100 Handy Photography Tips for Beginners

The weekend’s almost here, so here are some great suggestions to help you go out and improve your photo skills. In the video at the bottom of this post, photographer Mike Smith shares 100 handy photo tips for beginners (or for any photographer who wants to brush up on photography fundamentals).

“When I first started out, it was back in the mid 90s; I had a Canon EOS 5 film camera and I had to figure it all out by myself,” Smith says. “I made a lot of mistakes, and the learning process was a lot longer than it is now. But if I could start it all again, I’d tell my alternate self these tips to get better at a faster rate than if I was just randomly taking photos from time to time, hoping to get better.”

Smith’s comprehensive photo advice runs the gamut from the practical to the technical to the compositional and creative. A professional photographer who shoots for corporate clients including doing headshots for their businesses and personnel, Smith’s real passion is landscape photography, so many of his 100 tips are applicable to that genre along with portrait photography.

“If you want to shoot photographs with a blurry background, I start off with tips and techniques for those,” he notes. “If you really don’t like the blurry background look, I cover other ways to get your photos looking nice and crisp and I give you a whole myriad of tips and tricks that I have learned over the 25 years that photography has been in my life.”

Here’s are a few of the tips Smith explains and demonstrates in the video. But we suggest you watch the whole nearly 38-minute free tutorial below to learn everything. It’s also a great video to return to again and again so be sure to bookmark it.

#1 Auto mode on your camera as a safety net
#12 Learn how exposure compensation works on your camera, and where to find it
#17 Patrol your edges. If something creeps into your shot and you’re not aware of it, it can sometimes ruin the photo
#25 Once your shoot in Raw, know that white balance is not that important in the picture-taking stage but more so in the editing stage
#33 Take photos regularly
#53 Delete the rubbish photos (the ones that are out of focus or horrible and blurry)
#64 Shoot at the eye level of your subject
#86 Try photographing the same subject in both portrait and landscape orientation
#95 Get a prime lens and shoot with it for a week
#100 Make mistakes. Don’t worry about making them and actually encourage them. Then laugh at yourself when you realize what you’ve done

If you want some more quick photography advice, check out this easy tutorial from Sawyer Hartman with eight key photography tips in just 120 seconds.