8 Tips For Better Digital Photos

Whether you consider yourself an amateur photographer, or you just want to create better family photos, there are many things you can do to get better photos. Here are some easy tips to use the next time you head out with your digital camera.

Even a beginner can take professional-looking photos - suitable for framing.

 Be Prepared

Keep all your photography equipment ready for use. Collect everything you’ll need into one place. A camera bag is ideal, because it keeps all your stuff together and lets you carry it all with you. Everything in its place. A good camera bag will let you organize a miniature tripod, extra batteries, memory cards, etc. - even a plastic bag or waterproof housing to protect your camera in wet weather.

Hold your Camera Steady

Blurry photos are almost always the result of camera movement. Just your own unsteadiness, causes your camera to shake enough to blur your pictures.

So steady yourself and your camera before you take the shot.

Plant your feet firmly on the ground and tuck your elbows in close to your sides. Instead of using the LCD viewer, steady your camera against your forehead and frame the shot using your camera’s viewfinder. You can also steady your upper body by leaning against a wall or a tree. Or totally eliminate any camera movement by using a tripod.

Once you’re all set, gently press the shutter release in one motion. Pressing the shutter release too hard could jerk the camera downward.

Get Closer

One difference in “snapshots” and really great photos is the composition of the shot. Unless you’re shooting an outdoor landscape, you can improve most photos just by getting closer to your subject. Depending on the situation, you can physically move closer to your subject, or use the zoom feature on your camera for the same effect. Try to get within a few feet of your subject so you eliminate most of the background. You’ll like the results.

Take more Pictures

Even professionals take loads of shots of the same subject - to get just a few that they will use. With a digital camera, you can delete the images you don’t like, and only print the winners - so don’t hesitate to take several shots of the same subject. Change the angle of the shot. Get a little closer. Adjust the lighting.

Why not fill the entire memory card with pictures of your kid at the pool, or your daughter in her cap and gown? The more pictures you take, the better the odds that you’ll get a few shots that will really thrill you.

Vary the Lighting

Using natural light will give better skin tones when photographing people, so try not to use the flash if you don’t have to. Outdoor daylight shots are easy, but you’ll have to be a little more creative when shooting indoors. Try using the light coming in from a window for warmer tones than you would get using the flash.

Experiment with natural lighting. You can get stronger shadows by moving your subject closer to a window, and turning your subject can create more dramatic shadows.

Eliminate Red-Eye

Red-eye is the result of light passing through your subject’s eye and reflecting back. You’ll get it more often when using your flash, just because the light from the flash isn’t as diffused as natural light. So the first tip for eliminating red-eye is simply to avoid using your flash when you don’t absolutely have to.

Another way to reduce red-eye is to have your subject look anywhere but at the camera. This reduces red-eye because any reflection isn’t directed back at your camera lens.

If you have to use the flash, some digital cameras have a built-in feature to automatically remove red-eye. Use it.

Go for Candid

Instead of posing two (or more) people looking directly at the camera, get a shot of them interacting with one another. Even two people having a conversation is more interesting than having them stand next to each other facing the camera. Some of the best professional portraits have the subject captured deep in thought, with their attention focused inward, rather than on the camera lens.

It makes a more interesting shot. Your portrait will look more natural - less posed.

Create a Scene

Putting your subject in the center of a photo is just boring. You’ll get a much more pleasing result if you place your subject off center when you frame the shot.

This is a truly professional technique. Place your subject so that they occupy 1/3 to 1/2 of the total composition, but NOT at the exact center of the frame. Capture an interesting background object in the rest of the frame.

Anybody can practice these techniques. They’re easy and you’ll get better, more professional photos.

How to be a Great Photographer

Take one camera (digital or analog) and film as needed. Put film into camera (if necessary). Snap shutter. Before snapping shutter, point camera at a subject that will give the viewer a meaningful aesthetic experience.

For someone who has no idea of what a camera is, learning how to carry out the first part of the prescription should take anywhere from a week to a month. However, the second part will take from a few years to forever. It's this part that I want to discuss.

