Taking better photos

Mintu

How can take a good photo with my Nikon D5100 in 18-55mm lens?

bruto

It would help to know what you want to capture, and what, if anything, you find wrong with your photos so far.

It is possible to take very good photos with the rig in question, but also, of course, possible to take bad ones.

As a starting rule, I'd suggest that you pay attention to the subject at hand, and work at reducing and removing distractions. Point and shoot snapshots often fall apart because the shooter has not gotten close enough to the point. Our brains filter out distraction, and we see what we want to see, but when we put it in a picture our filter is not applied to the picture. If the people are a little dot in the picture, it's a bad picture even though our brains focused on them alone when we took it. Try getting closer than you're used to, and concentrating on a single thing.

Make sure that you get your horizons level, and avoid distracting details in the foreground that might escape your notice. It's surprising how often we can aim at a subject and then realize later that there's a blurry branch, or a power line, or something like that, spoiling it. Look all over your viewfinder, not just at the middle, and don't forget the background. Trees, posts, things behind a person's head, things that seem all right to the eye, but look wrong when put into a two dimensional picture. Isolate your subject if you can.

Practice focusing on subjects, and get out of auto-area focus if you can. Get out of auto exposure mode also if you can. If you need point and shoot convenience, switch to "P" mode, and it will still expose well, but will give you much more control of ISO, focus, and whatnot.

Check out this site and others that contain photographic basics. Consider the cheat sheets, which are designed specifically to provide you with some settings that will work with the camera and lens you have. If you frame a subject right, and get what you are after, your photograph will be good.

Remember this is a digital camera, and that means you can shoot scads of pictures and erase the ones you don't like. I believe the life expectancy of this shutter is something like 150 thousand shots. You can shoot away for years and never hit that. Don't be shy, try everything, and experiment. If there's even a chance something will turn out interesting, shoot it. If you turn out to be wrong, erase it.