A lot of people have told me that I take pretty photos.  I personally
think that this most likely happens because I point my camera at pretty
things, but a surprising number of people seem to believe there's more
to it than that so I thought I ought to share my meager photographic
wisdom with you and let you know how easy it really is.

In the hands of a skilled person photography can be both highly technical
and a real art form.  I find, though, that many people don't want to
spend time mastering the technology and they don't want to master an
art form just to have good-looking vacation prints.  I've got great news
for those people -- you don't have to.  Follow just a few simple rules
and you'll be able to take photos at my level or probably better with
a relatively inexpensive and easy-to-operate camera.

Rule #1:  You have a camera, so use it!

By which I mean:  you have bothered to bring with you (wherever you
happen to be) a device which is solely intended to take photographs.
You must have intended to take some pictures, so do so.  Take a picture
of anything which looks remotely interesting.  Don't be afraid of
wasting film, especially if you're shooting with a digital camera..
It may seem like a hassle to stop and pull over every time you want
to take a picture on your road trip or to pull the camera out of your
backpack every time you see something cool on your hike but you won't
come back with any good pictures if you're saving your camera waiting
for a UFO to land or for bigfoot to show up.

Rule #2:  If something is worth one photo, it's worth half a dozen.

To the extent that I have a secret, this is it.  If I like the look of
something and think it might make a good photograph I don't just take
one picture of it.  A professional photographer doesn't go out on a
National Geographic shoot, point his camera at a subject, and take just
one exposure.  So why should I (with far less skill) expect to do well
with just one try?  If I think something is going to be a good photo I
usually shoot half a dozen shots at least.  As a general rule for every
fifteen to twenty shots that I bring home I'll put one of them up on
my web site to share with other people.  To get that one shot I'll try
different angles and different zoom levels.  If I'm feeling fancy I'll try
different f-stops to try and get different field depths.  And because I
am often sloppy when it comes to metering I let the camera do the work for
me by making liberal use of my camera's exposure bracketing -- especially
if you have a digital camera, LEARN TO USE YOUR BRACKETING FEATURE.
Also, if you have a digital camera, use the review feature to look at
the shots you have taken and keep trying until you get a result you are
happy with.

Rule #3:  Pay attention to the composition of your picture.

You don't have to be a great artist to benefit from a little thought
about composition.  So before you take a picture, try to imagine what
it will look like in its final form.  After a while you'll get beyond
the most obvious beginner mistakes and stop taking pictures of disembodied
heads floating in front of scenic landscapes, but everyone can and
should take things a step further with just a little bit of thought.
This part does take a little bit of practice and it requires learning
from your mistakes.  There are no hard-and-fast rules, but here are a 
couple of very basic suggestions you can find in any beginning photography
book.

  a)  Empty space is (usually) not very interesting, so unless you have
      some effect you are consciously trying to achieve, try to fill the
      frame with your subject.

  b)  Most pictures look better if the subject isn't in the dead center.
      many books for beginning photographers recommend using the rule of
      thirds.  Imagine your viewfinder is divided into thirds along each
      side, creating a grid of nine rectangles:

           +----+----+----+
           |    |    |    |
           +----O----O----+
           |    | XX |    |
           +----O----O----+
           |    |    |    |
           +----+----+----+

      the simple version of the rule of thirds advises that rather than
      center your subject where the "XX" is, instead place your subject
      on one of the intersections marked above with an "O" in the grid.

  c)  Pay attention to light and shadow.  Shadows often look much more
      noticable in photographs than they do in real life.  For relatively
      close subjects you can often eliminate or lessen shadows, especially
      on people's faces, by using your flash even if there is enough light
      to take an exposure without the flash (this is called a "fill-in"
      flash, and virtually every camera with an automatic flash has a 
      feature to force the flash off or on.)  Conversely, sometimes flash
      can create undesirable shadows and you have to force the camera not
      to flash.  

39 responses total.

 I want to stress again that any beginning photography book will probably
 tell you what I've just told you *AND* much, much more.  But if you just
 try working on the things above you will achieve a noticable difference
 in the quality of your casual photography.  99% of achieving a decent
 result is just paying attention to what you are doing.

My theory was that putting people into shots tends to improve them - you get
a better sense of scale.

It just proves what can be done by one motivated Marine and his rifle.

Also, pay attention to the background.  I've seen quite a few otherwise
good pictures ruined by a distracting background (and I've taken some
like that, myself.)  The background will be more noticable in the photo
than it is to the naked eye.  The classic example of this is the
snapshot of someone who appears to have a tree growing out of their head. ;>

If your camera allows you enough control, you can usually reduce the
depth of field to blur a distracting background and force objects in the
foreground to stand out more.

What is the bracketing feature?

re #4
You mean like GW's dog taking a squat behind the President on the White House
lawn?

