take pictures you like
I've been doing that for years, it's fun but I want them to look good
I've been taking photos since 2024 but now I'm starting to focus on photography, I use a app called "old roll" to take my photos but I actually dont know any photography techniques nor photo editing softwares, what should I do to start improving at photography
take pictures you like
I've been doing that for years, it's fun but I want them to look good
Pick a subject. Architecture, Portrait, Detail, Everyday life. Watch photographers you consider masters. Pick photos you like. Copy them. Learn about composition, light. Practice. Watch YouTube tutorials about basic editing.
Study photography composition and study art history. If your goal is to create art, you need to study art.
Light, composition and subject matter. 'Read This if You Want to Take Great Photographs' is a great book by Henry Carrol. It covers the composition "Rules" and when to break them. There are plenty of good tutorials on using light in photography. Focus on natural light first. E.g. https://www.fujifilm-houseofphotography.com/blog/item/mastering-natural-lighting-in-your-photography/ Obviously subject matter is down to you, but if you like taking portraits, for example, you might want to consider learning how to pose your subject. They're the main 3 - getting good at them will improve your photography far more than gear ever will.
You don’t get better at cooking by buying more pots or a bigger stove, you get better by practicing cooking and only when you realize your stove can’t cook a roast evenly do you buy a better stove. If I burn eggs every time I cook, buying a better spatula or frying pan is not going to make my eggs better. You get good at photography by doing it, by practising, by critical self-evaluation (why is this photo good? What doesn’t work? How would I do it differently next time? Is the problem the shot or the subject?) and by repeating again and again. Only once you say “I can’t take X photo because of the limits of my gear” as opposed to “the limits of my technique” do you look to buy more gear. No one gets good at the piano without playing. No one learns to swim by sitting on their couch. No one gets good at photography without taking photos and assessing them. I’ve been shooting for 40 years and still have things to learn. Quit the apps, quit the shortcuts, learn to shoot so you have control which means you can shot what you want, not what the software wants to show you.
the built in camera app on my phone warps out the colors and basically everything
There are three main aspects of photography that I would urge you to learn before anything else. First would be the exposure triangle. Learn it. ISO, Aperture, Shutter speed. ISO = on a modern camera, it's fine to set this to auto and cap it at where you think noise is acceptable and then adjust shutter speed accordingly if your aperture has to be at a certain number for your desired depth of field. Aperture = shoot wide open to blur the background. f1.4-2.8 is the typical range and primes are preferred. For landscape, you usually want to go the opposite way and stop down to f5.6 (typical peak lens sharpness on many lenses), f8, f11 or even sometimes f16 if you want sunstars or have a foreground object extremely close to you. Related to aperture (and focal length) is hyperfocal distance. Read up on it if you care about landscape photography. You can kinda ignore it if you don't. Shutter speed is maybe the most important variable in the triangle. Having the wrong speed will often result in a blurry mess. Doesn't matter if your lens is at its sharpest aperture or your ISO is at base for the cleanest result if you try to shoot at unreasonably slow speeds. An old rule from the DSLR era is to double your shutter speed according to your focal length. These days it's more like keep your shutter speed equal to your focal length if you have lens image stabilizer or in-body image stabilizer. Aside from the exposure triangle, learn about composition. Not going to go too in-depth on this, but at least read up on the rule of thirds. It's a good starting point, but don't get too locked into that rule. It's meant to be broken. Finally, the third and most important aspect of photography: light. Dull light makes even the most interesting and/or perfectly exposed scene and subject look boring and flat. Get yourself a mirrorless camera and a 50mm f1.8 to get started with a decent kit. 35mm f1.8 if you decide on APSC rather than full frame though. You can get started with like €500-650. (A6000 + Sony E 35mm f1.8 OSS prime)
You can disregard my answer and call me a photography snob if you like because I’m an old man with old opinions. *The OldRoll app is not making you better and is hindering your growth as a photographer. * With it, you’re just chasing retro vintage trends and you or others are just appreciating the filter and not the photo itself. I don’t know what phone you are using but I would thoroughly encourage finding out how to shoot in RAW on your phone to reduce the unrealistic HDR processing and sharpening that your phone automatically applies. There are also camera apps that will allow you shoot in RAW and edit your image for exposure, color, shadows and highlights etc. Take a lot of pictures But instead of just taking them and being done, look at your photos and decide what you like and what you don’t like about your own composition and style. Analyze the light and the directionality and what the light does to your picture. What is the picture trying to say? What it says doesn’t have to be profound. It could just be “look at this cute dog” or “look how tall and impressive this building looks at this angle” or “isn’t this a beautiful candid smile?” And ultimately, enjoy the process. Shoot for yourself and what *you* like in the pictures.
