How do you select a focal length for your first prime lens?

Hi every­one, my name is Paul, this is Expo­sure Ther­a­py, and in this video, I’ll demon­strate how Adobe Light­room Clas­sic can help you select your next prime lens.

Most of the stu­dents that attend my pho­tog­ra­phy work­shops bring gear pur­chased as part of a bun­dle or kit mar­ket­ed towards begin­ners. The kits typ­i­cal­ly include a basic DSLR or mir­ror­less cam­era, and a zoom lens with an 18–55 or 16–50 mm focal length, which varies depend­ing on the cam­era make. Some kits include a 75–300 mm lens for greater reach, but these are rar­er. 

When the work­shops tran­si­tion to the top­ic of the aper­ture and depth of field, some stu­dents real­ize that their basic zoom lens­es can’t achieve the shal­low depth of field aes­thet­ic they desire. This is fol­lowed by requests for me to rec­om­mend a large-aper­ture prime lens, which inevitably leads to a dis­cus­sion about how to choose a use­ful focal length. And so I ask prob­ing ques­tions about their pre­ferred sub­ject mat­ter, style, work­ing dis­tance, bud­get, etc., all in an attempt to glean the ide­al focal length for each stu­dent. 

This line of inquiry is com­mon, but it’s also prob­lem­at­ic because it assumes begin­ners can pro­vide accu­rate answers to ques­tions and con­cepts they’ve like­ly nev­er care­ful­ly con­sid­ered up to this point. 

Is there a bet­ter way? There is, but I’ll need access to your com­put­er.

Adobe Lightroom Classic can help you determine your next prime lens.

If you take every pic­ture a pho­tog­ra­ph­er has shot on a zoom lens and sort the results by the focal lengths used, you’ll find an uneven dis­tri­b­u­tion of images among them: some will have a greater share of the total num­ber of pic­tures than oth­ers. Bar­ring a few excep­tions, I pro­pose that the focal length with the great­est share of the total—the plurality—is the ide­al focal length for that photographer’s next prime lens. 

How do you do this?

Your cam­era embeds infor­ma­tion about itself into every pho­to it saves. This is known as meta­da­ta. Exam­ples of this info include the time and date of cap­ture, the camera’s make and mod­el, and, cru­cial­ly, the set focal length of a zoom lens. This is true for vir­tu­al­ly every mod­ern DSLR, mir­ror­less, and point-and-shoot cam­era.

Adobe Light­room Classic—emphasis on the Clas­sic, as this can’t be done in their sim­pli­fied version—has a func­tion that lets you fil­ter your entire entire cat­a­logue, or a selec­tion of pho­tos, by a vari­ety of meta­da­ta attrib­ut­es, includ­ing by set focal length. When you acti­vate the focal length attribute, the appli­ca­tion dis­plays a list of every focal length you’ve used to take the select­ed images, along with the total num­ber of pho­tos shot using those focal lengths. My the­o­ry is that focal lengths with a com­par­a­tive­ly larg­er share of pho­tos are evi­dence of a pref­er­ence and can serve as a great start­ing point for pick­ing your next no-regrets prime lens. 

Now I’ll demon­strate the process.

[Demon­stra­tion in video]

Analysis and limitation

The first and most obvi­ous lim­i­ta­tion of this method is that it requires Adobe Light­room Clas­sic. The so-called mod­ern­ized ver­sion of Adobe Light­room, the one avail­able on both desk­top and mobile plat­forms, can’t fil­ter meta­da­ta by lens type or focal length. (On a side note: I firm­ly rec­om­mend Light­room Clas­sic over Light­room not-clas­sic.) I’ve also con­firmed that both Apple Pho­tos and Google Pho­tos don’t allow fil­ter­ing pic­tures by set focal length, despite their abil­i­ty to read and dis­play the data in ques­tion. I can’t com­ment about per­form­ing this type of analy­sis using oth­er apps, such as Cap­ture One Pro, Pho­to Mechan­ic, etc., sim­ply because I nei­ther own nor use them. So sor­ry.

