In my experience, people are more disappointed with their outdoor photography than any other kind of images. They complain about the washed-out sky—it was very blue when they took the picture—as well as ugly shadows on people’s faces, bad exposure, and highly contrasting, harsh shadows that go through their pictures.
Why do all these problems occur? At the most basic level, it’s because your digital camera works differently from the way your eyes do. When you look around outside, your pupils—the apertures of your eyes—change diameter constantly to adjust for varying light conditions throughout the scene. When you look toward the sky, your pupils close so you see rich, blue colors. Look under a tree, and your pupils immediately open to help you see in the deep shadows that are down there. And then there’s the fact that your eyes have a much wider range of exposure values than a camera does. When you press the shutter release on your camera, it has to choose a single exposure level and try to depict the entire scene with that one reading—regardless of how dramatically the light changes throughout the picture. It is a miracle that we can get good pictures at all. That said, there are many strategies we can employ to get great pictures outdoors.
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Photography is all about light. These days, most digital cameras have an electronic flash unit built right into the camera body. The flash is designed to fire for a very short period of time and illuminate your scene in one of two ways:
- As the main source of light indoors or in the dark
- As a secondary source of light to fill in shadows when you’re shooting in bright light, such as outdoors
In general, your flash will probably know when to fire and can illuminate most pictures without your direct intervention. When your camera is set to the fully automatic exposure mode, the flash will probably come on as needed and not fire when it is not needed. On the other hand, you can probably figure out when you need a flash more effectively than your camera can. There will be situations when you may want your flash to fire when it would probably stay off, and vice versa. That’s why your camera has several flash modes to choose from. We’ll talk about those later in this & the following post.
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In this digital age, “on” and “off” are just too easy. Instead, your camera’s flash has three or more modes, each intended for a specific photographic situation. Here’s the rundown of your options. Your camera may not include all of these features, so you might want to check out your camera manual before you get your heart set on trying all of them out. Your camera should have some, if not all, of these modes:
Off
This one is easy. When you set your camera to this mode, no matter how strongly your camera believes that you need extra light, the flash will not fire. This is handy for situations where you are not allowed to fire a flash, such as in a church or a museum, or when you’re too close to the subject and think you might overexpose it. You may also want to turn off the flash in many night photography situations.
Auto
This is the standard mode that you’ll probably want to leave your flash in most of the time. When set to auto, the flash determines whether it needs to fire based on the amount of light in the scene. This is a good mode to use when you don’t want to think about whether the flash needs to fire. For typical snapshot photography, just set your flash to auto.
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The most common complaint I hear about digital cameras is this: “There’s a long pause between when I press the shutter release and when the picture is actually taken.” The result: when trying to take an action shot, the subject sometimes moves before you can take the picture.
Indeed, that pause is responsible for more frustration than all of the world’s child-safe medicine bottles combined. Older digital cameras had a “shutter lag” that lasted nearly a second, but even the newest digital cameras have some lag.
Shutter lag happens because digital cameras have a veritable checklist of tasks to perform when you press the shutter release. Not only does the camera need to measure the distance to the subject and lock in the proper focus, but it has to measure the ambient light, calculate the best exposure, and lock in an aperture setting and shutter speed. It also has computer-like “housekeeping” chores to perform, like initializing the sensor chip, flushing buffers, and reading white level.
If your camera’s lag doesn’t bother you, fine. But if you want to minimize the lag, there are a few things you can do. The biggest time-saver is auto focus. If you pre-focus your picture, you can save valuable milliseconds of lag (see the discussion of the two-step shutter: “How To… Capture the Moment”). If you’re more adventurous, you can also try pre-setting the camera’s white balance. If the white balance is set on auto, the camera will have to adjust the colors in the image each and every time you take a picture. Instead, you can use the camera’s menu to set the white balance for whatever lighting conditions you’re actually shooting in, such as daylight, night time, fluorescent, or incandescent lighting. Just remember to change the white balance for every new lighting situation you find yourself in.
Almost every digital camera on the market makes it easy to take quick-and-dirty snapshots using an automatic exposure mode. Automatic exposure is great much of the time, but I hope that you will sometimes want to get a little more creative. And when that happens, you may need to adjust the exposure of your photographs as we talked about both in this post. Not all cameras provide manual exposure settings; if yours does not, then you might want to think about upgrading at some point in the future to a more full-featured camera. In my experience, most cameras that cost about $500 have at least some manual exposure adjustments. When you reach $1,000, these cameras are about as full featured as they come, with all of the amenities you’d expect from a 35mm SLR camera. The Nikon CoolPix 5000, for instance, is an excellent example of a camera that has automatic exposure modes as well as manual, priority, and program settings. Here’s what each of these settings does, and when you would want to use them:
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Now that you know what your camera’s various exposure modes are for, you can think about using them when you encounter unique photographic situations. Every situation is a little bit different, but here are a few general guidelines that can get you started.
