Subtitles of the Movie

Now, it's worth taking a bit of time at this point to review the basic good habits a photographer should strive for in order to maximize your results, and that is to get the most out of your camera and Photoshop. Now, rules are made to be broken and this was never more true than in photography. But you should know the rules to follow before you go breaking them so that when you do break them, you know what to expect when you do so. Is that making any sense? Well, let's hope so. Now, the first rule is an obvious one. Clean your lenses. This is basic. And use only a lens cleaning cloth and lens cleaning liquid you find at camera stores. Don't use alcohol or paper towels or napkins. Any paper-based towel has wood fibers in them that will scratch your lenses and ruin them. Plus the alcohol will leave a residue on your lens, leaving it worse off than before. The next item is to shoot at a hundred ISO as much as you can. Now, many times you'll not be able to do so, but approach each shooting scenario with the thought of shooting at a hundred ISO and you won't forget to set it that way when you are able to do so. You might get in the habit of setting your ISO at a hundred each time you shut down your camera to force yourself to start at that point at the next shooting situation. The next rule is to shoot raw or large-sized JPG with the Adobe RGB color space without the in-camera sharpening activated and you also want to turn off the noise reduction feature in your camera if you have one. We've discussed these issues in previous lessons. The next one is to use a tripod as much as you can, especially on landscapes. Try to use it on portraits too, but many times portraits will look better hand-held. Now, again, expose for the histogram, not the numbers. Once again, we've discussed this in previous lessons. Now, you always want to get in the habit of using a lens shade. Now, I can't tell you how many times I see people shooting without a lens shade. Now, this'll help the contract and the clarity of your images. How does that work? Because when direct sunlight or strong ambient light, especially the lights in an arena hit the surface of your lens, microscopic dust particles pick up the light and wash out your contrast and clarity. Always use lens shades. Well, the next most important thing is to bracket your exposures, especially in landscapes. You won't have to do that so much in sports and in portraits, but definitely in landscapes bracket your exposures. Now, what this means is that you're going to take several pictures with different exposure settings to make sure you get a good one. Or you might be shooting with the sky in one shot and the foreground in another, with a plan to combine them in Photoshop later, which is perfectly acceptable. Now, most good DSLRs will have an automatic exposure bracketing function, but I never use it in my camera because I always want to look at the histogram between shots. But try to bracket your shots as much as you can. The next thing is to use a cable release when doing landscapes. This keeps your camera still. Very good basic. Also in landscape, learn how to use a polarizing filter and split-density filter. Polarizers will take the glare out of reflected subject matter and increase your color saturation in-camera. Split-density filters will help balance the dynamic range so you won't have to do it in Photoshop. And the next rule is the most important; have fun. How many photographers do you see that never smile? They take themselves so seriously. I'm a serious photographer. I'm to be taken seriously. Those guys just are not having any fun at all and it's just not worth it if you're not going to have a blast doing it, especially when you're doing portraits because then you're dealing with people and you need to connect with your subject matter. You need to make them smile. You need to bring out their personalities and you've got to have fun. If you can not bring out the personality of someone you're taking a picture of, if you're not happy and you're not enjoying what you're doing and you're not having fun. So the most important rule is rule number ten; have fun with this stuff. It ain't worth it otherwise.