The built in camera app and the camera for some reason warp out the color of photos, it makes everything look like plastic , for some reason the oldroll app solves it
Practice. Look for photos you like, try to figure out how they did it. Then go and practice. Post your work and ask for feedback and constructive criticism. Ignore people who say it sucks without explaining, it’s as useful as praises from friends and family. Then go and practice and use some of the suggestions suggested. You’ll never improve if you’re only showing your work to yourself. Ask people who actually know what they’re talking about. Pick a topic that you want to improve on and can practice with. So not street as it’s completely random. But if you concentrate on still life, portrait, landscape you can always redo at another time to fix your mistakes. Get good on one thing and expand in the future.
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watch youtube videos on photography basics. Follow instagram channels with photography genres that interest you. Try to reproduce those styles. Repeat.
Buy a comfortable armchair . . . bye !
Learn about composition, lighting, poses, style, and aesthetics. Figure out how your subject selection fits into this. I find a lot of inspiration from the visual arts in general: visit art museums and gallery shows and maybe get to know actual artists if you can. Read about the visual arts and learn lessons from the masters of the arts.
First = ditch the app and shoot pictures in RAW format using your phone’s built-in camera. Without all the processing and styling of the app, you can see the *actual* photograph you took. Concentrate on composition, since that’s the main way you can express yourself with a phone camera, since you typically can’t control the traditional triangle of exposure, ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Practice as much as you can. Get to the point where you’re comfortable actually capturing what you “see” when you use your eyes, and do it without having to think about it. *Then* talk to us about “what camera should I get?” and we can help you graduate to the next step. Without being able to reliably see a photo opportunity and capture a decent shot of it, a camera is an unneeded expense.
my built in camera app is ass and buggy, most of the times the color looks weird
If you have a local library, go there, find a comfortable place to sit, and start reading their photography books. Skim over, but don't skip the sections on developing film and making prints, because a lot of those concepts are directly implemented in photo editing software. Also, look through books of photos of great photographers. You'll see a curated collection of their best work. Examine the photos and try to figure out what makes them great. Read books on composition. You'll need a pretty good library to find anything good on this topic. A trip to a university library might be worthwhile, assuming it's open to the public. It's hard to teach yourself photographic vision. I definitely learned the most in the least amount of time when I was shooting for a paper, because objective feedback from someone who is better than you is the best way to learn. For a while I was participating in a forum weekly photo contest, where the participants voted on the photos. I never won. Looking at the winning photos, I always agreed they were better than mine. It takes a lot of work. So try to find a way to get external feedback from people whose opinion you trust.
Check out your local library. Amazingly, a lot of public libraries have specialty items, including DSLR cameras and even small lighting packages, available for free check-out. They may not be brand new top of the line, but definitely decent and generally well-maintained gear. You can check them out for a couple of weeks and you can usually extend the rental at least a couple of times. A lot of libraries have great great resources that a most people aren't even aware of. Get your hands on a DSLR for a few weeks and get familiar with the settings. Watch some content on photography for beginners. There are countless resources on YouTube. But with camera in hand, it won't just be theory. You'll be able to go out and actually practice what you're learning. Good luck.
First attend YouTube University. Next, practice.
Workshops, Workshops and more Workshops 🫣
Take a class, in person. I taught photography night classes for over a decade. So many people told me that they learned more in those 12 hours (4 nights) than they did in months or years of self teaching. And the cost, at a couple hundred bucks, was far and away the best return on investment for improving one’s photography.
Shoot photos but with intention. When you see something and your instinct is to photograph it, pause and think about what it is that made you want to take a photo. Was it the light? Some pattern or geometry? A specific subject? When you identify the why, think about what needs to be included and excluded in the photo to best capture exactly what it is that drew your attention, what you need to include in the frame to support that and take the photo with nothing else. Now reconsider the entire thing. Change your angle; left, right, up, down or move forward or backward and repeat the process of identifying what should be in the frame. The goal is to be very deliberate about what you're photographing. You can do this with a phone and you'll start taking better photos over time. Simply banging away photos won't make you a better photographer. Shooting with thought and intent will.
IMO it's worth-while shooting reading or watching the blogs on lenses. Looking at MTF charts, maybe shooting some MTF charts yourself. Get some idea about what your gear is capable of. See what others are able to do with the gear you have or what other similar gear is capable of. For a while I did lots of calibration shots to see what my old lenses actually did with distortion and what not. Go out see what happens shooting into the sun. Check what the field curvature is. These things won't make you a worse photographer.