Frequently asked questions

No. The rule of thirds is a prompt to decide where the subject goes rather than letting it land wherever the focus point was.

Centring is right for symmetry, for confrontation, and whenever the surroundings add nothing. The failure is not centring — it is centring without deciding to.

No, and the difference matters. Zooming crops: everything in the frame enlarges together and the relationships stay as they were.

Walking closer changes those relationships — the subject grows faster than the background, which appears to shrink. Only moving can change what is behind your subject.

When you can see the marks, and not before. Photograph a plain bright surface at f/16 and look for dark specks in the same place in every frame.

Most dust never shows at normal apertures. Cleaning carries some risk and doing it unnecessarily is the more common mistake.

Not with a shirt — fabric carries grit, and grit is what actually scratches coatings.

A clean microfibre cloth is fine for smears. Blow the loose dust off first, because wiping it is how a dusty lens becomes a scratched one.

No. Every digital photograph is interpreted by something — if not by you, then by the camera’s own JPEG processing, which applies somebody else’s idea of contrast and colour.

Editing means choosing that interpretation rather than accepting a default.

Three things, permanently: clipping at either end, blur from camera shake or missed focus, and composition.

Sharpening increases edge contrast; it does not add detail that was never recorded. Cropping changes framing but not the relationships between things, which needed you to move at the time.

raw when the light is difficult or the photograph matters, because it survives correction far better. jpeg when neither is true and you want something you can share straight away.

Most cameras will record both at once, which costs card space and settles the question.

The same day you take them. The gap between shooting and copying is where losses happen.

One copy is not a backup, and two copies on the same computer are not either — they fail together. The workable minimum is your computer plus somewhere that is not your computer.

Almost any camera with manual controls. The three controls behave identically on a twelve-year-old entry-level body and on the most expensive one made, and it is the controls you are learning.

Spend the money on a lens with a wide maximum aperture instead — a 50mm f/1.8 costs very little and does more for what your photographs look like than a better body would.

No. A smaller sensor is not a worse sensor; it captures a smaller part of the image the lens projects, so the view is narrower.

What it does mean is that advice written for full frame needs translating. A 50mm lens on an APS-C camera frames like a 75mm lens would on full-frame — that is the crop factor.

Aperture priority, most of the time. It is faster than manual and the camera’s meter is right more often than not.

Manual earns its place when the light is constant and you want it to stop changing between frames, or when the scene keeps fooling the meter. Neither of those is most photographs.

Whichever one your eyes object to, on your camera, at the size you actually look at photographs. Published figures are less useful than twenty minutes of testing your own body.

The more useful principle: a noisy photograph of something beats a clean photograph of nothing. When the aperture is wide open and the shutter is as slow as you can hold, raise the iso without agonising.

Because your camera’s meter assumes every scene averages out to middle grey, and exposes to make it so. Snow is not mid-grey.

The fix is exposure compensation, usually +1 to +2 stops. Changing the metering mode does not help here — when the whole frame is snow, it does not matter how much of it the camera measures.

No. Brightening a dark file amplifies the same noise that raising the ISO would have, usually with less information to work with.

Protect the highlights, because clipping at the bright end is permanent — but do not deliberately underexpose beyond that.

The hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset, if you have the choice. Low sun is warm, soft, and comes from the side, which reveals shape rather than flattening it.

Overcast is the next best thing and far better than it sounds — cloud turns the whole sky into one enormous soft light. Midday sun is the hardest to work with, and the answer to it is usually shade.

Not to start. Most lighting problems are solved by moving the subject relative to a window, or by bouncing light back into the shadows with a piece of white card.

Buy one when you have exhausted those and can say what you need it for. When you do, bounce it off a ceiling rather than pointing it at people.

Three different faults look the same and have different cures.

If everything is soft, including things that were not moving, it is camera shake — use a faster shutter speed or rest the camera on something.

If only the subject is smeared and the background is sharp, it is motion blur — the subject moved, so use a faster shutter.

If something else in the frame is perfectly sharp, the focus went to the wrong place. Choose the focus point yourself rather than letting the camera pick.

The starting point is the reciprocal rule: one over the focal length. A 50mm lens wants 1/50s or faster, a 200mm lens wants 1/200s.

Stabilisation buys two or three stops beyond that. Technique — elbows in, breathe out, lean on something — is worth about one more, and costs nothing.