A. Portrait Photography
Taking pictures of people can be fun but intimidating. It’s hard to get a natural pose from people when they know they are being photographed. The best way to capture good portraits is to work with your subjects so they are a little more at ease. If you’re trying to capture spontaneous, candid moments, then back off and try to blend in with the background. If you’re trying to capture a fairly formal-looking portrait, you have a little more work cut out for you. It’s up to you as the photographer to put your subjects at ease. Talk to your subjects and get them to respond. If you can get them to loosen up, they’ll exhibit more natural responses and look better on film. Take pictures periodically as you pose your subjects to get them used to the shutter going off, even if it isn’t a picture you intend to keep.
I should mention that digital cameras have a cool advantage for portraiture that SLRs don’t: the LCD display lets you put your subject more at ease. Try framing your picture using the LCD display, keeping the camera some distance away from your face. That leaves you free to interact with your subject without having an intimidating camera obscuring your head.
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Now that I’ve spent the last post telling you what the rules of composition actually are, we can talk a little about how to ignore them.
Don’t get me wrong—I love the rules of composition and I think you should follow them.After you become comfortable with concepts like the rule of thirds and filling the frame with the focal point, however, you’ll find that you can take even better pictures by bending or breaking those same rules. This is an area of photography that is best experimented with and learned on your own, but here are a few pointers to help you get started:
Change your perspective
Technically, we’re not breaking any rules of composition here, but this is something that few people think about, yet it can have a profound impact on the quality of your photos. Simply put, experiment with different ways to see the same scene. Try taking your picture by holding the camera horizontally, and then see how you might frame the picture by turning the camera vertically. Experiment and don’t be afraid to try something even if no one else thinks it’s a good idea. Get low to the ground or stand up on a chair or table to get a higher perspective on the same scene. You have a lot of options: try them.
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Term life insurance is perhaps the simplest form of life insurance. It is arguably one of the best values in the entire financial services arena. One of the best reason for you to buy term life insurance is probably to protect against dying too soon. You might have so much concerned for your survivors that you do not want them to face a financial hardship. Just consider how many people who are dependent upon you financially.
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What does it take to take a good picture? Certainly, it requires more than a mastery of your camera’s various controls. If that were all you needed, anyone who knew how to read a camera manual could be Ansel Adams. No, taking good pictures demands a little creativity and a touch of artistry. Perhaps more importantly, though, it takes a solid understanding of the rules of photographic composition and some knowledge—which you can acquire as you get better at photography—of when it’s okay to break those rules.
Composition is all about how you arrange the subjects in a picture and how you translate what is in your mind’s eye—or even right in front of you—into a photograph. After all, the camera sees things very differently than you do, and in order to take great photographs you have to understand that and learn how to see the world the way your camera sees it.
Taking a picture with a digital camera is really no different from taking a picture with a 35mm camera. That’s why in this post we will be talking about the rules of composition: what they are, how to use them, and how to break them. If you are already an accomplished photographer and you’re reading this blog to make the transition to digital photography, you may not need most of what I offer in the following post. But if you’re not an expert, I welcome you to study this post. It is only through an understanding of composition that your images will go from snapshots—the ones that bring comments like “What a nice picture of a cat!”—to potential works of art.
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All that talk about f/stops, shutter speed, and ISO settings may seem irrelevant to your digital camera, but it’s not—all cameras use these concepts, even though they’re sometimes disguised fairly well. The main difference between a digital camera and a chemical film camera, of course, is the fact that digicams don’t use film. That means you never load anything that has a specific ISO value into the camera. So how does the camera actually work?
Simple. When light enters the camera at the moment of exposure, it doesn’t hit light-sensitive silver halides that are fixed in a chemical broth. Instead, the light hits a computer chip called a charge coupled device (CCD). The CCD is light sensitive, and each of its many pixels register changes in light just like the film’s many grains of silver react individually to light. In other words, the silver grains in film and the pixels in a CCD are essentially the same thing. They contribute to your picture in the same way, and both are the smallest components that make up your picture. The CCD makes a picture by noting the variation in light rays that travel through the camera lens. The CCDs pass this information on to the camera’s microprocessor in the form of varying electrical charges. The image is transformed into digital bits and stored on a memory card.
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