There are several approaches to developing as a photographer.

1. Do nothing

A lot of people use their camera to record family celebrations and vacations and are content with the outcome.

2. Study web pages that have tips for better photographs

These will often help to tighten up your pictures. If you want to get a few ideas in a few minutes, this is the place to look.

3. Get your photographs critiqued at an appropriate website

This is a good way to learn how others respond to your pictures. But be careful. Not all criticism is equal. Some of your evaluators may be experienced professionals and others beginners. If you are going to rely on this method, it is important that you learn enough to evaluate the evaluators (see point 4).

4. Study the work of acknowledged great artists

By taking this route you can learn what elements contribute to a fine photograph. This takes time and study. Don't simply look at a few photos but read art criticism to find out what professional educators think and why.

One drawback here is that you won't be able to see how your work measures up. If you plan to take this route and also join a critique website (see point 3), you will be in a position to know which criticism to ignore and which to pay attention to.

5. Join a photography club

Clubs often have lectures, workshops, and juried shows. This can be a good hands-on learning experience.

6. Take a class (online or in person)

There are all sorts of classes. If you choose one that has assignments and feedback, you can be guided through the fundamentals by an experienced photographer. You can check the DSLR MASTER COURSE .

7. Get a coach

At this point I have to say a few words about the difference between a competent photographer and a person who uses photography as an art form. The competent photographer will be able to produce pleasing postcard- or calendar-quality pictures that look like postcard and calendar pictures. The artist will be able to take photographs that represent his or her vision of the world. If you are after the former and not the latter, you should choose among methods 1 through 6. A good coach should help you develop your unique way of seeing.

8. Go to an art school

This, for people who have the time and the money, is by far the best. I studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. Here's how it worked. I went to a photography class two or three times a week. At every class meeting each student pinned 20-30 photographs to the wall and, under the supervision of an accomplished professional, we criticized our own and one another's work. We also took photography history classes as well as courses in other fields of art. Mine were film, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. There were frequent guest lecturers. We never learned any rules. In fact, rules were never mentioned. But through a combination of years of exposure to all types of art, classical through contemporary, and having to produce 50-60 new photographs every week, we eventually learned what art was about.

There are many ways to improve your photography. Before you make your choice you should decide on your goal. If you have little time and just want to tidy up your pictures a bit, read the tips pages. On the other extreme, if your goal is to be an artist, there is nothing close to attending art school. Most people fall between these extremes.

Baby Photography - Tips !

Babies can be the most challenging and rewarding portraits to take, but can also be the most frustrating.

Babies tend to sleep, eat and cry a lot and won’t pose in front of the camera but don’t let that put you off photographing them. Creating the perfect baby portrait, when done right, will certainly be rewarding.

One of the most important factors in photographing babies is patience and the way you apply child psychology when relating to the baby. Babies over six months may be shy and won’t react well to a complete stranger. This is where child psychology comes in - you must try to play with the baby, or even become  a child yourself while taking the photograph. The keys of your car can be very effective. But remember, your job is to take a baby portrait; you must be able to react quickly when the infant responds to your entertainment.

Shooting a portrait of a newborn baby can be difficult. At this age the baby will not be active, so it’s better to focus on close-up head-shots. Try using natural light from a bedroom window to add mood to the portrait.

Babies over a few months of age will be more alert and will have a lot more movement in them. Shooting fast is a necessity, the infant will tire quickly.

Babies seven months or older can be very tricky to shoot. The baby will bore quickly and will not want to stay in the same position.

If you are serious about baby photography and you tend  to shoot from your own studio make sure you have a lot of toys to amuse the infants. A light colour background will work best and shoot the portraits in colour and black and white.

Parents may be worried about the affect of studio lights on their baby. Point out that strobe lights have no effect on kids. Try to point this out before the parent asks.

Don’t ever handle a baby without the parents consent. Most parents will be very protective and won’t react well to a stranger lifting the infant.

