Photography Business, Step One

2025 is your year.   This is the year you’ve decided that you want to take your love for photography to the next level, but where do you start?  This series is going to focus on some of the steps needed to take better photos while potentially starting a successful photography side hustle.

 

Assuming you have a camera but you've been relying on the Auto settings too much, the first thing in my opinion, is to start learning how to manually expose an image. Most cameras have several different shooting modes.  All of which definitely have their place but

 

In order to get complete control over the camera's exposure you need to switch your camera into manual mode.  Yours may not be exactly like this but most cameras have the ability to shoot manually. If you are unsure, a quick google search can probably get you pointed in the right direction.  

 

For demonstration purposes, I’ll be using this older nikon d3000 with a cheap 50mm f1.8 prime lens.

 

Pay attention to the f number on your lens, that will come into play shortly.    

 

Don’t fall into the trap that you have to have the latest greatest gear out there to be successful and take amazing Images. This is a super capable camera and this combo can be picked up used for just a couple hundred dollars.  Infact, my daughter has second shot weddings for me with this exact setup and the images were amazing.  

 

Now, I wouldn’t use this setup as my main camera for a wedding but for a beginner that's just assisting or for someone just getting into photography that's wanting to take awesome photos and possibly make a little extra cash doing family portraits and what not, this is perfectly fine.  

 

Now that you're switched into manual mode, I want to go over the exposure triangle, which is your shutter speed, aperture and iso, and how they affect each other but most importantly how each one  affects your image.  

 

All three settings control how much light is let on your camera's sensor and all three affect each other. If you raise or lower any one of the three it will let more or less light in the camera, raising or lowering exposure.  

 

But the effect that each setting has on your image will determine how you set your exposure up.  

 

For instance, Your shutter speed controls how much motion you allow your sensor to capture.  If you set your camera to a slower shutter speed, moving objects will appear to blur indicating movement in your frame.  Having too slow of a shutter speed can also make you think your focus is off.  This can make a cool effect with things like moving light or moving water.  It can also be a cool effect to add into portraits to convey some type of motion.  The opposite is true for a faster shutter speed.  If you are shooting things that you need to freeze,  like sports or kids running around, you will need a faster shutter speed.  A good rule of thumb is to set your shutter speed to twice your focal length.  So in other words if i'm shooting with an 85mm lens i want to be at 1/160 at minimum while staying as still as i can.  This is so you don’t get blurry images or missed focus because of camera shake.  

 

As for aperture, your adjustments will have quite a different effect. It controls your focus depth of field.  It's measured in increments called your F stop.  The lower the f stop, the thinner the depth of field is, or how much of your scene is in focus.  If you combine longer focal lengths with small F numbers, you can get razor thin depths of field. The longer the focal length the more compression it adds which can mimic a small f number slightly.  Generally speaking I shoot with my aperture wide open, or the smallest “f stop” the lens is capable of.  And that's where I leave it.  If I am shooting a wide landscape or off camera flash where I'm trying to overpower the sun, then I may raise my f stop which lets less light in but like I said for the most part I stay pretty much wide open.

 

Finally, you have the camera's ISO.  This is essentially your digital film.  The ISO controls how sensitive your sensor is to light.  With digital cameras the iso can go up into the thousands.  The only trade off is the higher you take the iso, the more Digital noise shows up in your image. This is generally referred to as grain.  Most modern digital cameras are capable of shooting 12k plus and still have very usable images.  I tend to push mine sometimes because I like the grain effect the higher ISO’s produce.  

 

Pro tip.  Try not to get in the habit of “pixel Peeping” where you zoom way in while in lightroom to see how much grain there is.  A lot of times, in lightroom the software will reference a smaller preview or cashed file which is nowhere near the true resolution of the finished images.  It does this to make lightroom more efficient.  If you are truly that concerned about it and want to see an accurate representation of the actuarial noise your camera has produced, a better option is to export a full res version of the file with all your edits and zoom in on that.  99% of the time, you will find that the finished product has way less noise than you thought it would.  

 

So, where do you start? Now once you get in the habit of shooting in manual mode, it becomes very easy to know what to adjust and where your basic settings will start.  But for instance let's say you are going to take portraits in the later afternoon.  Since you're not planning anything fancy with movement in your shot, let's set the shutter speed at 1/200th to start with.  Then, if it were me, I'd make sure my aperture is as far open as it will go. Lastly, I set my iso to 100 and adjust my shutter speed up if I'm over exposed. Take a test shot and adjust where needed.

 

Take advantage of your camera's light meter to make your adjustments.  This is the little bar that has a zero in the middle and a plus and minus on either side.  If the bars are moving to the plus you're letting in too much light or over exposing, and if it's going to the minus you're not getting enough light which is called under exposing.  For the most part, in a bright environment starting with similar settings you would most likely be overexposed, so to counter the and let less light in, you would raise your shutter speed.  

 

But let's say you're in a darker environment and you start with these settings and your meter is moving to the minus or under exposed side.  What would I do then?  Well, Let's take a look at our settings. My shutter is as slow as I would comfortably want it at 1/200th of a second or so and my aperture is already wide open, which is letting in the maximum amount of light the lens is capable of.  That leaves the ISO, that we previously set to 100, which is as low as most cameras will go.  So watching the internal light meter, I'm going to start bumping up the iso till that meter is as close to center as I can get it. Once i'm there, ill take a test shot and see what it looks like.  

 

Now the camera metering systems can fluctuate from brand to brand and they use different algorithms to determine if a scene is over or under exposed, so that test shot will help you get a visual idea if the image is where you want it.  Then you can just adjust it up or down to your liking.  

 

I recommend always shooting in raw, especially for any type of paid client work.  A raw file gives you several stops of adjustment that you can use in your editing software to raise or lower the exposure in post while you edit. Just in case you didn’t completely nail your exposure in camera.  Try not to get in the habit of "fixing things in post" though, if it can be done in camera, do it in camera.  The less time you spend editing, the more money you make from your business.  

 

Manual exposure can exponentially boost how creative you can be with your images.  But, None of this matters if you're not going to get out and practice. The worst feeling in the world is getting out with paid clients and all the sudden your brain completely misfires and you can’t remember where to start.  But I assure you,  once you do it for a bit, it really does become second nature and can open up an entire new world of possibilities.    

 

If you made it this far, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to read to the end. Thanks and I will see ya in the next one.