Sec­ond­ly, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that both the upper and low­er lim­its of your zoom’s focal length range can own a greater share of the dis­tri­b­u­tion. This isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly because you pre­fer these focal lengths, but more so because they’re the hard lim­it of the lens. For exam­ple, if my lens tops out at 55 mm, but I want a big­ger ren­di­tion of my sub­ject, I’m going to set­tle on 55 mm despite want­i­ng more. 

Last­ly, this analy­sis is lim­it­ed to the focal length range of your exist­ing zoom lens­es. How­ev­er, since the point of this method is to guide you towards a pre­ferred focal length from among those that you use, this lim­i­ta­tion is large­ly moot. I firm­ly believe that it’s more prac­ti­cal for begin­ners to expand their col­lec­tion of zoom lens­es before com­mit­ting to fixed-focal length prime lens­es. The ulti­mate point of this exer­cise is to engage in due dili­gence and pho­to­graph­ic intro­spec­tion so that you can avoid buyer’s remorse. 

Conclusion

And there you have it, an easy way to use Adobe Light­room Clas­sic to help you choose your next prime lens based on the focal lengths you use most often. If you have requests for future top­ics, let me know in the com­ments, and I’ll address them in future videos. In the mean­time, you can learn more about pho­tog­ra­phy on ExposureTherapy.ca. See you next time.

A tran­script of the text fol­lows below.

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Many new pho­tog­ra­phers, espe­cial­ly those that don’t have some artis­tic back­ground, have trou­ble with com­po­si­tion. In this video, I’ll do my best to dis­till the idea of com­po­si­tion to its core, dis­cuss how our minds process visu­al infor­ma­tion in a way that could sab­o­tage a casu­al approach to com­po­si­tions and share a few tech­niques for work­ing around these psy­cho­log­i­cal imped­i­ments to cre­at­ing pleas­ing pho­tos. Let’s begin.

What is composition?

In her book, The Art of Com­po­si­tion: A Sim­ple Appli­ca­tion of Dynam­ic Sym­me­try, Michel Jacobs writes, 

Com­po­si­tion is one of the means to express to oth­ers the thought that is in the artist’s mind. We can do this with colour, with line, mass, form, or with the light and shade—all of which should be com­bined to bring out more forcibly the idea of the artist.

In oth­er words, pho­to­graph­ic com­po­si­tion is the way you arrange the place­ment and scale of your sub­ject with­in the con­fines of your can­vas. The sub­ject is the per­son, place, or thing you want to pho­to­graph, and the can­vas is sim­ply every­thing with­in your vis­i­ble frame. Side note: I know many pho­tog­ra­phers take pho­tos intend­ing to crop them lat­er; how­ev­er, at this stage, and for the sake of sim­plic­i­ty, just assume “frame” refers to what you see in the viewfind­er or on the camera’s screen. 

Cre­at­ing a pleas­ing com­po­si­tion starts with under­stand­ing your sub­ject, and then find­ing an effec­tive way of trans­lat­ing that under­stand­ing into a pho­to­graph. Begin­ners often have trou­ble with both parts of the process. They take pic­tures hap­haz­ard­ly, with­out tak­ing the time to con­sid­er their inten­tions. They hap­pen upon some­thing inter­est­ing, point their cam­era, and take a pic­ture assum­ing the result will look as good as what they expe­ri­enced. But unless they’re lucky, this isn’t often the case.

The disconnects between what you see and how you photograph

The way our minds process visu­al infor­ma­tion cre­ates dis­crep­an­cies between what we see and how we pho­tog­ra­phy. We may look with our eyes, but we see with our minds. Let’s delve into the basic psy­chol­o­gy of sight.

Perceptual hypothesis

The Gestalt school of psy­chol­o­gy offers hints at how peo­ple orga­nize visu­al inputs. It pro­pos­es there are two types of visu­al stim­uli, dis­tal and prox­i­mal. Dis­tal stim­uli are those that lie in the dis­tance, out­side your body; they’re the objects you’re look­ing at. Light from dis­tal stim­uli enters our eyes and cre­ates prox­i­mal stim­uli, which are the pro­jec­tions of light stim­u­lat­ing your reti­nas. 

