How to take sharp pictures

Hello friends. Its been a long while since my last post. In the meantime, I was bed-ridden with Typhoid and those who are unfortunate enough to suffer this horrible disease know fully well how weak it leaves you. It has been almost a month and yet I feel that I am not fully fit. But the show must go on and hence this post. Honestly speaking,  I was kind of getting lost thinking about the subject of my next blog. Then one think stuck my mind, why not write about something which affects the quality of the image a great deal. You must have noticed one aspect in almost every pro level photo. They are sharp. Super sharp to be precise. Open up any fashion magazine and you will be amazed with the amount of sharpness and detail in the images there. Thats one of the key elements that differentiate between images taken by us amateurs and the professionals. Now of course they do not shoot with the likes of Nikon D3300  or Canon 750D with the 18-55 kit lenses, but still, if we keep some important things in mind, we too can take sharp images from the modest gears we own (ok,  not as sharp as the Pros, but lot better than what we generally get).

Tips on Nature/Landscape Photography

Landscape photography is a fascinating world in itself. Those who are unaware of it may think that this genre of photography is very easy as all one needs to do go to a beautiful location and shoot. Wrong. In fact, in many cases, you can take liberty with your composition in street or some other kind of photography, but when it comes to landscape photography, you have to be careful about every element in your frame and their composition. Otherwise your images will turn out to be the same Ok-Ok kind of landscapes that we come across everyday on various social networks.

For a landscape to look stunning, a number of elements must be present in the picture and more importantly, they must be in sync. Generally when one goes to a stunning place, people tend to stop thinking and just point the camera and press the shutter. The result becomes evident when we often hear lines like "The photos are nothing, you have to be there to understand the beauty" or "The place was really stunning, the camera couldn't capture it". A photo doesn't become beautiful just by itself. You have to work to make it beautiful. I am a complete novice, but still, during the last few months, I have done a bit of homework and in the process, learnt a few tricks about landscape photography. Just sharing them with you all now as I have always done. Feel free to add some points or to ask any questions in the comments. I will try my best to reply. So now lets get started.

How to get better in Photography

I vividly remember when I first got my "serious" camera, a DSLR. I always had a knack for image-making and even when all I had was a Kodak P&S, I used to shoot many pictures. Thats how I realized that I am being limited by my camera. So, when I ultimately made the jump to a DSLR, it didn't take long for me to understand how it works and within a day or two, I was shooting away like crazy, subject or composition be damned. Naturally as all of you may have experienced, getting honest feedback is a tough job. If you show your photos to your immediate friends and relatives, they all will praise them just to make you feel better. And if you post your pictures in dedicated photography forums or Facebook pages, very very few will take the pain of telling where are you going wrong, because you are new there and the experienced photogs don't want to hurt you by giving negative feedback. So, long story short, after a month or two, I almost shot close to a thousand photo, but all of them were crap, literally.

This is not only my story, but I reckon, anyone starting out in the field of photography is bound to have the same experience. We shoot anything and everything but don't realize where we are going wrong or why our photos suck while some of our experienced friends can take the same picture and their ones look much better. In this post, I am trying to decode this mystery of how to get better in photography. This may be a long(ish) post, so please bear with me. Lets get started-

Understanding Composition in Photography (Part-2)

After my last post, I had to think a lot on how to advance on this particular topic. Composition is such an important aspect of photography and there is so much to discuss that its very easy to get digressed from the main topic. In fact, without the ability to compose the shots well, one can never take take good images no matter how good or advanced the equipment may be. A crappy image will look crappy no matter what is the gear used to shot that. 

There are some set rules or guidelines when it comes to composition, but as I have already mentioned in my previous post that photography is a form of art and there can't be any definitive rules. So, it is a very common scenario that the frame you composed very carefully keeping in mind a particular "rule" is violating two other "rules". So my advice would be not to get too bogged down by all the rules. Keep them at the back of your mind and compose your shots as per your heart. I can only speak what works for me and this is how I compose.

Understanding Composition in Photography (Part-1)

When I started out photography around four years back, I didn't really think much about it. I bought a DSLR (Nikon D3100) and started out quite enthusiastically. Fortunately I was in Kolkata at that time and I found many friends just like me. I joined some Photography groups and began to go out in groups to take photos. I remember vividly those fun days. We would go out in hoards in and around Kolkata and click photos. In the end, we would come back, process them and post them in our common group for comments and critique. The first few outings were real fun as I didn't know a thing about photography and randomly shot and posted snapshots. The others, being the good friends they are, never said anything to me. I was blissfully ignorant that my images are literally crap.

One day, one of such friends asked me to show him my work and I gleefully showed him my flickr collection. I expected the usual "Good work, nice work" type of comments but what he said really surprised me. His exact words were- "These are nothing but ordinary snapshots. There are no thought or design to them. You need to improve a lot". He forced me to think and take a re-look at my own images. The same images which looked nice and interesting appeared downright horrible. That was the day, I came to know about something called Composition in photography and its importance.

Photography is a form of art, and there are no rules in art. But at the same time, there are some unwritten guidelines that good images allover the world across time follow. Of course there are exceptions and there are great pieces of art that do not conform to the so called guideline, but before breaking the guideline, we should learn about them first. Also, each and every of these "rules" do not apply universally to all the images. It is up to the photographer how he wants his photos to look like. What I personally do , is I keep the rules in my mind and when I see a scenario where a particular rule may apply, I try to compose accordingly. The rules and tips that I am going to discuss here is by no way exhaustive. These are some of the most basic rules that we photographers should know and apply to our images. As discussing all of them in a single post will be too cumbersome and lengthy, I am dividing this post in multiple parts. In this part, I am just laying down the very basic ideas about composition, and in later parts, I shall post some commonly used tools and techniques which even beginners can apply while shooting and improve their photographs. So lets go ahead and jump in it-