Brilliant Prints is pleased to announce a new weekly series for beginners, ‘Photography Boot Camp’.  Anyone who has been taking point-and-shoot snapshots but has been put off by some of the mystery or complexity surrounding serious photography and who has been content to ‘Instagram’, is sure to benefit from our ‘Boot Camp’.

Using simple language with a minimum of fancy words and a step-by-step approach we’ll present key photography concepts so you get to understand the principles without having to learn the science and optics.

Also, each boot camp blog post will be a standalone lesson so that you learn a single concept or technique at a time without having to understand or follow anything else at the same time.

Most importantly, a Boot Camp lesson will guide you through a 1-2-3 ‘practical’ in which you’ll see and experience exactly what a given setting, usage or technique is supposed to achieve.

We’ll start off with composition – making a conscious selection as to what should be in your picture, and what shouldn’t be in it.  You may not want to cut people off at the knees without realizing it, nor may you want all that empty space above your subjects’ heads that you often see in your photos.

We’ll move on to aperture and shutter speed in the next lessons but we’ll work ‘backwards’: we’ll show and explain the effect and outcome first, because the effect and outcome are your ends; things like aperture and shutter speed are only the means to that end.  Ever admired an out-of-focus, blurry background?  Or do you like motion-blur in action photos, say of a galloping horse?  These lessons will explain just how to nail those types of shots.

Likewise, if words like bracketing and polarizers seem off-putting to you now, worry not: they’ll be demystified in such a way that bracketing and polarizers will become second nature to you.

That said, the ultimate end in our Boot Camp series is to master the basic skills so that a beginner or novice takes that all-important step toward becoming a hobbyist photographer.

Attend our Photography Boot Camp and say ‘goodbye’ to ‘Always Auto Mode’!