beginner

Where so far this guide has focussed on some of the rather technical aspects of photography, we're now moving on to a specific technique: macro. Macro photography is the rather confusingly named practice of taking pictures of really small things. Popular subjects are insects and flowers, but anything that is either really small or has a lot of small detail will do. The way this is achieved is by getting very close to the subject and the defining aspect of macro photography is therefor very short focussing distances.

One of the first things a beginning photographer looks at after deciding to become more serious about taking pictures is filters. Filters change the light before it hits your sensor which allows for a great many of special and useful effects. However, if you're just getting started it can be a bit dounting to understand what each does and why you need it.

In digital photography a RAW image file contains a direct data dump from the sensor without any processing performed on it (other than lossless compression). A JPEG image is a development of this RAW data. This is true even when you shoot in JPEG, except there the conversion is done by the camera. A RAW image is often called a digital negative, and the process of converting it to a normal image format (say jpeg) is called developing it.

When we see an object, its apparant colour is a combination of the colour of the object and the colour of the light it is reflecting. If you shine yellow light on a white object, it will look yellow. Or rather, it looks yellow for a camera. The human brain is very good at compensating for light colour changes so that white remains, roughly, white (as long as the colour of the light is not too intense). Because of this mental trickery, you probably don't realise just how big a difference there is between different light sources.

Photography is a fun hobby, but it is also a rather technical one. Of course it's the final image that counts and artistic should trumph gadgettery, but to get the best results one needs to know the gear. This guide gives an introduction to some of the more technical aspects of photography which are nonetheless essential for making ebtter pictures. Understanding this information will open up new artistic possibilities to a beginning photography.

In any shooting mode except for manual, the camera calculates at least one of the shooting parameters for you. To do so, it measures the light coming in Through The Lens (TTL). Cameras have several ways of measuring and calculating the amount of light in a scene, which are called Metering Modes. Which modes are available depends on the camera model, but most olympus cameras have the following modes: Digital ESP, Center-weighted, Spot, Highlight spot, Shadow spot. These will be discussed later on but first we'll look at how metering works in general.

Your camera has four primary shooting modes, which differ in what parameters you can control and which are calculated automatically (and how):

When taking a picture, you focus on a specific distance. In theory only points that are this distance from your camera are perfectly in focus. In practice however we find that points some distance closer and some distance farther away are also sharp. They aren't exactly in focus, but they are "close enough" for us not to notice. The range in front and behind the focus distance where focus is "close enough" is called the depth of field.