  On virtually every camera you might buy these days there are two 
  variables which control the exposure by limiting the amount of light
  that falls on the film (or in the case of a digital camera, the CCD
  sensor.)

  The first is the aperture setting.  When the camera shutter opens,
  the aperture setting controls how widely it opens.  A wider opening
  allows more light in.  Aperture settings are measured in what are
  called an "f-stop" number, e.g. 2.8.

  The second is the shutter speed.  Shutter speed is the measure of how
  long the shutter remains open.  The longer the shutter remains open,
  the more light gets in.  Shutter speeds are measured in fractions of
  a second, e.g. 1/250

  The big trick in photography is getting the right amount of exposure.
  Allow in too much light (overexposure) and your photos will look
  washed-out and faded.  Allow in too little (underexposure) and
  everything will look dark and shadowy.

  Point-and-click cameras make the decisions for you about which aperture
  and shutter speeds to use but on better cameras you can override the
  camera's decision and pick your own settings.  Almost all cameras that
  do this also allow you to "bracket" your exposure by setting the camera
  in an automatic mode that takes multiple exposures at different settings
  by taking three (or five, or however many) pictures, one at the setting
  the camera things is best, one at an aperture setting that is slightly
  lower than the camera thinks is best, and one at an exposure setting that
  the camera thinks is slightly too high.

  Say the camera thinks your aperture setting should be 2.8.  I often set
  my camera to use +/- 0.6 bracketing so instead of one picture at 2.8
  when I press the button:

                             +---+
                             |2.8|
                             +---+

  I get three pictures at the same shutter speed but different apertures:

                  +---+      +---+     +---+
                  |2.2|      |2.8|     |3.4|
                  +---+      +---+     +---+

  The point of bracketing is that the camera makes a decision about how
  much light to let in but it isn't always right.  Sometimes your pictures
  come out overexposed and sometimes they come out underexposed.  By 
  bracketing your exposure you take three pictures at three different
  exposures, which gives you a much better chance that in at least one of
  them the exposure will be right for the picture.  That's how I get photos
  where the sky and scenery colors are good -- by taking several exposures
  and picking the best-looking one.

How do I do that on a Kodak DC-215?

  I don't know if the DC-215 supports bracketing but if it does it will
  certainly be mentioned in the manual.

Ah, my camera doesnt do that. 

I only see that option on the Canon Powershot G3 and hte Canon EOS 10D.
Which of those 2 do you have, Mike? ;)

  Pity.  There's a lot that you can do if you have manual control over
  your camera's aperture or shutter speed. 

  For example, here's a simple trick using shutter speed.  You know
  those pictures you see of streams and/or waterfalls where the water
  is blurred and wispy while everything else is in clear sharp focus?
  That's a very easy effect to achieve.  You'll need a tripod or something
  similar to stabilize your camera and either a timer or a cable remote
  because to get this effect you need to manually set your shutter
  speed to about 1/4 to 1/2 second.  At that slow of a shutter speed you
  won't be able to hold the camera still enough to prevent the picture
  from blurring and even the force from pushing the shutter button with
  your finger will cause enough motion to blur, hence the requirement
  for the timer or cable remote.

  A similar effect using slow shutter speed can create intentional blurring
  to show motion if you're photographing a sporting event or wildlife.
  The relatively stable background will be in sharp focus while the moving
  subject will be blurred as its motion carries it partway through the 
  picture during the interval when the shutter is open.

  Manual control over your aperture and shutter give you all kinds of 
  very simple tricks like these, using only the features built into a
  reasonably good camera.  No investment in fancy lenses and filters
  required..

I think I have some manual control. Just not a feature that 
automatically takes multiple pictures as you described. 

I am keeping a photo blog sort of. I am not updating it nearly often 
enough but anyone should feel free to check it out at 

http://slynne.blogspot.com

re #11:  I have the Olympus C-2020 Zoom, a 3-year-old 2 megapixel camera
         that isn't even made anymore.  Before that I used an old Pentax
         SLR body that weighed a ton; I'm much happier with digital but
         it's about time for me to look for something with more lens
         flexibility.  I miss too many good bear, eagle, and whale shots
         for lack of lens power.

general item #1011 <----> photography item #60

re# 7

The apperture is totally independent of the shutter. The shutter 
is usually the cloth or metal curtain you see when you open up the 
back of the camera. Even on a leaf shutter lenses, the shutter is 
a seperate thing.

In film photography one of the rules for tricky exposures, is to
expose for the shadows and develope for the highlights. It's just
the opposite in digital (since there is less tonal range). The
blown out highlights in digital are almost impossible to recover,
so center weight or slightly under exposed would be your best bet,
you can always mess around with the curve later in Photoshop.

