I have no idea where I first heard this, but it’s extremely true: “the main difference between painting and photography is that the painters needs to work hard to put things into their images, whereas photographers have to work hard to take things out of their images.” Painters start with a blank canvas, and every single thing that ends up in the final piece of art is a result of careful craftsmanship, years of hard-earned skill, and raw intention. The photographer’s canvas, on the other hand, is all of the world’s visual chaos, and he or she must deploy an equivalent amount of craftsmanship, skill, and intention to weed out all the fluff.

This is by far the hardest and most important thing about photography these days. Forget about all of those technical-sounding terms like aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. It seems like everyone I talk to is mostly scared these fancy-sounding terms and their counterintuitive numbering systems, but really, you can learn those things in a day, and get pretty good within a week. It’s not like you have to deal with messy chemicals, narrow temperature ranges, or fumble around in a darkroom. It’s not rocket science, and computers can do a lot of the hard work these days. There’s no shame in relying on them. Your job is only to know enough about the system to take control and make artistic decisions.

Camera settings are just tools for your tool box, and they are only the first in an endless list of techniques and tricks that you use to do the real, hard work of photography—which is figuring out how to remove or de-emphasize distracting elements in the frame, and place emphasis on your subject.

How do we do this? Well for starters, there’s always the nuclear option: you can just blur distractions into oblivion with a really big aperture. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, just be careful not to rely on it too much, and don’t forget that there are so many more options out there. A photographer should always be curious about expanding his or her palette. Here are a few ideas that I’ve been tinkering with lately. I’m sure that there are may more.