Their dis­tinc­tion is impor­tant because an object’s true shape may vary from the shapes danc­ing across your reti­nas. In vision, the prox­i­mal stim­uli are dis­tort­ed, two-dimen­sion­al pro­jec­tions of their true forms. For exam­ple, if you lay a square sheet of paper (the dis­tal stim­uli) on a table and observe it from direct­ly over­head, its image (the prox­i­mal stim­uli) will look like a square; how­ev­er, if you sit down and look at the square from an angle, it will appear trape­zoidal, because the top of the square is fur­ther from you than the bot­tom. Despite its trape­zoidal appear­ance, we under­stand that we’re see­ing a square. How? 

Our minds are con­stant­ly bridg­ing the gap between dis­tal and prox­i­mal stim­uli by form­ing hypothe­ses about the nature of the real world. A per­cep­tu­al hypoth­e­sis is an infer­ence about the nature of a dis­tal stim­u­lus based on its prox­i­mal char­ac­ter­is­tics. Our minds process visu­al infor­ma­tion and mak­ing guess­es about what real-world forms are respon­si­ble for the pat­terns we per­ceive.

Guess­ing true shapes from incom­plete or skewed visu­al infor­ma­tion works against casu­al pho­tog­ra­phers by cre­at­ing a bias in favour of a form’s true shape instead of its visu­al shape. In essence, what we know com­petes with what we see.

We can observe this in pho­tos fea­tur­ing hori­zons and archi­tec­tur­al forms. Intu­itive­ly, we under­stand that a flat hori­zon should be level—that is, per­pen­dic­u­lar to the pull of gravity—but this under­stand­ing can impede our abil­i­ty to notice when a com­po­si­tion lists to one side. Fur­ther­more, our eyes stay lev­el with the hori­zon by rolling with­in their sock­ets. You can observe this in a mir­ror by slight­ly tilt­ing your head from left to right—notice how your eyes roll in the oppo­site direc­tion of your head’s move­ment. 

In archi­tec­ture, forms com­mon­ly fea­ture straight lines, right angles, and great height rel­a­tive to your ground-lev­el per­spec­tive. Angling the cam­era upwards to cap­ture a building’s facade con­verges its ver­ti­cal lines towards a van­ish­ing point. This is called the key­stone effect, and it’s com­mon­ly avoid­ed by pro­fes­sion­al archi­tec­tur­al pho­tog­ra­phers. Keyston­ing is easy to spot in pho­tos tak­en with wide-angle lens­es, but it’s not some­thing we’re mind­ful of because we intu­itive­ly under­stand the form’s true shape, and that its lines aren’t con­verg­ing but reced­ing into the dis­tance, which we under­stand thanks to depth per­cep­tion.

Depth perception

There are two types of depth per­cep­tion in human vision: binoc­u­lar and monoc­u­lar. Binoc­u­lar depth cues are dis­tance clues derived from the dif­fer­ing views of the two eyes—they pro­vide that dis­tinct sen­sa­tion of an object’s posi­tion in three-dimen­sion­al space. Monoc­u­lar depth cues are dis­tance clues derived from each eye alone, such as motion par­al­lax and pic­to­r­i­al depth cues, which are dis­tance clues that can be expressed in a flat pic­ture, such as a pho­to!

Binoc­u­lar depth per­cep­tion allows us to see a sub­ject, sense its dis­tance in space, and iso­late its form from its sur­round­ings. This lets us over­look visu­al­ly dis­tract­ing ele­ments that would oth­er­wise be more con­spic­u­ous in two-dimen­sion­al ren­di­tions. This brings us to the con­cept of atten­tion.

