HM Group's Photo School

Welcome to the HM GROUP's Photo School.

Here you will find the notions of a man who has been trying to figure all this out for nearly 30 years. The opinions expressed here are biased to say the least. This is what works for me in the images that I make. Experiment with these ideas, find what works for you, and then tell us about it, so we can all learn something new.

Introduction to Photography

Photography is a series of choices that a photographer has to make--not only choices of equipment and film, but also choices in composition like subject, lighting and camera position.

In this class we are going to cover basic equipment in a way that will increase the number of choices that you as a photographer have to work with in composing an image.

The Basic principles of composition that underlie successful photographs are not rules to be followed slavishly. But understanding them will help you to produce the images you visualize. It matters not if you are using an old manual 35mm SLR (Single Lens Reflex), a Point and Shoot Automatic or a Digital camera, learning some of these basic principles will help you to improve your photographs. With the automatic cameras there are often ways to program the settings used here, and with the simple, feature challenged, cameras, there are often ways to fool it into doing what you will learn here. READ YOUR MANUAL.

If this is your first visit, you may want to view the pages in the following order: Film, Shutter, Depth of field, Composition, Shape and Form, Subject.