioned in my overview of composition that one guideline is called the Rule Of Thirds and this involves dividing the image into a 3 by 3 grid like this:    You can see in this example that the windmill is placed in the centre of the frame. This goes against the rule of thirds [...]

Composition

Composition is probably the most important thing to get right in photography in my opinion. Nowadays slight errors in exposure can be corrected on the computer but composition is very hard to put right unless you are a photoshop expert. Sure, you can crop your image and chop off the edges to get a better [...]

An example of depth of field

In another post about aperture priority, I talked about depth of field as being the amount of the photo that is in focus for a given aperture setting. The following two images demonstrate this. The first uses an aperture of f2.8 which is a very wide aperture meaning the hole that light can pass through [...]

An example of noise

In another of my posts called What is ISO I talked about something called noise. This is the grainy effect you can see on your images in certain circumstances. Increasing the ISO setting on your camera is the main way that you will start to see more noise. The following image shows 3 different ISO [...]

What camera should I buy?

This is one of the most common questions I get asked, and it’s one of the hardest to answer. If you think about how many digital cameras are on the market right now ranging from under £100 all the way up to several thousand pounds, then recommending a single camera is a very hard thing [...]