Your Own Photography Business

Copyright (c) 2008 Tom Jackson

It is December 2008 and you may be looking for ways to make money in your own home based business. Do you need to make additional income to pay the bills? Do you have a love and passion of photography? It is possible to make a very good income, part or full time, with your own home based photography business using your digital camera. Wedding Photography is an approx. $5 Billion per year industry.

You can make an excellent at home with your digital camera and shooting weddings on weekends. Do you love taking photos of family and friends? Do your family come to you for photo advice? Then you can start your own business taking wedding photos on weekends. Wedding photography can be a very lucrative part time or full time career. In the United State alone, the Wedding Photography industry accounts for approx., $5 Billion per year. That's a very large market. And with some know how and a decent digital camera, you can be a part of this industry. All you need is a course that includes business forms, technical discussions, sample ads and business cards, and even tips on using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Apple's Aperture.

In this article, I will explain some technical considerations of picture taking. Available light photography and many people often have questions about the aperture and how to use it effectively.

Available light photography is pretty much as the term says. You take photos using just the available light in the scene. You do not use the flash on the camera or other portable light sources. Reflectors can allow you to reflect the natural light where you need it to remove hard shadows and give a more pleasing effect in the final image. In my blog, the address is below in the resource box, you will see some sample photos, including a scene from a wedding which does not use a flash.

If you look carefully at the photo, you will notice some very obvious things about the light. Overall, the light is very even right across the whole image, including the background of the image. The light coming in through the windows is bouncing off the walls and lighting the whole church, lighting the scene naturally. A flash on the other hand, will only light a small part of the scene, usually just the bride. The problem with flash is that it will product a lot of hard shadows both on the bride and dress, and also on the background. With flash, you would normally see a big shadow of the bride on the wall in the background. By using available light, you eliminate this shadow. Also, the shadows on the brides face are also very soft.

The biggest problem with available light photography is the shutter speed. Usually this will be relatively long, so the cahnce of spoiling the image due to movement, either from the subject or the photographer, is quite big. One should always use a tripod in this situation. So, you need to let people know that this is a special lighting effect and that they need to stay very still for the exposure. The image shown in the blog, had a shutter speed of a quarter of a second. Photographically speaking, that is a long time. Exposures under normal conditions, will be using a fairly fast shutter speed so that the movement of the subject will be frozen to give a nice sharp image and a pleasing photo as a result.

We need to consider two things to when using available light to get correct exposures. One is, as we mentioned, the shutter speed, and the other of course, is the aperture.

Lets take a look at how a correct exposure works. The shutter speed, in a wedding for instance, will freeze the movement of the subjects, so that the images appear sharp and pleasing to the eye. So, the shutter speed determines how long the light affects the sensor on the camera, and the aperture affects how much light hits the sensor. So the combination of how much light hits the sensor for how long determines by the shutter speed, gives us a correct exposure.

The secondary effects of the shutter speed is the amount of movement shown on the image. A fast shutter speed will show no movement, and a slow shutter speed will cause a blur of the image, either from the movement of the subject or by not holding the camera perfectly steady.

The secondary effect of the aperture is how much of the image is in sharp focus. With either shutter speed or aperture, a lot of people get confused about the numbers involved. The aperture shown on a camera lens is usually shown as f5.6 or f8 etc. The confusing part for many photographers, is that the larger the f number, the smaller the lens opening. But do not let the numbers confuse you. The numbers are only written this way because of space constraints. The number is really a fraction, and every number technically should be written with a one on top of the number. So, f8 is really f and 1 over 8. And f16 is really f 1 over 16, or a sixteenth. What this means is that each stop downs, halves the amount of light coming through the lens.

The effect of closing down the aperture this way, is that the smaller the aperture, the larger the depth of field. In other words, the smaller the aperture, more of the image will appear in focus. So, when shooting portraits, we usually want a shallow depth of field, so that the background does not affect the appearance of the subject. But as we adjust the aperture, by letting more or less light reach the sensor, we have to adjust the shutter speed to allow the light to be on the sensor for a longer or shorter period to make a correct exposure.