Visual attention and perceptual blindness

Atten­tion is a cog­ni­tive process that lets you con­cen­trate on a dis­crete selec­tion of sen­so­ry inputs from many com­pet­ing ones. When direct­ing your visu­al atten­tion towards your sub­ject, you become less aware of its sur­round­ings. It can lead to a phe­nom­e­non called inat­ten­tion blind­ness, which is a fail­ure to notice an unex­pect­ed occur­rence with­in your visu­al field because your con­cen­tra­tion is else­where. 

The lim­its of atten­tion cre­ate a prob­lem for begin­ner and expe­ri­enced pho­tog­ra­phers alike. You could be tak­ing a por­trait, con­cen­trat­ing on your subject’s pose, and com­plete­ly miss that their shirt is com­ing untucked and their zip­per is down. Oops!

Visual perception has no borders

Unlike an artist’s can­vas, our visu­al expe­ri­ence of the world has no defined bound­aries. There’s a cen­tral area of atten­tion, and there’s a periph­ery, and beyond that periph­ery lies…an absence of visu­al per­cep­tion. When we look around, we dis­cov­er the views beyond that periph­ery. And yet, when our eyes cross some­thing interesting—something we deem picture-worthy—we must con­sid­er it with­in defined com­po­si­tion­al bound­aries. 

Casu­al shoot­ers sim­ply point their cam­era at the sub­ject, ensur­ing that it’s all-in, and take a shot. They look with their eyes, see with their minds, and assume that’s all it takes. What they don’t con­sid­er is how our minds process that infor­ma­tion to “fix” their per­cep­tion of that view, a view that often doesn’t trans­late into a well-com­posed pho­to­graph.

How to think compositionally and achieve great results

How can you move beyond absent­mind­ed pho­tos to achieve more pleas­ing com­po­si­tions that work with­in a two-dimen­sion­al medi­um con­strained to a can­vas? The fol­low­ing tips should help you orga­nize your thoughts towards think­ing com­po­si­tion­al­ly in the con­text of the psy­cho­log­i­cal process­es I’ve out­lined ear­li­er. Just remem­ber: these aren’t rules.

Define your subject

In my opin­ion, the first step towards cre­at­ing a pleas­ing com­po­si­tion is clear­ly defin­ing your sub­ject. Think like a reporter: under­stand what you want to show and why it’s caught your inter­est. Under­stand­ing the answers to both will inform your sub­se­quent deci­sions.

Find your perspective

It’s time to explore how you’ll take the pic­ture, and this starts with per­spec­tive. In pho­tog­ra­phy, per­spec­tive refers to your camera’s point of view and it’s deter­mined exclu­sive­ly by the posi­tion from which a pho­to is tak­en. Ask your­self: what’s the best angle from which to cap­ture this pho­to? 

Your body is a great asset for manip­u­lat­ing per­spec­tive. You can crouch down, walk around, lean out, look straight up, lay down, get close…and then clos­er, or take a step—or fifty—backwards. Depend­ing on what you’re pho­tograph­ing, you can walk around or through your sub­ject to find inter­est­ing per­spec­tives.

Gen­er­al­ly, pho­tog­ra­phers seek per­spec­tives that empha­size the subject’s phys­i­cal geom­e­try, the qual­i­ty of light, and its visu­al place­ment rel­a­tive to back­ground and fore­ground ele­ments. Alter­ing your per­spec­tive can make the dif­fer­ence between a pho­to that looks flat ver­sus one that has a dis­tant back­ground and a sense of depth. 

Per­spec­tive also adds an emo­tion­al aspect to por­traits. High-angle shots, where the cam­era looks down at a per­son, can con­vey a sense of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, meek­ness, and insignif­i­cance. These are con­trast­ed by low-angle shots, where the cam­era looks up at a per­son and sig­ni­fies strength, con­fi­dence, and author­i­ty.

Per­spec­tive can also inform the scale of your pic­ture. 

