Photography Techniques Beginners Should Learn First

Many "out of focus" beginner pictures are really camera shake, and fixing it costs nothing. Use both hands, tuck your elbows against your body, plant your feet and press the shutter gently at the end of a slow breath out. With a viewfinder, bracing the camera against your face adds a third point of contact; with a phone, a wall, railing or doorframe does the same job. Exercise: indoors in the evening, photograph the same bookshelf ten times one-handed at arm's length, then ten times braced. Zoom in on all twenty at home and count the sharp ones.

A phone lens lives in pockets and under thumbs, and a greasy smear turns bright lights into hazy glare and softens contrast across the whole frame. Wipe it gently with a clean microfibre cloth rather than a shirt hem, which can scratch the glass and its coating, and check that the case opening is clean too. Skip glass cleaner and alcohol wipes. Exercise: photograph a lit lamp or a streetlight at dusk without cleaning the lens, then wipe it and take the same picture again. The difference in the glow around the light is usually obvious, and the habit sticks once you have seen it.

Left alone, a camera often focuses on whatever is nearest or most contrasty, which is rarely a person's eyes. On a phone, tap the subject on screen; on an iPhone, touch and hold until AE/AF Lock appears, and focus and brightness stay put while you reframe. On most cameras, half-pressing the shutter button focuses and holding it there keeps that focus as you recompose. Exercise: put a mug close to you and a plant further back. Take one picture focused on each, then lock focus on the mug and turn slightly so it sits at the edge of the frame before shooting. Deciding what is sharp is the first real creative choice.

The camera's meter aims for an average grey, so snow comes out dull and a face against a bright sky turns into a silhouette. Exposure compensation is the fix: the plus and minus dial on a camera, or the sun-shaped slider beside the focus box on an iPhone, with similar controls on Android phones. Each full stop doubles or halves the light, and most cameras step in thirds. Watch the brightest parts. A white sky or shirt that has gone flat with no detail cannot be recovered, while slightly dark shadows usually can, so when in doubt err a little darker. Exercise: photograph something white, something black and something mid-toned, each at minus one, zero and plus one, and notice which setting looks truest for each.

Shutter speed decides how movement looks. A fast setting such as 1/500 of a second freezes a child mid-jump or a dog mid-run; a slow one turns a waterfall silky and car lights into streaks, but only if the camera is held perfectly still or rested on something. For handheld shots, a useful guide is to keep the shutter speed no slower than one over the lens's focal length, so roughly 1/50 second at 50mm, adjusted for a smaller sensor's crop factor. Stabilisation buys some leeway; it does nothing for a moving subject. Exercise: in shutter priority (S or Tv), photograph a tap running at 1/1000, 1/60 and 1/8 second. Phone users can try the same with a long-exposure or Live Photo effect.

Aperture is the size of the lens opening, and its numbers run backwards: a small f-number such as f/1.8 is a wide opening that lets in lots of light and leaves only a thin slice of the scene sharp, while f/11 or f/16 keeps far more in focus from front to back. That is why portraits are often shot wide open and landscapes stopped down. Background blur also grows as you move closer to the subject and the subject moves further from the background. Most phones have small fixed openings, so portrait mode creates the blur in software; the same distances still make it convincing. Exercise: in aperture priority (A or Av), photograph a friend a few metres in front of a hedge at your lowest f-number and at f/11, then step closer and repeat.

ISO sets how strongly the camera amplifies the light it receives. Higher settings add grainy noise, which is why beginners are told to keep it low, but that advice taken too far produces something worse: a blurred picture from a shutter speed too slow to hold. A little noise in a sharp photo of a birthday cake by candlelight beats a clean smear. On a camera, Auto ISO with a sensible maximum and a minimum shutter speed lets it rise only when it must. Phones usually set ISO automatically, so this one matters most once you own a camera. Exercise: indoors at night, photograph the same scene at ISO 100, 800 and 3200, keeping shutter speed fast enough to hold. Compare the noise and the sharpness at full size.

One of the most common problems in beginners' pictures is a small subject lost in a big, busy scene. Decide what the picture is of, then walk towards it until it fills most of the frame. Use your feet before the zoom: on a phone, pinching beyond its built-in lenses only crops and enlarges the picture, so detail drops away. Exercise: pick one subject, such as a bicycle, a doorway or a friend, and take five pictures, each a step closer than the last. Your favourite will often be a step or two nearer than where you would normally have stopped.

