Do you wish you were a better photographer? All it takes is a little know-how and experience. Keep reading for some important picture-taking tips. Then grab your camera and start shooting your way to great pictures.
1. Look your subject in the eye 2. Use a plain background 3. Use flash outdoors 4. Move in close 5. Move it from the middle 6. Lock the focus 7. Know your flash's range 8. Watch the light 9. Take some vertical pictures 10. Be a picture director
Look your subject in the eye
Direct eye contact can be as engaging in a picture as it is in real life. When taking a picture of someone, hold the camera at the person's eye level to unleash the power of those magnetic gazes and mesmerizing smiles. For children, that means stooping to their level. And your subject need not always stare at the camera. All by itself that eye level angle will create a personal and inviting feeling that pulls you into the picture.
Learn more about adjusting your angle of view
Too high
Better
2
Use a plain background
A plain background shows off the subject you are photographing. When you look through the camera viewfinder, force yourself to study the area surrounding your subject. Make sure no poles grow from the head of your favorite niece and that no cars seem to dangle from her ears.
Distracting background
Better
3
Use flash outdoors
Bright sun can create unattractive deep facial shadows. Eliminate the shadows by using your flash to lighten the face. When taking people pictures on sunny days, turn your flash on. You may have a choice of fill-flash mode or full-flash mode. If the person is within five feet, use the fill-flash mode; beyond five feet, the full-power mode may be required. With a digital camera, use the picture display panel to review the results.
On cloudy days, use the camera's fill-flash mode if it has one. The flash will brighten up people's faces and make them stand out. Also take a picture without the flash, because the soft light of overcast days sometimes gives quite pleasing results by itself.
Subject is dark
After
4
Move in close
If your subject is smaller than a car, take a step or two closer before taking the picture and zoom in on your subject. Your goal is to fill the picture area with the subject you are photographing. Up close you can reveal telling details, like a sprinkle of freckles or an arched eyebrow.
But don't get too close or your pictures will be blurry. The closest focusing distance for most cameras is about three feet, or about one step away from your camera. If you get closer than the closest focusing distance of your camera (see your manual to be sure), your pictures will be blurry.
Good
Better
5
Move it from the middle
Center-stage is a great place for a performer to be. However, the middle of your picture is not the best place for your subject. Bring your picture to life by simply moving your subject away from the middle of your picture. Start by playing tick-tack-toe with subject position. Imagine a tick-tack-toe grid in your viewfinder. Now place your important subject at one of the intersections of lines.
You'll need to lock the focus if you have an auto-focus camera because most of them focus on whatever is in the center of the viewfinder.
Boring
Better
6
Lock the focus
If your subject is not in the center of the picture, you need to lock the focus to create a sharp picture. Most auto-focus cameras focus on whatever is in the center of the picture. But to improve pictures, you will often want to move the subject away from the center of the picture. If you don't want a blurred picture, you'll need to first lock the focus with the subject in the middle and then recompose the picture so the subject is away from the middle.
Usually you can lock the focus in three steps. First, center the subject and press and hold the shutter button halfway down. Second, reposition your camera (while still holding the shutter button) so the subject is away from the center. And third, finish by pressing the shutter button all the way down to take the picture.
Subject not in focus
Better
7
Know your flash's range
The number one flash mistake is taking pictures beyond the flash's range. Why is this a mistake? Because pictures taken beyond the maximum flash range will be too dark. For many cameras, the maximum flash range is less than fifteen feet—about five steps away.
What is your camera's flash range? Look it up in your camera manual. Can't find it? Then don't take a chance. Position yourself so subjects are no farther than ten feet away. Film users can extend the flash range by using Kodak Max versatility or versatility plus film.
8
Watch the light
Next to the subject, the most important part of every picture is the light. It affects the appearance of everything you photograph. On a great-grandmother, bright sunlight from the side can enhance wrinkles. But the soft light of a cloudy day can subdue those same wrinkles.
Don't like the light on your subject? Then move yourself or your subject. For landscapes, try to take pictures early or late in the day when the light is orangish and rakes across the land.
Good
Also good
9
Take some vertical pictures
Is your camera vertically challenged? It is if you never turn it sideways to take a vertical picture. All sorts of things look better in a vertical picture. From a lighthouse near a cliff to the Eiffel Tower to your four-year-old niece jumping in a puddle. So next time out, make a conscious effort to turn your camera sideways and take some vertical pictures.
10
Be a picture director
Take control of your picture-taking and watch your pictures dramatically improve. Become a picture director, not just a passive picture-taker. A picture director takes charge. A picture director picks the location: "Everybody go outside to the backyard." A picture director adds props: "Girls, put on your pink sunglasses." A picture director arranges people: "Now move in close, and lean toward the camera."
Most pictures won't be that involved, but you get the idea: Take charge of your pictures and win your own best picture awards.
