Photography 101 – Everything You Wanted to Know!

Introduction

Photography? What’s that? Photography is the art of capturing the light, without light, photography wouldn’t exist.

In case you didn’t get the memo, my name is Bill Peppas and I’ll be here on eTeknix regularly publishing reviews, articles, guides and news regarding photography and videography.

In this article we’ll go through the basics of photography, the basic terminology which is required to get familiar with if you want to understand everything (well, at least most!) in the forthcoming reviews, articles & guides. We’ll also talk briefly about the general equipment that you need to get into photography and the types of photography and photographs.

Before we dig into the basic terminology and equipment section, let’s talk a little bit about the types of photography and the photograph types as well just to clear things up.

There are two types of photographs, a “photograph” which is an artistic impression of a subject (it could be anything, a person’s portrait, a pet’s portrait, a landscape, a cityscape, a moment at the beach, a close up of an insect, really anything) and a snapshot. Us photographers call images “snapshots” when they are pure memorabilia shots, a picture you took to remember something (e.g. a birthday, a party, your graduation, whatever). Technically a snapshot is a shot that is… captured without any thoughts regarding the artistic parts of photography such as composition, lighting, framing, technical qualities, etc.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you are allowed to capture whatever you want with your camera. Reading our reviews & articles however can help you refine your technique, vision & execution, which can lead to better photographers, whether those are memorabilia snapshots or your first attempts in artistic photography. Even nowadays with all the knowledge that is easily accessible on the internet, every single day, I see people taking photos of their friends and family with the sun behind the subjects instead of having the sun behind the photographer/camera. There’s a solution to that, actually more than 2 solutions, but that’s a part of a future article/guide and it doesn’t belong to this introduction article.