Digital Photo Tips

This is a list of great tips that will help you take nice pictures with your digital camera.

Take as many photos as possible. The big advantage of a digital camera is you are only limited by the size of the memory card and the battery charge.

The number one tip is to take as many photos as possible if you are shooting a particular event like children running around, a wedding party, etc. You will have more chance to capture some unique shots.

Bring several memory cards with you and fully recharge the battery before the event. I would also recommend to bring along a spare battery fully charged.

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If your camera allows manual control you might want to shoot the same scene with different settings to ensure you get the best shot. You might want to use different combination of shutter speed and aperture. Higher speed will allow you to open more the aperture for a lesser depth of field (in case of portrait). A lower speed will produce a more dynamic photo of a child running in the field.

When you shoot a waterfall, you might want to try different shutter speed (hence aperture will change to maintain the same correct exposure) until you are satisfied with the way the cascade will look on the photo.

Placement of the photographer and the subject. Often I see people take group or portrait photos with the sun in the back of the subject. Chances are you will get a photo where the faces are dark.

In those situations what you can do is either use the fill-in flash technique discussed below or simply change the placement of your subjects or move yourself around the subject.

Your camera will give you a better picture if you have the sun in your back instead of having the sun in the back of your subject.

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Use Fill-in Flash. If you camera is set on automatic, the flash will trigger if you take a photo indoor under weak lighting conditions.

Sometime you will need to force the flash even though you are taking a photo outside under a blue sky. That situation arises when you have to deal with a strong contrast taking photo under the shades for example. In this case you need to force the flash otherwise your subject will be under exposed. This technique is known as fill in flash.

Check the White balance. Digital cameras use an electronic image sensor to capture the light that forms the photo.

The colors rendered by the sensor is something you need to be aware of. In order to render a natural color range digital cameras have a function called the “white balance”. In general you can leave it on the automatic white balance.

In some cases you might want to change the setting to produce a different color tone. The effect can be quite interesting. If you set the white balance on “Cloudy” in a sunny day the colors rendered will be “warmer”. You’ll find the overall color balance lean toward the yellow. This setting will make your photos look warmer.

Read the Histogram. If you camera has the feature of showing the histogram. You might want to take advantage of it.

Basically digital photography deals with pixels on the sensor that receive a certain amount of light to form the picture. The rule of thumb for a “good” histogram is it would look like a bell curve. What it means is the medium tone has a lot of pixels and shadows and highlights are not totally burned out.

Read more on how to use the histogram in the section dedicated to Digital SLR Photography on this site.

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Use a tripod. Whenever possible, use a tripod to ensure you camera is stable to obtain sharp pictures.

Often blurriness comes from a camera that is not held steady enough. This is known as camera shake.

In photography there are two types of blur:

• Camera shake (camera budges when the photo is taken)
• Motion blur (subject in motion)

What you want to do is avoid camera shake and use motion blur at your advantage.

Tip: For slow shutter speeds (under 1/60s) a tripod is your best friend.

Make your subject feel comfortable. If you take a portrait of a person, make sure to get them feel comfortable. Communication is the key here. Show them the result on the camera screen as you go so they can participate.

If you take photos of a child you will need to deploy quite a few techniques to get their attention. We cover children photography in a dedicated page on this site.

Backup your photos. If you are on a trip or taking photos of a special event, make sure you have some ways to backup your photos that are on memory cards. Memory cards are pretty reliable today but you don’t want to take risks with those precious shots.

On way is to bring a laptop with you and use the hard drive in the laptop as a backup resource. You just need to download the photos from the card into the laptop.

There are also portable drive with embedded memory card reader. All you need to do is to slide the memory card in one of the slots and copy all the content onto the hard drive.

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