Your favorite photography tips and tricks

Over the years I've learned lots of little things that have improved my photography. I thought that in the

interest of helping other photographers, it might be useful (and perhaps even entertaining) to share whatever

little things you've learned. To get the ball rolling, here are a few in different areas:

 

EQUIPMENT

1. Use a lens hood

2. Use a tripod

3. Use a cable release (or timer if you don't have a cable release)

4. Use mirror lockup (for SLRs)

 

LANDSCAPE

5. For richer colors, take pictures within an hour of sunset

6. Use leading lines to draw attention towards the subject

7. Include something in the foreground when shooting at something in the distance.

8. Frame your images with objects in the foreground.

 

PORTRAIT

9. When photographing children, don't ask them to smile, just say, "Poopy diaper" and start clicking.

10. When photographing children, shoot at their perspective.

11. Avoid wider lenses to prevent facial distortion.

12. Use a large aperture to blur backgrounds

13. Focus on the eyes

14. Wear a white shirt to act as a diffuser when shooting up close.

15. For candid shots, give your subject time to get used to your presence.

 

LIGHTING

16. Be aware of flash falloff when shooting groups

17. Consider not using a flash to capture motion

18. Use fill flash to lighten shadows across the face on a sunny day

19. Use bounce flash for a more natural look

20. Be aware of the light temperature and compensate for it (white balance)

21. Don't expect any flash to evenly illuminate a large space (cathedral and so on). Consider a long exposure

instead.

22. Use a grey card (or your hand) for accurate readings in difficult situations

23. Use fill flash for subjects in front of bright backgrounds

 

COMPOSITION

24. Consider using the rule of thirds when composing

25. Fill the frame with the subject

26. When shooting buildings and architecture, keep the camera level to prevent converging verticals.

27. Consider shooting the subject from the opposite perspective.

 

DIGITAL

28. Use the histogram to ensure that your shots aren't over- or under-exposed.

 

MISCELLANEOUS

29. Be aware of why you want to take the photo (what you want to communicate) and determine how best to do it.

Try to remove anything that doesn't help to communicate your message.

30. Pan with moving objects to prevent blur and create a sense of movement

31. When shooting with slow shutter speeds, brace yourself as much as possible, hold your breath, and shoot

between heartbeats.

32. When aperture isn't important, shoot at f/8.

33. If you've found something fleeting you want to shoot, don't wait for the perfect moment. Take the shot first

(the insurance shot) and then wait for it to improve.

34. Always keep a spare battery with you.

35. Spend your money on lenses, not your camera.

36. Don't get obsessed with equipment. Make the most with what you have.

37. Don't spend all your time on photography forums. Go out there and shoot!

 

John

Great list John. I don't have that much to add but I will say my #1 is don't buy cheap" beginner" lenses. They will start annoying you quickly and you'll have to buy good lenses very soon anyway. Just get the good lenses to begin with. Good lenses are the best gift you can give yourself as a photographer.

Very good, and practical, advice...

 

...saying "poopy diaper," in any context, will make most parents smile, too.

 

MISCELLANEOUS 31. When shooting with slow shutter speeds, brace yourself as much as possible, hold your breath,

and shoot between heartbeats.

 

[i prefer an alternative. When I need a 'slow' shutter, I take a deep breath and 'click' in the middle of the exhalation.]

 

[Addition] FILM 38. 'Pull' in bright light or with high contrast, i.e. halve your ISO setting.

 

Johnny

here are some tips from a 9 month old photographer

 

1. Always use fresh-charged battery. Take your charger along, as well as extra batteries. Charge the 'exhausted' battery as soon as you can, and in spare moments, use the charger to 'top off' the batteries that are not 'exhausted'.

 

2. Always pre-format a new picture card with 3 sequential formats to ensure perfect functionality. Dont let picture images sleep overnight on the card, go ahead and upload all of them to the laptop when you get in from shooting. Do another format on the card right before you start shooting again.

 

3. Always try to set the camera White Balance to match your ambient lighting as closely as possible. This will help you get the best colors most of the time.

 

4. Use a Tripod if at all possible. This greatly minimizes camera wobble and results in sharper pictures. A cheap tripod is better than no tripod, but its MUCH better to acquire a really good tripod than a cheap tripod. As soon as you can afford one, acquire a GOOD tripod and take care of it. Use the cheap tripod as your secondary or backup unit.

 

5. Take a clean dry cotton hankie along to wipe the fog off the lens when you move the camera from cool and dry air-conditioned place to a very warm and moist picture-taking place.

 

6. Take a laptop along with you, as well as extra DVD disks, so you can make DVD backup disks of all the pictures you have uploaded. If you're schedule permits it, stay an extra day or two and make a full set of DVD backups before leaving the site and hitting the road.

 

7. Take along a couple of 3" wide wood blocks cut out of a single 2X4 beam. Place these under the 2 back corners of your laptop to raise the laptop off the surface and allow plenty of cool air to circulate under the laptop. This will help keep a hot-running laptop running cooler. And that may prevent h/w or s/w problems while you are uploading or doing post-processing on your pictures.

 

8. Before taking your laptop along on a major shoot, take an hour or two, and run about 12 passes of DEFRAG on each hard drive. This will serve to check and repack all the files in nice contiguous order, and that will have the effect of making your File System respond noticeably quicker and faster when you get onsite and need to upload the new pictures.

