Composition is key

By Adrian Toon, director of a2n.

Understanding the basics behind photography and how your camera kit works is an important first step in taking good pictures.

While automatic settings on cameras do a great job to take a picture that it thinks you want to see, this ‘AI’ does not always get it right for a particular image you wish to capture.

Each camera comes with many automatic settings, but each of these are created on the basics. This can be easily learned online and with your camera’s manual, giving you the ability to choose the settings that are best for the pictures you want to take.

Knowing these basics will not necessarily make you a pro photographer; what we need now is good composition.

This can be learned from photographs you’d like to emulate, and it initially it comes down to trial and error.

So: frame the image you want to take by being in the right place; use zoom or wide-angle adjustments on the lens; take the picture; then move the frame to take further images. This gives you choice when reviewing the images.

With people photography, always take two or three images in one location to avoid the closed eyes of someone blinking in the image. It happens a lot.

Composition, as with any skill, is iterative; know what you want to achieve. Take the pictures, review the pictures, and take again if they do not give you what you want.

The more pictures you take the easier it is to get the right composition.