Choose your subject’s scale and prominence

Scale and promi­nence are inter­re­lat­ed con­cepts with sub­tle dif­fer­ences. Scale refers to the appar­ent size of your com­po­si­tion­al ele­ments. You can change the scale by mov­ing clos­er or far­ther, and by zoom­ing in or out. Promi­nence refers to the share of your view­ers’ atten­tion each com­po­si­tion­al ele­ment holds. Gen­er­al­ly, as scale increas­es, so does promi­nence; they have a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion.

Nev­er­the­less, there are sit­u­a­tions where a small-scale ele­ment can have great promi­nence. Think of a spotlit singer against the back­drop of a dark the­atre, a spring flower bloom­ing through the snow, or a per­son wear­ing a colour­ful out­fit in a sea of peo­ple wear­ing grey suits. Such com­po­si­tions manip­u­late our atten­tion using con­trast, tex­ture, and colour.

Find leading lines

You can also manip­u­late promi­nence by lead­ing the viewer’s eyes through the com­po­si­tion towards the sub­ject. Lead­ing lines are real or implied straight or curved lines that ter­mi­nate on or point towards your pri­ma­ry sub­ject. They’re a use­ful com­po­si­tion­al tool for achiev­ing promi­nence when con­trast, tex­ture, and colour aren’t work­ing in your favour. 

Use the viewfinder 

Use your camera’s viewfind­er instead of the rear LCD screen, if you have the option. Think­ing com­po­si­tion­al­ly is much eas­i­er when your visu­al field is lim­it­ed to the pho­to­graph­ic frame. The viewfind­er sep­a­rates your view of the frame from the extra­ne­ous dis­trac­tions of your sur­round­ings or the reflec­tions on your LCD and allows you to con­cen­trate on the har­mo­ny of the visu­al ele­ments. 

Minimize distractions

Try to min­i­mize dis­trac­tions. Dis­trac­tions are any intru­sive ele­ments that com­pete for visu­al atten­tion with your pri­ma­ry sub­ject. They can man­i­fest as tex­tures, shapes, and colours. Giv­en what we now know about visu­al atten­tion and depth per­cep­tion, the first step towards min­i­miz­ing dis­tract­ing ele­ments is to look at your sub­ject with one eye or through your cam­era. This imme­di­ate­ly com­press­es the 3D world into one plane, and lets you look for back­ground and fore­ground ele­ments that would oth­er­wise detract from your sub­ject. Next, check the vis­i­ble out­line of your sub­ject for inter­sect­ing lines and shapes that could be con­fused for being a part of it. A com­mon exam­ple would be scrag­gly branch­es or street lamps erupt­ing from your subject’s head. Addi­tion­al­ly, you can min­i­mize fore- and back­ground dis­trac­tions with selec­tive focus of your lens. 

Level horizons

In gen­er­al, you should try to keep your pho­tos lev­el unless there’s a good rea­son not to. A sub­tle slant can look like a mis­take, and most often is. Grid­lines in your camera’s viewfind­er or screen can help you achieve lev­el hori­zons. You can also lev­el a crooked pho­to after the fact using pop­u­lar edit­ing apps. By the way, a cant­ed-angle or Dutch angle describes a pho­to that’s inten­tion­al­ly set off-lev­el. 

Be mindful of headroom and lead room

When you look at some­one and make eye con­tact, their eyes are cen­tred in your visu­al field and occu­py your atten­tion. When casu­al shoot­ers take this life-long habit and apply it to their pho­tog­ra­phy, their results fea­ture too much head­room, which is the dis­tance between your subject’s head and the top of the frame. Por­traits where eyes and noses are in the cen­tre of the frame often look slop­py or incom­plete because most of our atten­tion is at or below the cen­tre line. Next time you’re about to take a por­trait, assess whether the space above your subject’s head is adding or sub­tract­ing from the shot. 