Almost every phone and camera can overlay a grid of two horizontal and two vertical lines. Placing the subject on one of those lines or where they cross, rather than dead centre, usually gives a picture more movement and room to breathe; putting the horizon on the upper or lower line stops a landscape feeling split in half. The grid also makes a tilted horizon impossible to miss. Treat it as a starting habit, not a law: a symmetrical building or a face looking straight at you can sit perfectly well in the middle. Exercise: switch the grid on today and leave it on. Photograph the same view three times with the horizon low, central and high, and decide which you prefer.

Beginners look at the subject; the picture includes everything else too. A lamp post growing out of someone's head, a bin at the edge of the frame or a bright window behind a face pulls the eye away from what matters. Before pressing the shutter, run your eyes around the four edges and behind the subject, then fix what you see by stepping sideways, crouching or moving the subject a pace or two. Exercise: for one week, make a deliberate edge check before every picture. Then compare those shots with a batch from before the week; the tidier backgrounds usually show straight away.

Almost everyone photographs from standing eye height, so pictures taken from anywhere else look fresher straight away. Crouch to a child's or a pet's level and they become the main character rather than something seen from above; get low over a path and the ground becomes part of the story; climb a few steps and a market or a crowded table turns into a pattern. Exercise: choose one subject and photograph it from five heights, from lying on the ground to arm raised above your head, without changing anything else. Keep the one you would not have taken before.

Roads, rivers, fences, railings and shadows all act as paths for the viewer's eye. Position yourself so a line starts near the bottom corner of the frame and runs towards the subject, and a flat scene gains depth. A foreground object, such as a gate, a rock or a flower bed, does a similar job for landscapes, which otherwise tend to shrink into a thin strip of distant scenery. Exercise: find one long line nearby, a pavement edge or a row of parked cars will do, and photograph it from the middle, from one side and from low down at one end. The low, angled version usually pulls you into the picture most.

Light hitting the subject from behind you is safe but flat. Light from one side carves out texture and shape, which is why a face lit from a window looks so much more three-dimensional than one lit by an overhead bulb. Light from behind the subject gives glowing edges to hair and leaves, though you may need to brighten the exposure so the face does not go dark. This is the skill that separates snapshots from photographs, and it needs no equipment at all. Exercise: sit a friend, or a houseplant, near a window and photograph them facing the window, side-on to it and with their back to it. Then try the same with an apple on a table at dusk with one lamp.

When the sun is low, shortly after sunrise and before sunset, its light is warmer, softer and comes from the side, so ordinary streets and faces suddenly look good. Definitions of the golden hour vary and its length depends on the season and how far from the equator you are, so a sunrise and sunset app is worth more than the name suggests. At midday, hard overhead sun puts dark shadows under eyes. Move people into open shade, under a tree or beside a building with open sky in front of them, and the light softens at once. Exercise: photograph the same street corner at lunchtime and again in the hour before sunset, and photograph a friend in full midday sun and then a few steps into shade.

Light has colour. Household bulbs are orange, shade under a blue sky is cool, and the eye adjusts so quickly that you only notice when a photo comes out strangely tinted. Auto white balance handles most daylight well; it struggles with mixed light, such as a lamp-lit room with a window. Cameras offer presets such as daylight, shade and tungsten, and phones let you warm or cool a picture afterwards. Sometimes the cast is the point: warm light at a candlelit dinner should stay warm. Exercise: in a room lit by an ordinary bulb, photograph the same corner on auto, on the tungsten preset and on the daylight preset, or warm and cool one phone shot in editing, and decide which matches what you saw.

The editor already on your phone or computer can fix the three things that spoil most pictures: a tilted horizon, a loose frame and brightness that is slightly off. Work in that order, then stop. Heavy saturation, clarity and filters make pictures look dated fast and hide whether the photograph itself was any good. Edits in the built-in phone editors can normally be undone later, so there is no risk in experimenting. Exercise: choose your five best pictures of the week and give each no more than three adjustments, starting with straighten and crop. Compare them with the originals side by side; aim for a version that looks better without looking edited.

The first frame is rarely the best one. When something catches your eye, take the obvious picture, then keep going: step closer, move left, crouch, wait for someone to walk into the light. Afterwards, pick one favourite and delete or archive the near-duplicates, because choosing teaches you what works far faster than taking more. This habit ties the rest of the list together, since each new frame is a chance to try a different technique. Exercise: on your next walk, give yourself ten frames of one ordinary subject, such as a bench, a front door or a tree, each different. At home, choose one and write a sentence on why it beat the other nine.