Break The Rules

Rethink your camera’s usual settings, discover different creative techniques, and capture your own unique images that retain a professional quality

Photography is a relatively simple concept – all the photographer needs to understand is how to control brightness through a combination of camera settings. Learning how to frame the world in a way that’s exciting or thoughtful, and which offers a glimpse into your creative vision? That’s more difficult. The process of honing your own style takes practice and experience until you start to instinctively know which approaches will suit a given situation.

There’s a formulaic approach that many of us adopt when learning the key photographic skills (think the rule of thirds or the exposure triangle); but while these rules are useful guidelines to get us started, and help us get to grips with the basics, it’s easy to become reluctant to try new ideas and think outside the box. The rules of photography rarely encourage imaginative thinking, instead leading many new image-makers to follow an inflexible procedure for the creation of every image they shoot; rather than being commandments, we see the rules as a means of applying a core recipe to any situation.

The standardised rules give you a fantastic starting point from which to experiment and be creative, and here we want to encourage you to take a stepping stone beyond them, into your own artistic – and arguably free – way of thinking.

In this feature we’ll explore each area of camera control, from lenses to long exposures, and question how appropriate the preconceived ideas are to image-making. Reimagining everything you already know about photography can be the source of great inspiration and incredible images.

CONSIDER SHUTTER SPEED

Analyse the effects of choosing fast or slow exposures