beginners

The Best Cameras for Beginners in 2024

Looking to get started in photography but feel overwhelmed at the huge number of different camera models on the market? The daunting feeling can be an obstacle as you try to dive headfirst into the art form, but you have come to the right place: we have selected the best cameras for beginners looking to dip their toes in photography without breaking the bank or getting in over their heads.

20 Essential Photography Tips For Beginner Photographers

Starting out in photography can be really confusing. There is so much stuff to learn, so many things to do, and so many resources to read, not to mention the insane amount of people screaming opinions at you all the time. It’s hard to fight through all the noise.

7 Pieces of Advice Every New Wedding Photographer Needs to Hear

Photographer Pye Jirsa of SLR Lounge recently put together a video that every budding wedding photographer should watch. It's basically his version of "7 things I wish I'd known when I first started out as a wedding photographer," and it answers some of the most common questions (and dispels some common myths) about this popular genre.

Opinion: A Used Canon 5D Mark II is the Best Camera for Beginners

Photographer and occasional PetaPixel contributor Usman Dawood has put together a video and camera showcase that seeks to prove a simple, possibly overlooked point: the best beginner camera for aspiring professionals isn't a high-end APS-C system... it's a used Canon 5D Mark II.

Sock Puppet Teaches You How to Use Your Camera’s Manual Settings

If you've been looking for a fresh, entertaining take on the standard beginner's guide to
getting out of Auto Mode, look no further. The YouTube channel TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin has released the strangest (and yet still very informative) tutorial we've seen in this genre.

Back-to-Basics: 7 Street Photography Tips for Beginners

Photographer Evan Raft recently published a list of 7 helpful, back-to-basics tips for anybody who is interested in getting started with street photography. If you're a beginner, this video is a great place to start before going out and trying to capture your first few street shots.

Wedding Photography Pricing Myths Exposed

Wedding photographer Taylor Jackson recently took on what he's calling "wedding photography pricing myths." In a 30-minute video, Jackson tackles some of the most common tips, advice, and outright myths that he found online, setting the record straight for beginners who want to get into this business.

Advice for Beginner Photographers in 2020

Seeing that it's a new year and a lot of folks have recently gotten cameras, I thought it might be helpful to put down my thoughts and advice for beginners.

Here’s a Free Tutorial on Lightroom CC for Beginners

Adobe just announced its new cloud-based Lightroom CC app. If you're looking into get started with this software, Photoshop Training Channel just released a comprehensive tutorial geared toward beginners. You can find the 38-minute training course above.

Tips and Advice for Photo ‘Noobs’, Courtesy of Kai Wong

Former DigitalRev host and photo industry personality (do we have those?) Kai Wong is setting aside the gear reviews for a minute to help out the photography "noobs." If you're a beginner, he's got some great tips, advice, and inspiration for you.

3 Mistakes Film Photography Newbies Make and How to Avoid Them

Patience is not one of my many virtues and I've always preferred practice to theory. Instead of taking the time to learn the essentials before starting, I usually jump in head-first... come what may! This behavior has caused me disappointment, loss of time and money.

Basic Tutorial Clears Up a Fundamental Confusion About Lightroom

This short little tutorial by photographer and educator Phil Steele might be too basic for most advanced and even intermediate photographers, but you might find it useful all the same. That's because it tackles what Steele calls "the biggest confusion about Lightroom."

An Introduction to Collecting Vintage Photographs

In 2011, a modern-day treasure hunter was browsing through an antique shop in Fresno, California. Flipping through boxes, he came across an old photograph. An unsmiling group of men, 19th century Americans it seemed, were playing croquet in front of a wooden building in a rural setting. It was an interesting photograph. He paid $2 for it and walked out.

6 Things You Don’t Know About Apertures, But Probably Should

One of the first things that we learn when we start taking photographs seriously is that ‘aperture’, the size of the hole in the lens through which light passes, controls depth of field.

A large aperture creates shallow depth of field while a narrow one creates wide depth of field. But there’s a little more to aperture than that, let’s take a closer look at this most fundamental photographic control.

Jim Goldstein Offers Invaluable Advice for Novice Photographers

The question, "how can I take better photographs" never goes away for the photographer who is constantly looking to improve and evolve, no matter how many years they've been doing it. But this question is particularly difficult to answer for beginners who don't yet have the foundation that years of looking through a viewfinder offers.

Thankfully for those people, there are professionals like Jim Goldstein who don't mind condensing years worth of experience into useful tips and advice.

A Beginning Photographer’s Guide to Photographing The Northern Lights

Dean J. Tatooles specializes in fine art panoramic landscape photography, wildlife photography, and indigenous portraiture from remote locations around the world. He also works with top-rated travel companies and fellow professional photographers to lead photographic safaris in Iceland, India, Kenya, and more. Fresh off a trip in Iceland, Tatooles and colleague Tim Vollmer answer some common questions about the eerie natural anomaly known as the Aurora Borealis. If shooting the Northern Lights is on your photographic bucket list, be sure to check out their tips below, which have been gathered from years of experience.

A Concise Video Refresher of the Basic Rules of Composition

Composition and the rules that accompany it are some of the most basic aspects you learn when first picking up a camera. If you've been a photographer long, it's probably safe to say that the "rule of thirds" and "golden mean" are ingrained into your brain so well that it's second-nature now.

That being said, every once in a while it's nice to take a fresh look at the rules and the underlying concepts behind them -- if for no other reason than because you have to know the rules in order to break them properly.

Great Tutorial: ’10 Things Beginners Want to Know How To Do’ in Photoshop CC

It's likely one of the reasons Adobe decided to shift to a subscription model was so that they could bring in more beginners and amateurs that had never had affordable access to the software.

For them, justifying a several hundred-dollar purchase wasn't always feasible, but $10 per month through Adobe's perpetually-extended Photoshop Photography Program is more than reasonable, and so we'd bet there are more beginners on Photoshop CC than ever before. Now the hard part... actually using the software.

Super helpful Photoshop CC beginner tutorial to the rescue!

The Gap: An Inspirational Video About How All Artists Struggle in the Beginning

We're not in the habit of reposting things we've covered before, even though at least once per week we run across some post or video from a few years ago that is going 're-viral' and is being covered by everyone who missed it the last go around (and some who didn't).

For this video, however, we're making an exception. And we beg your forgiveness for that but the truth is, our readership has more than doubled since 2012 and it would be an injustice not to share this with those new readers. Plus, those who have already seen it will definitely benefit from re-visiting this motivational message.