Free Photography Lessons

Sign up for our free photography course and get a weekly lesson straight into your inbox.

Here’s one example out of thirty lessons that you could receive after you sign up for the course.

Photography lesson number 3 – getting closer to your main object

In this lesson, you will learn how to move closer to your object in three different and sophisticated ways.

It was Robert Capa, the famous photographer, who coined the phrase “if your picture isn’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” We couldn’t agree more, and in this lesson we will show you several ways to get up close and personal, but let’s start with why being close to your object is so important:

When you are closer, you can better see the more interesting detail in a scene and find better ways to compose the shot.
When you are closer (or zoomed in) you avoid including too many elements around your object that will inevitably create visual noise.
When you are closer you become part of the photographic event - you sense the atmosphere and can identify with it (think about wartime embedded photographers – they have a much better feel of what is going on compared with photographers shooting from a safe distance).

The next two photos illustrate the importance of getting closer:

How to move closer and take a great photo

Today’s exercise – shooting from afar and from up close, and then cropping and comparing

Your task for this lesson is (and we can’t stress this enough – if you read these lessons and don’t complete the exercises you will remember as much as you remember from what you read in last week’s newspaper):

Take a far away and a close up photo of each of the following: a person, an animal, a flower, and landscape (experiment with shooting landscape from up close, it’s tricky since landscape photography is usually done with a wide angle lens from far away).

Go through your photo collection looking for photos you can crop. If you don’t already have a photo editing software you can use a free and simple application called Irfan View (you can get it online) – mark a rectangle and crop by pressing Ctrl+Y. The aim is to find a new photo within an old one by cropping it and enlarging the new area.

There are three main methods of moving closer in photography:

Use a long zoom lens so that your object fills up the frame (shooting with a long zoom lens has another advantage – it will blur the background and make your main object sharp).
Simply move in closer to your object until it fills most of the frame.
Lastly, you can create a practically new photo by cropping an existing photo and picking the elements that will stay (for cropping to work, the resolution of the original photo has to be high enough; though most cameras today shoot with sufficiently high resolution).

The left photo in the following sequence tells a slightly different story from the photo on the right. Can you tell? On one hand, the left photo doesn’t tell the story of the surroundings, but on the other hand, it does pick up on the story of the little girl and focuses our attention on her.

free photography lessons

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This was a sample lesson from the thirty lessons we offer in our photography course. These lessons will give you easy and practical ways to improve your photos and they will not take up too much of your time.

You can rest assured that your personal information is safe with us. We will never give it out to anyone for any reason.

After you sign up you will receive one lesson per week to your inbox, and you will be able to cancel the subscription at anytime. So what are you waiting for?

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	Beginner photography course Beginner photography course. Get email photography lessons that include explanations and practical exercises, and learn quickly and easily how to take great photos. Beginner email photography course.

	Photography lessons Free photography lessons for amateur, beginner, and professional photographers. You will receive the lessons after you complete a very short sign-up form. Each lesson deals with a different topic and includes exercises for any level with any camera.