10 Excellent Digital Photography Free Tutorials

By Scott Umstattd

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Look no further. Here are 10 excellent digital photography free tutorials to get you through almost any photography challenge. 

Learn about exposure and how it is controlled with your ISO, aperture and shutter speed settings.  Learn how (and when) to take great landscape photos. And learn the basics of composition. Plus a lot more.  

Get out your notebook and a pen.  There's lots of great stuff here! 

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Using Natural Light and Fill Flash

Above: Tony Northrop provides some quick and simple tips that help you combine natural light with fill-flash when taking portraits. It looks like he is shooting with a Canon 70-200mm zoom lens. That, by the way, is a great lens to make portraits with.

When zooming in on your subject your lens will compress the background. This will, in turn, blur the background. By blurring the background you make the subject stand out.

With a blurred background the viewer is not distracted by trees, cars, horses, godzillas or anything else that is happening behind your subject. All of that is blurred out.

When looking at the blur created behind models in portrait photography, pay attention to the bokeh. This can have a big influence on how the picture looks. 

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Discover Four Types of Light

Above: Karl Taylor walks you through the four types of light and how they affect your photography. He takes you to a beach where all four types of light are occurring at once. Karl then gives a tutorial on how to use and bounce natural light to fine tune your portrait photography.  

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How to Expose a Picture

Above: In this next digital photography free tutorial, Niko at CamCrunch walks you step by step through the three things that every photograph has to have in order to be a photograph. The ISO, aperture and shutter speed settings. These three settings determine how your picture is exposed. Niko walks you through what each term means and how it will affect the outcome of your pictures.

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Basics of Composition

Above: Jared at Fro Knows Photo goes to great lengths with his special guest Kermit the Frog, plus a Canon Rebel T2i and Canon 16-35mm lens, to explain the basics of photography composition.

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Wedding and Portrait Tips

Above: Photographer Overnight offers up four simple tips to help you with your portrait and wedding photography. Among the tips is one that is very important to follow, especially for wedding photographers - shoot in raw format. I took me some time to switch to raw. And there was a learning curve with regards to my workflow, but the ability to "save" pictures is far increased when you shoot in raw vs. JPEG.

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Lighting for Black and White

Above: The Slanted Lens brings out a studio worth of equipment to an old mine shaft to take some very interesting pictures of miners who work there. As you will learn from their video, lighting for a black and white picture can be quite different than with color pictures. While not all of us will be able to carry this amount of equipment around, the tips about lighting are useful and can be accomplished with a little ingenuity and creativity.

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Remember the Egg

Above: Photographer Joe Edelman reminds us why we should not forget the egg when thinking about lighting and photography. Joe is indeed The Egg Man. Coo coo kee choo.

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Using an Off-Camera Flash

Above: Gavin Hoey takes us from concept to final picture in this video that demonstrates the value of using an off-camera flash, in this case a Canon Speedlite 580EX II, to help overcome ambient lighting. He also demonstrates why an umbrella (or two) is a must-have prop to add a little flair to your portrait photography.

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Shoot More. Edit Less.

Above: Photographer Joe Brady talks about getting it right in the camera. I love his slogan/motto "Shoot more. Edit less." Being able to get it right in the camera is every photographer's challenge. By using a light meter and taking a little extra time to think about how to best position your shot, you can save yourself a lot of post-correction work. 

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Learn Low Key Photography

Above: The Beyond Photography Show gives a real-time lesson in creating a low key photograph. Don't know what low key photography is? That's a great reason to watch this digital photography free tutorial. Have you tried and failed to make your background dark so it doesn't distract from your subject? Watch this video to learn how to darken your background.

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A Few Final Words

So those are 10 excellent digital photography free tutorials.  Did you learn something?  Make sure to bookmark this page and come back for another lesson!  Please leave a comment below with any feedback, thoughts or ideas.

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