Watch out for the fingers - fingers in the mouth can be attractive but on most occasions they will obscure the face.

If you plan to resell the baby photograph to an agency make sure you get a release form signed from the parents. There is a large market out there for baby pictures but agencies or magazines  won’t touch them without the parents consent. For baby portraits to be sellable they must be technically perfect, but the picture must illustrate the baby being active or some form of child care.

Black And White Digital Photography

There are several ways to achieve black and white digital photography. With black and white digital photography, you are bringing the end user back into a period of time when life seemed a lot simpler. Many digital cameras come equipped with a function to take these types of photos. If your digital camera does not support this function, you can still change your photographs into black and white with software programs.

You’ll want your black and white digital photography to look its best when you are finished. A technique that can help you get the best image out of your digital photograph is through image manipulation. You may find it better to convert your eight-bit color images (which are usually JPEGs) into 16-bit colors first. This is important because an 8-bit RGB can be the same as a 10-bit gray-scale.

You can find information all over on the Internet to help you with your black and white digital photography. These resources can be found in everything from websites to magazines. Colored pictures can look truly beautiful as a black and white display. You will usually have to convert your graphics, because although there are options with digital cameras, there are no true black and white digital cameras.

 

Correct the Color-casts

An important part of black and white digital photography is correcting the color-casts. These are caused by bad lighting, but you can use software such as Photo Shop Elements to make the relevant changes by using their editing applications. The Imaging Factory is also software that can help you to easily convert and fix lighting areas in your graphics to get the best look with your black and white digital photography. If you want to turn your graphics into black and white digital photography, you can step into a completely new dimension in photography. You can do an endless array of projects right from your own computer.

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Abstract Photography - Has Photography Come of Age

“Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.” -W. Eugene Smith

 
The invention of the camera liberated painting from its reportage role. Gone was the need to produce a likeness, detail the events of the story, painting was free to express emotions. True what had gone before contained an emotional content but now painting could experiment and through imaginative interpretation allow the emotional content to predominate. Freed from this constraint the painter was able to create a new language and explore the motivations of their art.

As the 19th century evolved and throughout the 20th century painters from the impressionists through the cubists and expressionists to the minimalists could to use colour, line and form to go straight to the emotional content of their work.  The representational aspect of the work become coincidental and was pushed to the point that it became akin to lying on the grass making shapes out of clouds. Enjoyable as it may be it is secondary to the nature of clouds.

The introduction of the digital darkroom has given this freedom to photographers. The range of tools to fix and enhance the camera’s capture when pushed to its extremes produces a range of fascinating effects. When added to the filters built into the better software, images can be produced that any comparison to the original photograph is purely coincidental. As photographers explore these tools and incorporate them into their photographs so their visual language will grow. The revolution of the medium with the development from black and white into color is taking its next step. Now with the digital darkroom’s ever growing range of tools the only limitation is the photographer’s imagination.

With the use of these tools, the skilled photographic artist can take the pop song and create, in visual terms, the lyric beauty of a baroque symphony or the down town jive of a jazz variation without a tree or a high rise in sight. Just the light captured by the camera and fine tuned into something completely different, something new that comes from the photographer.

The photographer has been liberated like the painter before them by technology. Now photographs can explore the full range of human experience including those they have no words to express. Large statements will be accessible by the photographer not only in physical terms. Although like their painter counterparts, through an additional feature of the technology, the large canvas is becoming the order of the day. That this canvas can express feelings rather than just illustrate them denotes that the photography has become an adult in the arts.

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10 Tips In Better Photography

Taking a good photo isn’t as hard as you may think. You don’t need the most expensive camera or years of experience, just 10 simple tips.

Enjoy !

Tip 1 - Use All Your Available Space

Don't be afraid to use all the space in your photo. If you want to take a picture of something, it's ok for it to take up the whole shot with no or very little background showing. Keep distractions out of your shot

Tip 2 - Study Forms

This is a vital aspect to photography. Understanding forms in your photos. Don't see an object, she its shape and its form and find the best angle to photograph it from. Form is all around us and I highly suggest you read as many books on it as possible.