When look­ing at pho­tos, it’s com­mon for us to expect space in front of a mov­ing sub­ject or the direc­tion of their gaze. Lead room, some­times called active space, refers to the dis­tance between the implied direc­tion of your subject’s motion or gaze and the edge of the cor­re­spond­ing frame. Dead space refers to the space behind the active sub­ject. There’s no con­sen­sus for what con­sti­tutes a good amount of lead room, but it becomes obvi­ous when there isn’t enough. A pho­to can have a lack of bal­ance when the direc­tion of a subject’s gaze or motion is imme­di­ate­ly imped­ed by the frame. It cre­ates a sense of con­fine­ment.

Watch your edges

Inat­ten­tion blind­ness can lead to dis­trac­tions in your pho­tos, and some of the most notice­able ones occur at the bound­aries of your frame. You can guard against these by scan­ning your eyes along the edges of the frame to ensure dis­tract­ing ele­ments aren’t intrud­ing into your com­po­si­tion. If you notice a dis­trac­tion, adjust your com­po­si­tion, and repeat the scan.

You should also watch the edges of your frame for unin­ten­tion­al or awk­ward crop­ping of your sub­ject, espe­cial­ly when tak­ing por­traits. A com­po­si­tion can look slop­py when the frame’s edge crops off a small part of your sub­ject, such as half a foot, a sliv­er of the shoul­der, or an ear. Look along the edges to make sure that small bits of your sub­ject aren’t inad­ver­tent­ly cut by the frame. And when you must crop your sub­jects, such as in close-up or medi­um-scale por­traits, make sure the crop reads as inten­tion­al. 

Conclusion

And there you have it, a rule-free intro­duc­tion to think­ing com­po­si­tion­al­ly while avoid­ing some of the cog­ni­tive traps that can lead begin­ners to take poor pho­tos. If you have requests for future top­ics, let me know in the com­ments, and I’ll address them in future videos.

[The fol­low­ing is a tran­script of the embed­ded video.]

Are you dis­ap­point­ed by the qual­i­ty of your pic­tures because they look pix­e­lat­ed, or the colours don’t look authen­tic, or they’re sim­ply too light or dark, and you just want them to look good? 

Let’s sort it out.

My name is Paul and this is Expo­sure Ther­a­py. I’ve taught group pho­tog­ra­phy work­shops for the past three years, and in this video, I’ll dis­cuss three com­mon prob­lems encoun­tered by begin­ners, and what you can do to fix them.

1. Picture quality and resolution is set too low

The first prob­lem relates to pic­ture qual­i­ty and res­o­lu­tion, and it’s the eas­i­est to rem­e­dy. If you’re notic­ing that your high-megapix­el cam­era isn’t pro­duc­ing pho­tos with the lev­el of detail you’re expect­ing, you have an issue with pic­ture res­o­lu­tion. The Res­o­lu­tion affects how close­ly you can crop or zoom into your pic­ture on a com­put­er or phone before notic­ing obvi­ous pix­e­la­tion. In this exam­ple, you’re see­ing two ver­sions of the same pho­to. The left one was saved at my camera’s high­est res­o­lu­tion, which is 24 megapix­els, and the right using a low­er set­ting. Notice how I can’t zoom as close­ly to the image on the right, and when I force it, we see pix­e­la­tion instead of fine detail.

The solu­tion is to go into your camera’s pic­ture set­tings, which on most cam­eras is locat­ed at the top- or left-most of the menu list, and ensure your selec­tion is set to the largest res­o­lu­tion, which is most com­mon­ly des­ig­nat­ed as Large or with the let­ter L. This tells your cam­era to save your pic­tures using the full res­o­lu­tion of your image sen­sor so that you’re using all the megapix­els you paid for. 

In addi­tion to res­o­lu­tion, your cam­era also lets you choose between dif­fer­ent image qual­i­ty set­tings. This affects how much data com­pres­sion your files under­go; more com­pres­sion can pro­duce images that show vis­i­ble block­i­ness, arti­facts, and colour degra­da­tion, espe­cial­ly around high-con­trast edges or areas of flat detail. In this exam­ple, both pho­tos were saved at the same res­o­lu­tion but with dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty set­tings. The pho­to on the right was saved using low­er-qual­i­ty than the pic­ture on the left, and with clos­er inspec­tion, it shows some degra­da­tion, which isn’t ide­al.

