Tag Archives: How to photography

Building Your Photography Skills: The Exposure Triangle



Understanding The Exposure Triangle


photography exposure triangle

Diagram from Photography Life





Shutter Speed










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How Your DSLR Camera Works(1)

How Your DSLR Camera Works

A digital camera may sound complicated but they are actually very simple mechanical devices which are comprised of a few parts. For a standard DSLRs, there is the camera body with a lens that attaches to it. Your camera body contains all the parts needed to capture and process a photograph right inside; the lens is a simple canister with the optional glass which you use to focus your photograph onto the sensor in the back of the camera body.

These two simple components, the body of the camera and the lens, work together like this:

Light comes through the opening in your lens and glass. When you are looking through the viewfinder you are seeing a reflection from a mirror and prism inside the camera body.  The mirror reflects that light up through a prism (similar to a periscope) at a 45 degree angle and through the viewfinder to your eye, so you can see the scene that you’re about to capture and record on to the camera sensor.

When you press down on the shutter release button to take your shot, the mirror will flip up out of the way and the lens adjusts to the chosen aperture. The shutter flaps in the back of the camera body then opens allowing the light to shine through to the camera’s sensor in the very back of the camera body which creates your photograph.

At the same time the camera is saving the photo to your SD Card. Once the shot is complete the mirror returns back to the original position and it’s ready to shoot again. This can all happen in less than a millisecond depending on what you have your setting on…the longer the exposure time the longer the shutter stays open to record the image.

Mirrorless cameras work a little differently, obvious from the name, they do not have a moving mirror system.

Instead, what you see when looking through the viewfinder is a live feed of exactly what the image sensor is processing. This allows you to see things like DOF (Depth Of Field), exposure, White Balance and more, before you even take the shot. When you press the shutter release button of a Mirrorless camera, the lens adjusts to the chosen aperture, the shutter opens and the photograph is saved to your memory card.

Now that you have a better understanding of how your camera captures an image for you. There are three major concepts that you’ll need to develop or build upon; technical skills, artistic skills, and personality. In the next article we’ll start developing your technical skills as a photographer.



Discover the Art of Photography: Getting Started – Photography 101

Discover the Art of Photography is a series of digital photography tutorials, created by world renowned landscape photographer Trey Ratcliff, made specifically for beginning and intermediate photographers. Trey teaches some of the mast basic photography techniques in a unique way through a combination of stories of his experiences, live photo shoots and of course step-by-step instructions for photo editing. You will learn the fundamentals of a digital camera, best practices when composing a photo, finding your own unique artistic style and improving the quality of your photos.

Becoming A Professional Nature And Landscape Photographer: Making Opportunities

You Can’t Wait For Opportunities… You Must Make Them

Self-driven creative careers are no different than any other career, if you want to succeed it won’t come easily to you. It doesn’t matter if you are a painter, photographer, widget maker or egg sculpture; it going to take a lot of time, patience, and understanding to be successful… bottom line. It takes a tremendous amount of daily motivation to not only get a creative career off the ground but keep it fueled daily within yourself and your potential clients. More often than not when it comes to a creative careers such as photography, you will be confronted with people who don’t want to pay you enough or even at all for your products or services. It’s not that people are necessarily cheap (we all love bargains), I think most of the time people do not understand what it takes to create an original photograph or piece of artwork nor do they understand the costs associated with the creation. Photography is a perfect example, everyone owns a camera; we carry a tiny version of a camera around with us everywhere we go. It is very simple to wipe out our cell phones, snap the shutter button and be done with the scene. I found early on in my career, even though my landscape and nature photographs had better composition, lighting, color, perspective and angles, most people associate photographic art to their everyday camera uses and vacation snapshots. 

Silhouettes in Sunset is a nature photograph of a sunset with three silhouettes of the tops of tall weeds found in the field. Photograph was created by Melissa Fague.

Silhouettes in Sunset – Nature Photo by: Melissa Fague

My landscape and nature photographs are not created for any particular paying client, I never waited for someone to hire me to start my projects. When I was able to, I would go out exploring my region and create what I saw in the landscape or object on the scene. I created my work because I found peace in the time spent outdoors and I tried to share that sense of peace in each of my photographs. There are many places, or objects in a place, right in my local area that I found very appealing. Most of the time I returned to the area a second or third time to get my vision just the way I liked it; there are the rare occasion that I get the “right place at the right time” photographs but, like I said it’s rare.

I found that as my photographic skills grew so did my viewing audience. At first, it surprised me that other people liked my renditions of the scenes and objects that I photographed, especially places that the viewer was familiar with. People were beginning to see my photographs and were sharing them with others on sites like Google Plus and Facebook. I would get comments and private messages asking if the photographs were for sale. So I took the positive feedback as a sign, I learned a little about web design and slowly built up a website in order to sell my prints. This all occurred after my car accident, its funny how life works out sometime. Who would have ever though that a car accident could turn into a career change. 

Go back to part 1: Shoot What You Love                                             Coming Soon…Explore

Image Info:
Title: Silhouettes in Sunset
Genre: Nature Photography
Photographer: Melissa Fague