If you've seen a particularly eye-popping, out-of-this-world night photograph of a city skyline, or a particularly apocalyptic cloudscape with cartoonish color saturation making the rounds on blogs lately, there's a good chance it was made using high-dynamic-range imaging, or HDR software. And while these images may look like the work of a pro photographer, or at least a seasoned digital-imaging or special-effects expert, the tools to easily make your own amazing HDR images are widely (and in some cases freely) available.
So what exactly comprises an HDR image? Basically, more information per pixel. When you take a photo with your digital camera, the colors are converted to accommodate the limited palette of your display or a piece of photo paper. The human eye, however, is capable of taking in far more color and light information at any given time. This is why it's necessary to take a photo with the correct exposure settings—what your eye sees as a uniform scene with a balanced brightness and color range needs to be regulated to fit within the more limited range of your camera's sensor, or else the image will appear under- or overexposed (too dark or too light).
HDR provides a way to combine a range of exposures of the same scene into one image, adding significantly to the amount of data held per pixel (most digital images hold 8 bits of color information per pixel; an HDR image has 32). The result is an image with more "dynamic range"—in other words, the brights are brighter, the darks darker, and there's much more variance in between.
For a step-by-step guide to creating your own HDR images, continue reading below:
To get started, you'll need to shoot the same scene with a range of different exposures [above, my subject is the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City]. Scenes with uneven lighting really bring out the best of HDR (in my case, the bright lights of the bridges in the distance and the dark shadows of the cargo crane at left and the sky above). You can use the bracketing function of your digital camera (better point-and-shoots and almost all digital SLRs have it) to fire off three frames every time you squeeze the button—one with the correct exposure, one overexposed, and one underexposed. You want the difference to be as dramatic as possible, so if the three images look too similar, you can use the manual-exposure setting of your camera to take a series of exposures with a tripod (like I did here). The more exposures the better. And if your camera can shoot RAW images (an unprocessed format like a “digital negative” with greater flexibility), use that, as your images will have more detail.
Now, the magic. To combine them, you'll need software capable of doing the job. If you're using Photoshop CS2, you're in luck—HDR capabilities are built in. If not, there are alternatives. A cross-platform application calledPhotomatix Prois a specialized HDR processor that costs $100 ($83 if you use the coupon code foundhere; there's a free bare-bones version just for Windows that I haven’t tested) and does an amazing job; since it only does one thing, it does it very well, offering specialized controls and batch-processing options that Photoshop lacks. There is also a rapidly improving, free, open-source alternative calledqtpfsgui(great name, right?)—it doesn't have as many options yet for tweaking your HDR output, but you can't beat the price, and it's great to get started with. Venerable open-source Photoshop-alternative the GIMP has yet to incorporate HDR support.
Using whatever software you settle on, you'll need to combine your batch of variable exposures into a master HDR image. If you used a wobbly tripod (or worse, handheld your shots), you can have the software attempt to align them automatically—if they're not too far off, this usually works fairly well. The resulting image might take a while to generate and look a little weird when it does; this is because your screen isn't capable of displaying HDR images. To get the eye-popping HDR color effect, you'll need to downsample the image back to 8 or 16 bits per pixel, but in a way that blends the high dynamic range of your HDR composite image into one that still retains the increased detail and color range of HDR but fits comfortably in the viewable range of your monitor or paper. This process is called tone mapping.
Tone mapping is where the serious bit-crunching comes in, and each of the software tools detailed here has a different way of doing it. Photomatix provides a fairly straightforward dialogue of sliders that regulate the brightness, white and black points, and numerous other aspects of the resulting image—you can get some wild effects just by tweaking them and seeing what happens in the live preview. Photoshop gives you four tone-mapping choices. But the hands-down best is "Local Adaptation," which gives you control of the image via the "curves" control. I recently learned how to use curves, which are the basis of almost all digital-image processing, and I'm still not good enough to really explain them. I learnedfrom here, though, and if you use Photoshop, your life will be better for learning as well. Anyway, this gives you great control of the image's color and exposure, and again, simply playing around and observing the live preview can yield some fun results. Qtpfsgui has all kinds of crazy-sounding tone-mapping functions to choose from (Drago logarithmic mapping! Durand fast bilateral filtering!); since no one but the mathematicians who invented them have any idea what they mean, trial-and-error is again your friend.
After you've found some settings that work (it's amazing the range of output you can get), voila, you've got your first HDR image. As you can see below, the difference between the correctly exposed normal image and the tone-mapped HDR output is marked: richer darks in the water, less blown-out whites in the lights, and more vibrant colors.
So now what? As you might expect, there are countless groups on Flickr dedicated to HDR where you can show off your work, seek feedback, and learn more in the discussion forums. My favorite is the largest (simply called HDR), but there are many others dedicated to users of specific software, people who go for a more realistic look with their HDR imagery, and so on. As you'll soon see, some people really love HDR and some people really hate it, but as with most things dealing with the visual arts, a lot of it comes down to personal aesthetic. No matter what your feelings on the HDR look, though, it's still pretty amazing to see how the process works, and more amazing still that anyone with a camera and a computer can try it out for themselves. Viva la digital revolution! —John Mahoney
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