22 Tips to improve your Photographs
Handy hints to improve your photographs from an experienced professional photographer. Maria now has her own company specialising in weddings, portraiture and corporate work as well as teaching photography. Earlier in her career she worked as a cruise ship photographer for several years so knows all there is to know about capturing great holiday shots.
1)Hold it: Avoid camera shake (blurry photographs) by holding the camera steady.
Use both hands. Relax and don’t tense up. Remember to breathe!
In low light it may even be better to rest the camera on a flat surface.
Be aware of a slight delay with digital cameras. This is caused as the information
transfers to your media card.
2) Put the sun behind you: A photograph is all about light. Think about how the light is striking the subject. For the bluest skies, shoot with the sun behind you. This will saturate colours and enhances the shades. It also serves to illuminate your subject properly.
3) Less is more: Generally the best shots are the simplest. When approaching a scene, zoom in or move closer and fill the frame with your subject. Avoid unnecessary clutter in an image.
Use your subject to block out distracting elements such as ugly road signs, cars or litterbins.
4) Composition: Play with the emphasis of a shot by changing the orientation.
For tall subjects such as trees, buildings, or standing groups, a vertical format emphasizes height and helps you fill the frame.
5) Include people: Add human interest to your photographs, whether you know them or not.
In addition, by placing a person in a picture it can add reference to the size of an object.
6) Variety: You might take great shots but they may be dull to look at if they’re all the same style. Spice up your photography by adding variety. Try different lenses and effects.
Zoom in and out for impact and effect. Look for colour and texture. Get right into your subject.
7) Add depth: Depth is an important quality in a good image. You want to create a window on a scene, not just a two-dimensional photograph. Use perspective and lines to lead the viewer into the image. This will highlight distance and scale. Add foreground detail such as foliage to give depth and framing.
Rule of Thirds: ‘The Rule of Thirds’ is a fundamental creative principal. Imagine your picture frame divided evenly into nine sectors by vertical and horizontal lines. Place your main subject on one of the lines of intersection. Placing your subject in the centre of the picture may create a weaker shot, as it gives the eye nowhere to go. Employing the Rule of Thirds will help the eye ‘journey’ through the photograph, and retain the spectators’ interest for longer.
This will often result in a stronger shot.
9) Search for details: It’s always tempting to use a wider angle to get everything in.
However this can be too much and you may loose impact and interest. Instead, zoom in or get closer and find some representative detail. A shot of an entire maple tree looks like a tree, but a shot of just the maple leave can say so much more.
10) Horizons: Where you place the horizon in your shot affects what is emphasized.
To emphasise the landscape or ocean use a high horizon; for a dramatic sky use a low horizon. –Ensure your horizon line is flush with the bottom of the frame; you don’t want Arcadia to look as though she is running down a hill! Similarly, keep an eye out for wonky verticals, use a lamppost or building in the frame to keep you ‘straight’.
11) Bend your knees: Avoid unflattering distortion on standing subjects by bending your knees and shooting from as low a stance as possible. Otherwise the head and shoulders of your subject will be out of proportion with their feet. Even sit down if you can, to shoot a person standing up.
12) Get down! When working with kids or animals get down on their level and fill the frame for great family shots with loads of impact.
13) Fill in Flash: Look for the flash over-ride button on your camera. A bright background such as a window, or a bright sky in the landscape will trick your camera into thinking it doesn’t need flash. However you must balance your background and subject. If your subject looks to be in shadow with little colour or detail, that is how it will appear in your photograph. Turn your flash on and use it all the time for punchier shots and richer colours.
14) Compact camera modes: They are there for a reason. Play with them and enjoy the effects. Use forced (fill-in) flash to freeze motion. Turn the flash off, or use night time mode to capture movement and the colourful drag of lights. Place your camera on a solid surface for this, as the long shutter speed will cause blurring if shot hand held.
