10 tips for newbie photographers

I'm not all-knowing on photography or even close, and my professional career as a photographer has just begun. But I'm curious and I have learned my share of tricks, and I found that the most important things to remember aren't about equipment or numbers.
A friend of mine has been, to my advice, considering the leap from a compact digital camera to a DSLR (digital single lens reflex). It's been over a year since I first saw some pictures she had in her memory card of a recent trip to London, and realized she had a very good intuitive notion of how to frame things to please the eye and to compose interestingly. I love when this happens, when I see this raw talent in people. It agrees with what I think is essential in photography - not the equipment and how technologically advanced it is, nor the knowledge of editing software (although both help a lot) - but the sensitivity that allows you to look at the reality around it, and make something significant from it just by framing.
"Framing" is a big word for me (I believe most people call it "composition"). It's where 80% of photography is, in my view. After all, your eyes don't give you a 10x15 or 15x20 perspective of the world, and when you successfully fit a part of your surroundings into that rectangle and make it more valuable than it originally is - that's some amazing brain power right there. Photography is, most definitely, brain power. You can take a phone camera and take a visually effective and interesting picture. However, even with the most expensive and advanced camera, you won't take good pictures if the equipment is all you rely on. This takes us to my first advice (I'll list them with no particular order):

1. Equipment has only it's importance. No more, no less.

Having read the previous paragraph, I don't think I need to explain this. I did phrase this tip carefully, so you don't get the idea that equipment can be overlooked or ignored forever. Better and more advanced lenses and sensors will allow you to do many new things and therefore create different pictures. As you become familiar with DSLR cameras, you will understand what you can and cannot manipulate in a photo, and eventually you will want to do something that your camera can't do, but maybe a more advanced model can. Maybe it's something worth investing some money in. Sometimes the possibilities that better equipment brings are worth it.

2. There are good pictures to be taken in every stage of experience.

Being unexperienced is definitely not an excuse for not having good photos (among some not-as-good ones eventually) on your collection. This is also partially explained in the second paragraph of this post - what makes you a good photographer in the beginning, when you don't have all the knowledge or the equipment, is the same thing that will make you an outstanding photographer in the long run, when you have everything: good instinct, a watchful eye, how you approach reality around you and the way you decide to show it. As long as you think things through before you shoot, even though your expert friends point out what you could have done better, your photos will still good and interesting.

3. Know the basic rules.

Intuition will probably make you follow the rules unconsciously. Because rules, in photography (as in movies and other visual arts), aren't that all arbitrary. They are closely connected to our physiology, to human visual perception and processing of visual information. What this means is that some compositions just won't be meaningful or pleasantly appreciated, ever. There's no reason to waste good opportunities just out of ignorance of these simple rules that you can Google out in seconds. And as I've said before, wild and random doesn't mean creative.

4. Break those rules.

Not everything is about taking the safest way, though. Some impressions will only be achieved by breaking those golden rules. Specially if you take a more artistic interest in photography (as opposed to commercial, even though they frequently overlap). After all, that's often how art itself progresses - with the uncovering of new concepts and new standards by people who broke the rules and found something impressive. Strictly following the rules will guarantee you are not a bad photographer, but breaking them wisely will make you an awesome photographer. If someone tells you how to position your flash unit, try and put it some place else. Go wild and see what happens. Delete it afterwards because it probably went terribly wrong - but what if it goes terribly well?
I read a post on another photographer's weblog a while ago that deals with an approach to the basic rules of photography. We pretty much agree, so in the name of clarity and to give you options, here it is.

5. Quantity might mean quality. 


I like to think of artistic production represented by an incredibly tall cylinder, about the same diameter of a CD or DVD. You can even fill it, with your imagination, with DVD discs all the way up to the sky and infinity. There's a slit near the bottom that allows you to take one disc at the time - that disc is what I see as a painting, a photograph, a chapter of a book you are writing, whatever art you are into. What happens is that you need to take several worthless pieces before one good one comes all the way down from the sky and out of the narrow slit in the bottom. When you are a newbie, you will get one good piece once in a while, but that interval will decrease in time until you have an acceptable bad-to-good ratio. The lesson here is that, since there's only one slit and it's really really narrow, you HAVE to take the not-so-good piece first in order to eventually get to the good ones. That's sort of what happens in photography and most every art form - don't wait just to make good pictures: shoot everything. Get rid of the newbie photos and newbie mistakes if you want to be good at this craft eventually. Take your camera with you as many times as you can and take photos of everything that catches your eye. Do the cliches just to get them off your head if you have to. Sooner then you think you'll be revisiting old photos thinking "I really have evolved since I've started".

6. Know what's happening. 

Photography is not all art and intuition. There's physics behind it and a lot of mechanical components in every camera. How they work determines the properties of your pictures - depth of field, contrast and exposure, sharpness, freezing and motion blurs, etc. With a DSLR you will have control over how the inside of your camera works, which means control over the properties of your pictures. The impact of your images will be closely related to how you coordinate the mechanics of the process and instead of memorizing how A + B gets you C, it's far better to understand why it happens. Because sometimes, A + B can get you D, and you won't know that unless you know A and B right.

7. Avoid information overflow.

This can happen in many different ways as photography is a craft with a huge universe of knowledge around it.
Like I mentioned in rule #2, your friends will eventually tell you all you could have done better on your photos (which is normal). They might dump too much information and technical jargon on you and it's natural if you want to learn it all at once from wikipedia. I strongly recommend you don't, though - everyone has a certain amount of information they can retain at once, and everything beyond that is just a waste of time.
Don't try hard to read your whole camera manual or learn every function available from online reviews. I've been in photography for years now with DSLRs and there are still a couple of things in my camera I don't fully understand what they are for. But along the years I learned everything I know one function at the time, and by exploring them with time to make my own mistakes and successes, I got to know those pretty well.
Photography will mix physics with maths and technical tricks and who knows what else. It's too much to know all of a sudden, I strongly suggest you don't try. There's nothing wrong with not knowing yet.

8. Don't rush.

Photography needs to be fun. It's not a competition. And if people treat it like so (as they often do), you will be better off by not being like that. You will need to adapt to various different concepts of photography, some of them can be hard to grasp at first. It's crucial that you are having fun in the process or your motivation will evaporate very easily.

9. Be curious.

Even though you should take it easy and as slowly as you need while learning photography, you should try not to think that you already know a lot, or that what you know at a certain stage of your evolution is enough. There is always something more to know, something else to try. The beauty of photography is that it's world of possibilities is so vast, you will never ever run out of ways to be creative. Sometimes it happens by learning new complicated techniques, and some times it just means combining two simple things that have been with you all along, but that you never thought of articulating together.
Learn what you know well by applying it, but be always ready to take in a bit more of knowledge, and to accept a challenge that might be just a bit over your experience (this is usually how I pick my equipment - something I can use effectively, but that will require me to learn a bit more).

10. Never stop thinking "How can I make this better?"

This is a sort of "Break the rules" advice.
With time you will perfect your picture output to a fully functional workflow. You'll develop framing habits, perception shortcuts and editing vices. At every end of a process, remember to ask yourself "How can I make this a bit better?". What could I have made different? What other approaches were possible in this situation? What if I had done this with a different lens?
For me, art is an open ended process. Eventually you have to quit improving and be happy with what you have, but be sure not to do it at the first result. This might mean you will realize you made mistakes but I guess that's part of learning too.