Get the best camera you can afford.

Learn about light. Light is one of the basics to produce great photographs. You may get great photographs without knowing much about light but probably you won’t. A photograph has a very limited range of light that it can reproduce. On either end of this range photographs will be too dark or too light. Too little light produces dark photographs. Too much and the photo is washed out.. It’s called under or over exposure. To make a great photo requires the range of light fit into the range the process can produce. If there’s insufficient light, light must be added. It may be impossible to add enough light. If a tree is in the shade of  a building a tremendous amount of light must be added to make the shaded tree lit the same as the tree in sunshine. We don’t have the power of the sun to work with. If the camera is set to photograph the shaded tree then everything lit by the sun will be severely overexposed. Go find another tree to photograph.

To learn about light is practically a career but in a studio the light is completely under the control of the photographer so its far easier to control it. It still requires a lot of ability so study, study, study.

To learn to take great portraits, study Monte Zucker and Joe Zeltsman. There are plenty of other great photographers but Joe and Monte were among the best of the best of the lot, .. IMO.

To photograph outdoors study Ansel Adams. His Zone system is a perfect way to control light but it’s a bit difficult for some people to learn. Ken Rockwell is another great photographer and teacher.

There are a many other fields besides portraiture and outdoor photography. Sports photography; Architectural; Journalism are three. Underwater photography is another. You can learn them all if you are an exceptional person.

If you use your camera phone you can take outstanding photos. It takes skill to get great photos but the phone cameras are wonderful. The problem is they don’t work under certain conditions but there’s no way to set them for different conditions. All you can do is tell them to use the flash or not. Many times that’s not enough control. Toughies.

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