One luxury of using a digital camera that I'm slowly catching on to is
the ability to adjust the "film speed" (really the CCD sensitivity) on
the fly.  My Canon EOS 300D lets me set it to anything from 100 to 1600
ASA equivalent.  Higher settings give more light sensitivity at the
expense of slightly more noise.  This gives you a lot of latitude to use
the shutter speed and aperture combination you want.

An example of when this is useful happened just last night.  I wanted to
take a hand-held flash shot of a couple friends of mine at Barton Dam. 
It was dusk.  At 200 ASA they might as well have been in a dark room --
you couldn't see anything behind them.  At 1600 ASA, you could clearly
see the background.

Cool ascii pictures.

re #17
I've been reading alot about the EOS 300D..its the bomb

I'm really happy with it.  Being able to use any of the EOS-series
lenses is really nice.

One thing a few people I've shown it to have commented on is the
inability to use the LCD as a viewfinder for framing a shot.  That's a
natural consequence of the SLR design, of course, but it may throw
people who have used point-and-shoot digital cameras a lot.  The optical
viewfinder is excellent, though, and it has digital readouts of the
F-stop and shutter speed at the bottom.

I find the LCD to be a waste of battery.

  I almost never use the LCD as a viewfinder except
  (a) in macro-mode shots where the parallax problem is severe, and
  (b) when I'm taking something at an odd angle or bracing the camera
      against something so that it's difficult to see through the 
      viewfinder.

  I'm close to convincing myself to upgrade to a nice digital SLR but
  so far I've been waiting for them to take a price plunge.

In a situation like this you raelly need to ask yourself "Which blonde beauty
would Mohammad photograph?"

I'll use the LCD to check light levels and how the shot might turn out,
especially when the camera is bitching about needing the flash turned on. 
But since it's easy to crop in the computer, really precise framing isn't that
important anymore.

Tip:  Make sure your shot is level - look for a straight line in the
background.

Re resp:24: Being able to snap a shot and then immediately review it on
the LCD to see how it turned out is, for me, the greatest luxury of
using a digital camera.  I can see right away if I'm getting the effect
I want without having to wait until I finish a whole roll of pictures.

  Definitely.  And if you don't like the results you can just keep shooting
  until you get something you're happy with.

  I'm sure there are photographers on Grex who are much more technically
  knowledgable than I am and who have interesting things to add.  Would
  anyone else care to add their advice?

I've got a 64Mb card in my 2.1 megapixel camera, and even at the high
resolution setting I've got space for something like 150 shots.  So for me
it's better to wait until I've got the pictures on a good computer screen
before I start deleting the ones that aren't good enough.

 I'm not sure anyone is talking about deleting, just viewing to see that you
 got something that you were pleased with.

Ah, OK.  Though I should mention that I often take a couple of identical shots
just in case one turns out blurred from camera shake.  Hard to tell that from
the camera screen.

Oh, definately.  But it's nice to be able to get an idea of the overall
exposure quality -- especially on things like time exposures, where
there's a lot of guesswork involved.  Also, on my LCD I can zoom in to
look for focus and camera shake problems, if I suspect them.

I almost never look through the viewfinder and almost always look at 
the LCD screen on my camera. 

I use a Canon PowerShot A80. I really like the blur effects on moving objects.
The camera has a 'slow shutter' effect for this purpose. The 'fast shutter'
effect helps for moving objects where you want detail. Comes with many cool
features. The coolest one is the 'landscape' feature and that speaks for
itself.

I will have to take out the user guide again and learn about aperture.

Here's a shot of a creek in Washington. (don't remember the name)

http://www.morenatimm.com/vacation/creek.jpg

I have the name somewhere...hmm!! It would be good to keep a journal next
time.

I liked that shot, munkey! 

My camera is a FujiFilm 2400Zoom, 2.1 MP with optical zoom.  Bought it last
winter on clearance, partially because it's Linux compatible.  But also I was
looking more for something likely to have good optics rather than just a lot
of pixels.  And it works out pretty well, I get nice sharp pictures that would
look pretty good on 8.5x11 stock.

Here's a photo I took recently, mostly just to document how a microphone was
positioned inside the piano at the Ark.  It turned out really well, though,
digital cameras seem to take really nice photos with even half-assed stage
lighting.
http://www.scotthelmke.com/stereo-mic-piano.jpg (image was scaled down from
1200x1600)

I WAS OUTSIDE THE ARK< THOUGH I DIDN"T TAKE ANY PICTURES>

Re. 13:  I liked the Chicago pic best.  Normally, converging lines are
considered a no-no, but making it B&W gives an artistic feel.  

Thanks. Why would converging lines be considered a no no? I think that 
such things can add a lot to the composition of a photograph.

It makes things appear like their leaning when they actually aren't.

Hmm, lots of good suggestions here. :-)

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