15) Understand sensitivity: Digital cameras, particularly compacts, do not handle extremely bright situations very well, and they will ‘white out’ any texture or detail. Try to avoid giving them difficult exposures to deal with, such as a very bright sun or high contrast scenes. Nor do they like underexposed areas of shadow – help them along by always using your flash.
16) Its all about light: When you can, shoot early in the morning or late in the afternoon.
The warm natural hues can be much more attractive than a harsh midday sun.
Look for pleasing reflections, soft colours and long shadows. A scene or landscape will take on many different aspects throughout the course of a day.
17) Here comes the sun: On ‘changeable’ days, keep an eye on the clouds and grab your shot when the sun pops out. Similarly, particularly in the middle of the day, shoot when the sun nips behind the clouds. A cloudy sky can often present you with a very pleasing ‘even’ light which allows colours to saturate that might otherwise have been bleached out by the sun.
18) Sit up straight! Good posture knocks off the years and the pounds. Having your picture taken? Sit up straight, pull your shoulders back and lift your chin. Angle hips and shoulders slightly away from the camera for a more flattering angle. Point one toe elegantly towards the photographer, whether sitting or standing, lady or gent. Taking someone else’s picture?
It’s your job to flatter them by directing them to do the same!
19) Out and about: When moving from air conditioning on a coach to a humid outdoor environment, your camera lens may mist up briefly with a light condensation on the glass.
Allow it a few moments to acclimatise before shooting.
When shooting through a coach window, bring the camera as close to it as possible without allowing the lens to touch the glass. Wedge your camera tight against the window using your fingers as a ‘bridge’. Be sure to turn the flash off to avoid flash reflection and glare.
20) Focus and Exposure lock: Point the lens at your subject and half depress the shutter button to take an exposure reading and lock the focus. Keep it half depressed and recompose, then fire. Most compacts read the centre of a frame, so if you want your main subject off to the left or on the Rule of Thirds, you will need to do this to avoid focusing on the background or an incorrect exposure.
21) Spectacle flare: Angle glasses up at the ears to avoid reflection from the flash
22) Look after your kit: Media cards do have a finite lifespan. Avoid corruption by looking after them properly. Always format your card rather than deleting all images when you want to completely wipe it. Only insert or extract the card when the camera is off, and be patient whilst it is ‘working’ to transfer an image file. Digital cameras are very sensitive to mistreatment, and not as sturdy as an old manual film camera might be. Use a camera case to avoid clogging sensitive components with dust or sand. Avoid excessive temperatures, magnetic fields and hard knocks.
Digital Terms
Pixels: Picture Elements. Light sensitive squares on your cameras CCD, which record one colour each, but combine together to create an image much like a mosaic or your television screen.
CCD: Charge Coupled Device. This is the ‘chip’ in the back of your camera, which is covered in Pixels, and records the information in place of a negative. It sends this information to your memory card as a graphics file such as a Jpeg.
Stepping: The tiled effect, or squared edges you see on a low-resolution image. Shooting at a low resolution means less pixels record information. This creates smaller file sizes so you can fit more on your media card, but results in poor quality prints, such as you might get from a mobile phone camera.
Low-resolution images are only suitable for viewing on a screen
Digital and Optical zoom: An Optical zoom physically zooms in or out. The glass in the lens actually moves. Digital zoom only enlarges the already existing pixels digitally and ‘invents’ missing information to compensate, resulting in poor quality images. Shoot at the far end of your Optical Zoom, and do any further zooming on a computer. Computer software is much cleverer at this than a small camera.
White Balance: Light comes in different ‘temperatures’, from the blue tones of a cloudy sky to a warm orange from tungsten lights. Digital cameras have white balance compensation options to help photographs come out the correct colour. Experiment with these options in different situations. If you take photographs indoors without a flash you will experience an orange cast from artificial lights.
Formatting: Reformat memory cards rather than just deleting images. Memory cards do have a finite life span and this will help keep them fresh and uncorrupted.
Maria Southworth, photographer
Filed under Lifestyle by on Sep 8th, 2009. 