To make sure this doesn’t hap­pen, you should go back into your camera’s pic­ture set­tings and select the high­est JPEG qual­i­ty that’s avail­able. This is typ­i­cal­ly described using words like Fine, Extra Fine, or the let­ter F. The high-qual­i­ty set­ting on Canon cam­eras is depict­ed with a smooth quar­ter-cir­cle icon.

Your cam­era is now set to record pho­tos using its high­est res­o­lu­tion and best JPEG qual­i­ty. Keep in mind that pic­ture set­tings are what I call “per­sis­tent”, which means that you don’t need to wor­ry about repeat­ing this process every time you turn on your cam­era. 

2. Poor colour balance (white balance)

Now let’s tack­le the sec­ond com­mon prob­lem, which relates to colour. You’ve expe­ri­enced poor colour bal­ance if you’ve ever tak­en a pho­to that appears to have a cool­er or warmer colour cast than you remem­ber see­ing with your eyes. This some­times hap­pens when you’re tak­ing pic­tures of large­ly mono­chro­mat­ic scenes, like those in which a sin­gle colour is a dom­i­nant hue, or when you’re tak­ing pic­tures in dim indoor lights. Such sit­u­a­tions cause your cam­era to mis­in­ter­pret the colour of the light, and you end up with an unwel­come colour cast. 

You can eas­i­ly avoid such mis­takes by telling your cam­era the cor­rect colour of the scene’s pri­ma­ry light source. This is a two-step process. 

First, you’ll have to step out of the com­fort of full Auto mode and into Pro­gram shoot­ing mode, which is a ful­ly auto­mat­ic expo­sure mode that gives you access to sev­er­al fea­tures that were pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able. You can shift between modes using the Shoot­ing mode dial, which is locat­ed on the top of most cam­eras. Here it is on my 11-year-old Canon 7D. Turn the dial to “P”.

Now that you’re in Pro­gram mode, you can make changes to how your cam­era inter­prets the colour of light sources. The set­ting you’re look­ing to adjust is called White Bal­ance and is labelled “WB” on many cam­eras. Here’s the White Bal­ance but­ton on my Canon 7D; and here’s how I change it using the on-screen menu. If you haven’t changed it before, its prob­a­bly set to the default “AWB”, which stands for Auto White Bal­ance. 

Auto white bal­ance gen­er­al­ly pro­vides ade­quate results in scenes fea­tur­ing a vari­ety of colours. Beyond that, many cam­eras let you choose from sev­er­al white bal­ance pre­sets designed to match com­mon­ly encoun­tered light­ing con­di­tions. The most com­mon pre­sets are Shade, for when your sub­ject is lit by blue sky­light; Cloudy, for pho­tos tak­en under over­cast con­di­tions; Day­light, for sub­jects in direct after­noon sun­light; Tung­sten or Incan­des­cent, for sub­jects lit by ener­gy-inef­fi­cient light bulbs; and Flash, for when you’re using your camera’s built-in flash or a speed light mount­ed to your camera’s hot shoe. The Flu­o­res­cent pre­sets found on mod­ern cam­eras are only approx­i­ma­tions for the huge vari­ety of flu­o­res­cent and LED lights on the mar­ket, so pick these with cau­tion and don’t expect per­fec­tion.

Some cam­eras have addi­tion­al, more advanced pre­sets, such as “K” and “Cus­tom”, which uses this icon, but they’re beyond the scope of this video.

For now, the pre­sets I described above—Shade, Cloudy, Day­light, etc—should help you get great pho­tos with con­sis­tent­ly accu­rate colours in sit­u­a­tions when Auto White Bal­ance has the poten­tial to be inac­cu­rate. Of course, I don’t want to imply that Auto White Bal­ance is always bad—it’s not, it has a time and place. How­ev­er, you’ll get bet­ter results when you pick a pre­set that match­es the scene’s light­ing.

