Lifehacker has a collection of starter photography tips today that you might find useful. They use David Pogue’s tricks as a jumping off point. I’m going to assume you go off and look at these and either find them useful or you find them too basic. Now here are some photography tips of my own to try and get you shooting like a semi-pro.
Shoot in Aperture Priority Mode
Your camera probably has a million modes that you may or may not have played with. Some might be icons, and some are probably just letters like “A”, “P” and the dreaded “M.” Your camera may not have any of those settings. If that’s the case, I suggest you find one that does. They’re getting cheaper and cheaper. So what is aperture priority mode? It’s probably “A” on your mode dial, to start.
I’m not going to bore you with the science of lenses and light and irises. Aperture mode is 50% of what you need to make your photos look more professional. You know how nice professional pictures isolate the subject, and how everything in the background is blurry? But you know how your snapshots are tack sharp all the way through? The difference is basically aperture. Select aperture mode and dial it down as far as you can (aperture is measured in something called f-stops). The lower the number, the more blur you will have and the narrower your focal range is. Really low settings and you could take a picture of someone’s face where their eyes are in focus and their ears are not. I am almost always shooting at the smallest aperture setting on my camera. Sometimes I dial it up if I want to increase the depth of field.
To get even more blur, zoom in. Now I mean optical zoom. Turn off digital zoom if your camera has it. It sucks. Anyway, this decreases the depth of field even more. So, you want to isolate your subject and get nice blur, zoom in, turn on aperture mode, and dial aperture to the smallest number you can get. Instant quality boost.
Another good reason to shoot in aperture mode? You need less light to expose a photo. Less light means faster shutter speed which means there’s much less chance your picture will turn out blurry because it’s impossible to truly hold a camera still. The greater your focal range (the farther you can zoom in) the faster your shutter speed needs to be to avoid the dreaded camera shake. For instance, I shoot with a 300mm lens often, and even with my camera’s image stabilization, I try to shoot at no less than 1/600th of a second, and even then, I get blurry shots sometimes.
Find your ISO setting and turn it up when indoors
Have you ever tried to take pictures in your house and found that the pictures turned out either underexposed or blurry, or worst of all, you used the on-camera flash and everyone looks dazed? We generally light our homes pretty dimly as far as photography goes. There’s some numbers I could throw at you that explain the average lighting as it relates to cameras, but who cares. Here’s how you get better indoor pictures quickly, but at a sacrifice:
Your camera most likely has a setting for something called ISO. Remember how film had speeds? Well, ISO on camera is about the same thing, only the reasons for it are different. The higher your ISO, the more sensitive your camera’s sensor is to the light. Try boosting to ISO 400 or even ISO 800 when shooting in your house.
The downside of boosting ISO is that you get noise. Noise looks good in black and white. It sucks in digital pictures and often is “chroma” noise which means it’s all kinds of different colors. It’s up to you to decide how much noise you can stand in your pictures. Try taking some shots at different ISOs and look at them to get a feel. Figure out your hard limit and never go above it. I never shoot about ISO 400 if I can avoid it. My particular camera does not handle low light conditions very well. But sometimes, noise is much better than underexposed. And if you can afford the bazillion dollars for some special software, you can strip out a lot of that noise (although even those really expensive programs have their limits).
Forget Everything I Just Said and Use a Tripod
Cheap tripods cost $30 or so. Buy one if you want to take pictures indoors often and don’t want to have to shell out for a hot-shoe flash (you can snap off the on-camera flash for all that piece of crap is worth). Put your camera on the tripod and let your shutter speed be whatever it needs to be. Now, if people are moving, expect the background to be in focus and them to be blurry. This can be a neat effect sometimes. I like shooting people dancing this way. But basically, the goal is to get the camera stable when in low light because you’re going to have longer shutter times which means the picture is more prone to picking up your palsy. Not that you have any, but every camera thinks you do.
Don’t want to carry a tripod around? There are other options, like the poor man’s tripod and gorillapods that I can go into in the future. You could just sit the camera down on a shelf or something, that works too. Just don’t hold it in your hands unless you can get that shutter speed up!
Read your manual
The only manual I ever read is my camera manual (yes, I am a typical guy in that way). Especially when you have a $1700 pro camera like mine, you have to read it just to figure out where they’ve hidden all the damned settings. But even if you have a cheap point and shoot, you should read your manual. Learn what those weird symbols stand for, because each one of them has a time and a place. You may never need them, but if you don’t read the manual, you’ll never know, will you?
Sometimes you have to get off the internet and shoot
Nobody taught me how to take pictures except myself. I had a class in junior high and I grew up around photographers int he family, but they never put a camera in my hand and explained how they worked, and if they did, it was with equipment so archaic that cave men could have figured it out.
I learned just like you’re learning now. Reading stuff on the internet, reading my manual, and experimenting. Each time I learn a new technique I do a bunch of shots around it until I burn it into my middle-term memory. Not everything I read about turns out to be something I care much about, but sometimes, I learn something that takes my work up a notch.
I’ve made around $400 this year on photography. I probably spent ten times that at least. Maybe in the long run, it will pay for itself, as I get better. But don’t worry about that. Buy what you can afford. If you want to get serious, then you should be reading something other than my post. But if you just have a casual interest in photography, these tips and the tips in the articles linked above should help you get better pictures most of the time.
And hey, chances are you’ve been laid off recently so you probably have a lot of spare time on your hands between all those job interviews and applications, so more time to practice! Once you have your camera, digital photography is basically free. Just don’t get any ideas about trying to make money off of photography unless you really really like weddings and have the calm of a zen master when being berated by Bridezilla.
Tags: Link Dump, Photography
