Learning Photography Course — 8. Photographing the World

Module 8 of the Learning Photography Course. Seven modules built a camera you understand. This one takes it outside and points it at the world — portrait, landscape, street, wildlife, macro, night, sport, architecture and events.

The idea that runs through the whole module: every genre is one hard constraint plus taste. A face is only a few centimetres deep. A landscape needs everything sharp at once. The street moment will not wait. Wildlife is far away. Macro depth of field is measured in millimetres. The night is short of light and the stars move. Sport is fast. Buildings need straight lines. Name the constraint and the settings mostly choose themselves — using five questions that work for any genre: what must be sharp, what is moving, how much light is there, how close can I get, and what do I owe the subject.

Worked numbers, with the assumptions stated: an 85 mm lens at f/1.4 focused at a metre and a half is sharp through about 26 mm in total, which is why you focus on the nearer eye. Hyperfocal distance for a 24 mm lens at f/11 is about 1.75 m. Zone focusing a 28 mm lens at f/8 puts everything from about 1.6 m to infinity in focus before the camera is raised. A ten-stop ND filter turns 1/60 s into about 17 seconds. At 1:1 magnification f/8 behaves like f/16, and depth of field is about a millimetre.

The night sky: why the old 500 rule allows visible star trails on a modern sensor, and the NPF rule devised by Frédéric Michaud of the Société Astronomique du Havre in 2010 — about 9.5 seconds against the 500 rule's 21 for the same 24 mm lens. The Bortle dark-sky scale, published by John Bortle in Sky & Telescope in February 2001.

And the law, quoted from the primary source and dated. The Metropolitan Police's own guidance that no permit is needed to photograph in public places and that officers cannot delete images. The ICO's statement that pictures taken for your own enjoyment are outside the UK GDPR — and why commercial use ends that. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 on disturbing Schedule 1 birds at the nest, with 'recklessly' added in 2000. Legal is not the same as fair, and the module says so.

Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.