Updated May 2026. The basics of photography don’t change. The cameras have, so the gear examples here reflect what you’d pick up today.
Basic photography is not about what camera or lens to buy. It’s all about you as a photographer to understand the basics of photography and become a better photographer.
Photography is not rocket science. Anyone willing to learn can click great photos with a grasp of some basics. Let’s look at some of the basics of photography you need to know to get started. Think of this as your 101 photography guide for beginners.
Consider this image:
This is the kind of image we all shoot as beginners in photography.
Not a great image.
Yes, this has been photographed by me.
But still not a great image.
This is one of my earlier images when I got started.
As you can see, even I used to click shaky, blurred images.
If you want to improve your photography, you need to get the basics right. The basics of exposure triangle parameters, which consist of aperture, ISO, and shutter speed, are what you need to understand. Let’s break each one down.
Shutter Speed:
Shutter speed in simple terms is the duration of time the shutter is open for light to enter and hit the sensor. It is expressed in seconds such as 1/15, 1/30, or 1/500. This is one of the parameters that controls how much light enters the camera.
Shutter speed is responsible for freezing the action or creating motion blur in the image. A faster shutter speed like 1/1000 or higher will freeze the action. How fast depends on what’s happening in the scene. A slower shutter speed like 1/15 creates motion blur. It’s also responsible for the shaky hand-held shot when you don’t have steady support.
A quick note on what’s changed: most modern mirrorless bodies have in-body image stabilization (IBIS), often giving you 5 to 7 stops of stabilization. That means you can shoot 2-3 stops slower than the classic “1/focal-length” rule and still get a sharp image handheld. It doesn’t stop subject motion, only camera shake.
Look at these two examples of what shutter speed can do to an image.
The below picture has been shot at a shutter speed of 1/500.
It froze the water flow. Now consider the same scene shot with a slower shutter speed.
The below picture has been photographed for 20 seconds.
This created the silky flow of water. As a photographer, you decide which shutter speed serves the story.
Aperture:
Aperture is the size of the lens opening. It’s the circular opening in the lens that controls how much light enters the camera. It is expressed as f/4, f/5.6, or f/8. F stands for the focal length of the lens.
Aperture is one of the parameters responsible for the depth of field. Depth of field is the area of a photograph that’s in sharp focus. The other two parameters responsible for the depth of field are focal length and camera to subject distance.
See the below image and let’s understand the role of aperture.
By using an aperture of f/5.6, we created a very shallow depth of field and the background went completely out of focus. This was photographed with an 800mm f/5.6 lens. Today, a 200-600mm zoom on a mirrorless body gives you similar reach and similar shallow depth of field at a fraction of the price and weight.
You do not need a very high-end camera or lens to achieve this.
Consider the below image, shot with a basic Canon 1200D and 55-250 kit lens. That was an entry-level DSLR setup from the early 2010s. The current equivalent would be something like a Canon EOS R50 or Sony A6400 with a kit zoom. Entry-level by today’s standards. Yet the principles work just the same.
You can observe that we achieved a beautifully out-of-focus background.
How did we achieve such a clean out-of-focus background?
Simple:
- Lens: 55-250 kit lens. Zoom out completely to 250 mm. This gives longer focal length and shallow depth of field.
- Subject distance: Move as close as possible to the subject, which gives a shallow depth of field.
- Small aperture: Used the smallest possible aperture on the lens, which is f/5.6.
From the above images, it’s clear that the images we get don’t depend on the photography equipment you use. They depend on understanding and using the basics.
ISO:
In simple terms,
ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor. In film days, sensitivity came from the chemicals in the film reacting to light. In digital photography, the sensor reacts to light. Slower ISO takes more time to react to light. Higher ISO takes less time.
The drawback of using high ISO is that it creates noise in the image and the image quality goes down. The level of acceptable noise in an image depends on the camera model.
Here’s what’s changed since 2019: modern full-frame mirrorless bodies routinely deliver clean images at ISO 12,800 or higher. Push it further with AI denoising tools like DxO PureRAW or Topaz Photo AI. Even ISO 25,600 looks usable in post. That’s a real shift from a decade ago. The underlying logic is the same: lower ISO whenever you can, raise it only when you must.
As a photographer, you should get a good hold on these basic concepts of photography to take your learning forward.
One last note. Since I first wrote this post in 2019, cameras have changed. In-body stabilization is standard on mirrorless bodies. AI subject detection picks out eyes and animals automatically. Phones with Portrait mode and computational long exposure do clever things too. None of that replaces understanding the exposure triangle. The cameras change. The basics never do.
Get the basics of photography right from this post and start clicking the images you’ve been imagining. Which part hit hardest for you? Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments.
You can go deeper on all these concepts in our online photography courses.