The Picture Taking Process - 10 steps

I've broken this down into the following 10 steps which I hope you will find useful. Please share!

The key to improving your photography is to go out with the camera, relax, take your time and go through the picture taking process:

1. Find a location.

2. Choose your subject and how it is lit. Decide on your angle of lighting.

3. Decide which lens you will use i.e. select your focal length which controls field of view and perspective (the relative size of objects and how far apart they appear to be).

4. Use Aperture Priority mode and choose your aperture which controls depth of field. A small F stop number is a wide aperture which results in a shallow depth of field which isolates your subject against an out of focus foreground and background

5. Roughly compose your picture and see what shutter speed your camera is giving you. Remember how your point of view (POV) changes the dynamic of your picture. Getting down at the same level is often a good idea.

6. Increase your ISO if you need a faster shutter speed (make sure you set your ISO back to its lowest setting before each new subject). Higher ISOs result in noisier pictures.

7. Take a test shot and look at the overview screen, highlight warning screen and histogram. Decide which part of your scene is the brightest and position this at the best point in your histogram (bar graph). Is there is a white this should be represented in the last columns on the right of the histogram.

8. Use exposure exposition to adjust your exposure if required.

9. Work on the composition remembering that you are “Writing with Light”. Understand your scene from how your eyes and brain are reading it.

10. Take a step back and consider other ways in which your subject could be captured by changing your POV, lighting, focal length, aperture and shutter speed.