Tip 3 - Motion In Your Photos

Never have motion in your photos if you are photographing a still object. If there is something moving while you are trying to photograph a stationery object, your photo won't turn out anywhere near as well. Also never put a horizon line in the center of your frame.

Tip 4 - Learn To Use Contrasts Between Colors

Some of the best photos have shades of white, gray and black. You can take great shots with just one color on your subject, but the contrasts between colors in a shot is what makes you a great photographer.

Tip 5 - Get Closer To Your Subject

This is one of the biggest mistakes most photographers make, not getting close enough to their subject. Get up and personal and close the distance gap. You can always reshape and re-size a good shot but you can't continue to blowup a distant object.

Tip 6 - Shutter Lag

Shooting action shots with digital camera's can be tricky due to shutter lags. What this means is, when you press the button to take the photo, it can take up to a second for the shutter to take a photo, by that time what you were photographing would have moved or changed somehow.  This means you have to compensate for shutter lag by predicting what your subject is going to do and taking the photo just before it takes the action you want. More expensive digital cameras don't have this problem.

Tip 7 - Pan

If you are taking an action shot and your shutter speed is slow, pan with the object. Follow through with the subject, from start to finish and one of those shots will be a winner. You have more chance of getting a good shot if you take more then one photo.

Tip 8 - Continuous Shots

To pan like I suggested above you will need a camera that does continuous shots and doesn’t need to stop and process after every shot.

Tip 9 - How To Take Fantastic Night Time Shots

Night time shots can be spectacular, almost magical.... if done right! If not they can look horrible. Really horrible. Without adequate lighting, even good camera's can turn out crappy photos if the photographer doesn't know what he or she is doing.

Tip 10 - Study Your Manual

If your digital camera has a special night time mode, read the manual and follow their instructions on how to use it properly.


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5 Tips For Shooting Winter Landscapes

Winter brings out the toughest elements in our climate, with many people putting away their camera bags ‘till early spring. But, if you do put away your camera you are missing out on the raw beauty that this magical season brings.

Here are a few tips to make the trip more enjoyable.



1. Wear the Right clothes: It’s very important to wrap up warm when out shooting winter images. The winter season brings the toughest elements, so if you are planning to spend a few days out and about always be well prepared.

2. Watch the weather: It’s very important to know what the weather is going to be like. You don’t want to travel for a couple of hours and then hear a weather report that tells you that: the weather is wet for the next few days.  During the winter months the weather can dramatically change in a matter of hours.

It’s always advisable to let someone know where you are going and which route you’re planning to take. If you do get injured or ever caught in a storm someone may be able to help.

3. Carry only What you Need: Carry only the essentials. You don’t need to upload your camera bag with every piece of equipment you own. If you are going to be out taking pictures all day you are much better off going as light as possible.  Carrying a light load will also help preserve energy.  You could be climbing icy rocks or crossing snow filled hills; a warm flask would serve you a lot better than a third camera.

4. Look for detail: Snow, ice and frost bring out texture and atmosphere in most subjects.  The early frosty morning is an ideal time for close-up photography. The frosty morning also brings out patterns in our landscapes. 

Take care where you place your camera: if you are taking pictures early in the morning try placing it at oblique angles to the sun - this will give your images strong shadows. This will also add mood to your landscape images.  Once you have found the perfect spot pay extra attention to foreground interest as this will  add depth to your image.

5. Expose carefully: Snow and ice are extremely difficult to expose properly. Snow usually confuses your cameras metering system or your hand held light meter. When you take a light reading from snow you will automatically get an underexposed image. The meter will record the snow as grey.

Now is the time to start bracketing your shots.   If you bracket your shots add 1 - 2 stops of light to compensate for your light meter reading. Using an 18% grey card, which I described in a previous article, should also give you a perfect light reading.