7 Key Photographic Fundamentals In a Nutshell

by Mark Hatasaka

Readers of my books, Digital Nature Photography and Mark Hatasaka's Digital Landscape Photography, know that I've canonized photographic fundamentals into six easy to learn and execute categories—Subject, Lighting, Composition, Color, Focus, and Exposure—or SLCCFE for short .

Here's a handy nutshell summary to these fundamentals with a new category, Timing, included.

SLCCFET in a Nutshell

• Subject. What you choose to photograph. My best advice is to photograph subjects you're totally passionate about.

• Lighting. With no light, there is no photography. Always, always, always pay more attention to the quality of your light than the quality of your equipment. The main qualities of light to mind are:
  • Contrast
  • Direction
  • Color
  • Intensity
  If you do a lot of natural light shooting, timing is also extremely important.

• Composition. There are two parts to composition.
  1. Framing—what you include in the viewfinder of your camera. Commit these two simple framing variables to memory (they play a gigantic role in selecting effective camera equipment).
     1. Camera position
     2. Lens focal length
  2. Artistry— how you arrange aesthetic elements like:
     • Lines (spirals, diagonals, S-curves...)
     • Visual pathways
     • Center of Interest
     • Colors
     • Shapes (triangles, ellipses, circles...)
     • Chiaroscuro (shadowing)
     This is where your talent as an artist quite literally enters the picture, and where you imprint your own unique style. Mastering artistic composition involves inclination, study, perhaps a dash of natural-born talent, but mostly practice, practice, practice.
  Don't forget the part about framing and lens focal length. This will strongly influence your choice of camera equipment from here on out.

• Color. Like composition, the colors you set in your photographs (including black and white photographs) play a tremendous role in setting your individual style as an artist. You set colors primarily by controlling:
  • The color of your subjects
  • The color of your light
  • Accurate exposure
  • The white balance, saturation, and color mode settings of your digital camera
  • Digital darkroom magic
  I no longer recommend using optical filters to control colors. Digital darkroom software does a much better job of this.

• Focus. In my job as a professional photographer, controlling focus takes up an amazingly large majority of my field time. Focus is especially difficult because it works on many different levels. You must learn to:
  1. Optically control depth of field by properly setting lens focal length, aperture, and focus distance.
  2. Mechanically control camera and subject motion by expertly setting shutter speed, aperture, recording (ISO) speed, focal length, autofocus, manual focus, lighting, light metering, tripods, handholding technique (keep those elbows tucked to your sides), and image stabilization.
  3. Control perceived sharpness via lighting, selective focus (deliberate blur), postprocessing software, and the Adobe Photoshop Unsharp Mask.
  As you can see, focus is one of those fundamentals that seem easy on the surface, but in reality, require constant and consumate skill to properly execute. Interestingly, beyond a low thresshold, pixel resolution, lens resolution, and fast maximum lens aperture play a surprisingly minor role in my battles over focus control.

• Exposure. The more and more I photograph, the more and more I'm impressed by how good photography begins and ends with accurate exposure. It enables you to:
  • Easily and faithfully translate awesome mental visions into awesome photographs.
  • Capture the most vibrant and accurate colors.
  • Keep your postprocessing and digital darkroom chores to an absolute minimum.
  Accurate exposure is achieved by expertly setting:
  • Ambient light
  • Aperture
  • Shutter speed
  • Recording (ISO) speed
  • Light metering mode
  • Exposure mode (aperture priority, shutter priority, full manual, etc.)
  • Exposure compensation (deliberate variance from metered values)
  This is often made more complicated because these factors also play prominent roles in controlling focus. Competition between these two objectives can raise some rather thorny conflicts. Historically, even for the most accomplished and expert photographers using the best light meters available, proper exposure has always involved a certain amount of guesswork, luck, prayer, mojo, pledging of first borns, and painful nail biting. Fortunately, today, many digital cameras offer the greatest photographic innovation since the invention of cameras themselves. I'm talking about the in-camera exposure histogram. This one little feature single-handedly wipes out more than 150 years of exposure strife, angst, feverish corrective work, and messed-up dreams.

• Timing. For those of you who have read my books, timing is new to my list of canonized photographic fundamentals. This elevation in rank occurred when I noticed a large percentage of my field time was spent preparing for, waiting for, and shooting for the precise right moment. This activity was so fundamental, so instinctual that it took a long, long time to register in my conscious mind. My awareness of the supreme importance of timing was accelerated by growing awareness that great photographs stand head and shoulders above the pack because they depict great moments that stand head and shoulders above the pack.

—MTH

Text and Images Copyright © 1999-2007 Mark Hatasaka    Contact

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