Tutorial

Digital Photography in a Nutshell

(This is an on going project, and may change from time to time)

To get start, one needs to identify the purpose of photography. What to take, how and when. The budget, the desired dimensions and weight of the gears.
The important factors of great photographs are: composition, framing, leading lines, angles. For composition, headroom (head room, or lead room, looking room especially for portrait) is a similar concept.
First of all, the rule of thirds, the basic of composition, and dated back to 1797 by John Thomas Smith. Wikipedia gives a very good explanation as follows.

The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

There are many great collections of tips on composition.
10 Top Photography Composition on PHOTOGRAPHYMAD is a good start. It contains examples of pictures with all kinds of compositions.
5 Elements of Composition in Photography, by Darren Rowse, gives good descriptions and examples of Pattern, Symmetry, Texture, Depth of Field and Lines.
Second Picture provides tips on composition from many different point of views. The main tops themselves sound attractive to photography lovers: Unusual View Angle, Things to Avoid in a Photograph, Frames in Photos, Give Space to Subjects of the Photo, Meaning of Depth of Field, Photograph Close, Simple Composition, Rule of Thirds.
Kodak has a more systematic page on all the topics of composition. Examples of simplicity, balance, merger (background, border, near) are especially very inspiring.
naturephotographers presents tips on composition in landscape photographs.

Next, the elements of an Image
The essential attributes of an image is said to be: shape, tone, form, pattern, and texture.
To capture/express the shape of an subject, camera angle, good contrast (against the background) and right exposure (with histogram concentrating on the left hand side). Lighting is not extremely important in this case.
The mid-tones (with great details) are the most important for providing a subject with three-dimensional form.
Pattern is the repetition of a shape, form or texture. Long telephoto lens setting and distant view point can help to enhance patterns.

While there are many things we need to talk about the gears for taking pictures, one thing in particular we need to be careful is the calibration of lens. It is also called AF micro-adjustment. This is especially important when one starts to feel frustrated by pictures of bad focusing, and details are the primal expectation. Peter Gregg presented a very easy and fun way to do it, in his article "Lens Calibrating A DSLR Is Easy and Fun - Don't Be A Chicken - Just DO IT". Unfortunately, this can be done only for cameras with built-in calibration features. Keith Cooper provided more "professional" ways to do this, on northlight-images, by Moire fringe technique, with image Moire interference patterns.

Here are some tips on sharing your master pieces, or whatever you like, by online services.
toptenreviews gives a excellent review of online photo services. Although most of them are commercial services, some of them allow free usages for limited storage space. For example, picasaweb and flickr. For other sites, we can even sell our pictures. Although the competition is intense, and one single sales cannot bring much big cash, the most amazing thing is that no marketing efforts are needed at all. The only thing needed is to concentrate on creation of excellent contents in need.

For more information, please refer to the following collection of links.

• photographytips.com, as its domain name suggests, is where one can find many useful techniques and tricks to improve ones photography.
• 50 Incredible Photography Techniques and Tutorials is a collection of many links, on many interesting topics of photography. The main key words themselves will make any photography lover's mouth water: High Speed Photography, Tilt-Shift Photography, Black and White Photography, Motion Blur Photography, Infrared Photography, Night Photography, Smoke Art Photography, Macro Photography, HDR (High Dynamic Range), RAW Processing, Panoramic Photography.
• 10 Top Photography Composition Rules is a nice summary of the basic composition rules with some simple examples.
• PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS for beginner and beyond is also a nice site, with user friendly user interfaces and eye catching examples. The photography tips are especially educating and practical, covering many daily situations.
• Photography composition articles by photoinf.com is a nice collection of online (free!) articles on photography composition.
• Photography's Recommendation by Ataru Matsunaga (写真のすすめ。松永あたる)