When I shoot food photography, I usually reach for my 24-70mm zoom lens, or my 100mm macro. For portrait work, I prefer an 85mm. If you’re traveling or doing landscape shots, you’d be better off with a wide-angle lens.

 Keep in mind that the crop factor of your camera will have a bearing on which lenses you choose.

 Entry level DSLR or “prosumer cameras” usually have a cropped sensor. A Canon Rebel is an example of a good DSLR with a cropped sensor.

 What this means is that a 50mm lens will behave more like a 80mm lens because of the crop factor.

 If you have a camera with a cropped sensor, make sure that any lens you buy will be usable if you decide to upgrade to full frame.

 Bright and airy photo of a stone tower on a clear day - how to take professional pictures

 Aperture is a regulator that controls the flow of light through the lens. But aperture also affects your depth-of-field.

 Depth-of-field refers to the area of acceptable sharpness in a photograph. Aperture controls how shallow or deep the zone of acceptable sharpness is.

 The size of the image sensor, the focal length of the lens, and the aperture all affect the depth-of-field.

 To control the depth-of-field in your photograph, you must control the aperture. This is a balancing act between exposure and depth-of-field considerations.

 In portrait photography, the most important thing is to get the eyes in focus. Many professional photographers shoot portraits at a very wide aperture.

 But when shooting still life, you’d want your aperture to be at 5.6 and higher, depending on the subject.

 ISO is part of the Exposure Triangle. It affects how sensitive your camera is to light. As you increase your ISO, your image will become brighter.

 Digital cameras are much better at handling noise than they used to be. Many digital cameras go up to ISO 6400. At what point you start to see significant noise will depend on your camera.

 There’s a major problem with shooting at a high ISO. Increasing the exposure in post-production will alter the look of the grain.

 Test your camera to see how far you can push the ISO before you destroy the quality of your images. Use a fast shutter speed and a smaller aperture like F8 or F11 so you get sharp images.

 Take the same image at a variety of ISO settings. Start at 100 all the way to the max ISO of your camera and compare them in your editing software.

 Manual focus is when you take complete control of where the camera focuses. You turn the ring on your lens until the area you want sharp comes into precise focus.

 This is not the best approach if you have less than 20/20 vision. If you are even a bit off, you can miss focus. Blurry images are often the result of missed focus.

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 Autofocus is when the camera adjusts the lens to focus on your subject for you. But the AF system can end up focusing on the wrong part of a scene, or struggle to lock onto anything.

 One way to make it easier to get that razor sharp focus is to calibrate each of your lenses to your camera body. You can have a professional do this for you or learn to do it yourself.

 Straight out of the box, most lenses are either slightly front or back focusing. You need to make micro-adjustments to get accurate focusing.

 This is a compositional principle that divides an image into nine equal sections. It does so by using two horizontal lines and two vertical lines.

 The important elements in the scene fall along these lines. They can also fall at the points where the lines intersect.

 There are other compositional principles that are even more powerful though. Check out the Phi Grid and Fibonacci Spiral.

 Think about shooting outside on a cloudy day. The clouds act a giant diffuser, filtering the harsh rays of the sun as they hit your subject.

 Think about shooting outside on a cloudy day. The clouds act a giant diffuser, filtering the harsh rays of the sun as they hit your subject.

 When it’s a hot, sunny day, the brightness of the sun can create harsh shadows in your images. A diffuser placed in appropriate relation to your subject will soften that light for a more even and appealing look.

 There are a lot of professional diffusers on the market. Some have handles, which is very handy for doing portrait photography (pictured below).

 You can also use translucent curtains or even shower curtains to make your own, if budget is a concern.

 Fill light refers to the amount of light that is bounced back onto your subject. It is used to eliminate or soften shadows caused by the main light source. This is how you control contrast.

 Professional reflector kits are foldable discs. They come in gold, silver, white or black. You can use them interchangeably, depending on your lighting scenario.

 Use a grey card to determine the correct exposure and make sure that the whites in your images look white.

 We’ve all taken winter scenes where the snow looks grey. This is because when metering, your camera looks for an average of 18% reflectance.

 A scene that is very bright or very dark will not match this standard. A grey card will help you by providing a standardized reflectance target.

 All you have to do is place it in your scene at the same angle as your lens and take a shot.