Jeremiah Tolbert

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.