Keep in mind, if you go back to using Auto mode instead of Pro­gram mode, you’ll lose the abil­i­ty to select White Bal­ance.

Let’s take a look at an exam­ple of what White Bal­ance looks like when it’s wrong and when it’s right. The pho­to on the left was tak­en with Auto White Bal­ance, and my cam­era incor­rect­ly read the scene as Day­light, which is a set­ting intend­ed to match direct after­noon sun­light. My grand­moth­er was sit­ting by a large win­dow, and although it was sun­ny out­side, direct sun­light wasn’t the main light source. Her face was illu­mi­nat­ed by the light of the sky. That’s why the scene, as shot, looks too cool and pro­duces skin tones that are almost grey—that because sky­light is cool­er than Day­light. Chang­ing the camera’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the scene to Shade, which is the cor­rect set­ting for sub­jects lit by the blue sky, pro­duces much more authen­tic and pleas­ing colours. Keep in mind, this exam­ple is sim­u­lat­ed, and in prac­tice, you’ll have to make the right choice before tak­ing the pic­ture.

By the way, White Bal­ance is a cre­ative choice as much as a tech­ni­cal one. The most accu­rate White Bal­ance set­ting isn’t always the “right” one; some­times, the right White Bal­ance set­ting is sim­ply the one whose look you pre­fer the most. So feel free to exper­i­ment and dis­cov­er your pref­er­ences.

3. Incorrect auto exposures (and fixing them using exposure compensation)

The last com­mon prob­lem that many begin­ners encounter is inac­cu­rate auto expo­sures. These are often expe­ri­enced as pho­tos that come out too dark or bright in com­par­i­son to what you saw with your eyes, or per­haps what you were hop­ing for. For­tu­nate­ly, there’s a very sim­ple and intu­itive way to nudge the camera’s auto expo­sure in the right direc­tion. This is done using a func­tion called Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion. Sim­i­lar to White Bal­ance, Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion doesn’t work in Auto mode, so you’ll have to keep your cam­era set to P mode to use it. 

On many begin­ners DSLRs and mir­ror­less cam­eras, Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion is set by push­ing the but­ton labelled with a plus and minus symbol—it looks like this—and then rotat­ing your camera’s main con­trol dial. Rotat­ing the dial either adds or sub­tracts the amount of com­pen­sa­tion, which is typ­i­cal­ly expressed using pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive num­bers in your viewfind­er or on the main screen. Pos­i­tive num­bers tell your cam­era to make auto expo­sures and neg­a­tive num­bers tell your cam­era to make them dark­er. 

As a gen­er­al rule of thumb, very bright scenes and sub­jects call for a pos­i­tive adjust­ment, while those that are dark need a neg­a­tive adjust­ment.

Let’s take a look at a sim­u­lat­ed exam­ple. In this pho­to of a white dog on snow, the dom­i­nance of light tones through­out the scene fooled the cam­era into think­ing there’s too much light and a reduced expo­sure is war­rant­ed. Being smarter than the cam­era, we know that both the dog and the snow should look white, not grey. So for this scene of a bright sub­ject, adding pos­i­tive Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion pro­duces a much more desir­able and authen­tic result. And once again, in prac­tice, you’d make this adjust­ment before tak­ing the pic­ture.

Bear in mind that Expo­sure Com­pen­sa­tion is a per­sis­tent set­ting. To avoid acci­den­tal­ly sab­o­tag­ing your next series of pic­tures, it’s good prac­tice to reset it to zero before turn­ing off the cam­era. 

Now you know how to rec­og­nize and rem­e­dy the three most com­mon mis­takes made by new pho­tog­ra­phers. If you have requests for future top­ics, let me know in the com­ments, and I’ll address them in future videos. In the mean­time, you can learn more about pho­tog­ra­phy on ExposureTherapy.ca. See you next time.

The web­site has launched. This post is a brief doc­u­ment of the launch. Addi­tion­al­ly, it serves as a soli­tary place­hold­er for the blog’s archive page.