 

9. Take along plenty of extra batteries and extra picture cards. If you only take 1 battery and 1 picture card, then you will have to stop shooting when the battery is exhausted or the picture card is full. By taking plenty of extras, you can quickly stop and swap out the exhausted battery with a fresh one or the full picture card with a new empty one. Also, having plenty of spares on hand will keep you going if you do discover one of the cards or batteries is gone bad.

 

10. Using one of those funky little lens cover keepers will help keep the lens cap from getting lost during night shoots. This is not as important for lenses with common diameters, like 49mm. But its more important for big lenses having less common diameters like 77mm, for example. Few stores carry a 77mm lens cap replacement, and that makes it harder to replace if you lose it.

 

11. If you include a couple of 1 gallon size Ziplock bags in your kit, you will be prepared for that unexpected rainstorm that threatens to douse your camera and flash with unwanted moisture.

 

12. Take the batteries out of the camera and flash when you go to store the camera. Wrap them in cardbaord or paper and tape them tight, and label the outside so you know which camera they go in. Doing this will keep the batteries from leaking inside the camera and causing a corrosive process that could ruin the camera if left unchecked. If storing re-chargeables, give them a fresh charge first, so they go into storage fully charged. Then, re-charge them every 6 months or so while they are in storage.

 

 

13. Back up your picture images to DVD disks as soon as possible after uploading to the computer. If time and the amt of data permits it, select the option to "Verify Data After Write". This will cause the the DVD burner software to go back and do a file X file comparision of the two copies. The source file is compared against the DVD copy and so you know they are exact duplicates. If you have a huge amt of data to backup, and time does not permit this option to be used, try and watch the backup process as it runs, to at least confirm that no errors occur while the data is being written to DVD.

 

good luck...

 

Store your tripod in the trunk of your car.

Take the shot right on the spot -> spend less time in front of the computer.

I see lots of tips but not too many tricks. One of my favorites was, taking the 50mm lens off the camera, turning it around and placing the front of the lens against the camera to get a 1:1 macro. (You could also buy reversing rings to mount the lens that way.) That was always good when walking around with a camera and 50mm lens and seeing an interesting bug. But then, how many people today walk around with a 50mm lens? Also use the 50mm lens as an 8X loup.

Check those settings: ISO what you want/need? AV/TV/M set where you want it? Battery looking good? Plenty of shots left on the card/roll?

The biggest impact on my pictures has been learning about ACR from Bruce Fraser's book Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3. The biggest impact from that book so far is the judicious application of capture sharpening.

 

Other than that, the most crucial thing is as Jack said above - checking ALL of the camera settings.

 

A most helpful thing on both my XTi and my 40D is to use the review screen that shows both the colour and black/white histograms for fast feedback.

Thanks John I hope you don't mind I made a copy of your post. Hopefully I can shrink it and tape it to my forehead.

I don't format my sd cards - it shortens their life. I use two ext3 formatted hard disks in my pc, reserved for photo storage . Ext3 means no defragging and it will work on windoze with the appropriate driver. Make sure spare battery is charged and in the bag, and have heaps of sd cards. Back up to dvd regularly using two different types of media, e.g. dvd+r and dvd-r, only Japanese made will do and burned at 4x in a Pioneer burner, with up to date firmware. I use a Liteon burner for checking the quality of the disks with CDSpeed software (free). I save everything, even the duds!

<br>

Auslogics Disk Defrag is faster and superior to the standard Windblows offering and it's free, formatting a card does not destroy data, and Linux is far more robust than any version of Windows. I use Silicon Power, Transcend, and Patriot sd cards, much cheaper than Sandisk and work just as well, and they are not fakes. So there is my offering.

My favorite tip would be to sometimes forget all of the rules. Shoot without looking, cut peoples heads out of the frame, zoom your flash to make it a spotlight, run and pan and wait for surprises. If you have to follow too many rules all the time things can get dull quickly :)

anyone mention enjoy it? The scene around you when you take the pictures and the process to get hem how you want it. You should enjoy it all

When using a rangefinder camera, remember to take off the lens cap.

When using older film cameras that don't read the DX coding, make you sure you remember to set your light meter

to the right ISO. When using a digital, check the ISO when you start in case you were shooting low light before (and

have the ISO very high) and are now trying to shoot landscapes (and hence want it low for increased quality). And

when using an older camera (especially a rangefinder like a Leica) always make sure the film wind knob is turning

when you wind the film (and so the film is properly threaded on the spools).

 

When changing lenses in a digital, it's a good idea (or so they tell me) to turn the camera off and point the lens down

to keep dust from coming in while you change the lenses (and those Rocket blowers are great for blowing dust off

the sensor).

 

Oh, and I always use a filter on the lens. I know it's controversial, but if I get condensation on the lens from

temperature shifts, I prefer to wipe the filter to wiping the front element of the lens. Also, I've lost a very nice filter

from sandblasting in Garden of the Gods (but losing the lens would have been worse) and I've dropped lenses which

actually just broke the filter. Given that even Leica M8 users are forced to use a IR cut filter in front of their lenses, I

dont' think you lose too much from having a skylight or UV haze filter there as long as it's good optically and has a

decent coating. I use B&W or Leica or another reputable filter maker.

 

Another tip is to pick a favorite photography site and go back a lot. See it in all different seasons or time of day. It's

surprising what you learn over years trying to get the best possible pictures of a given site. It should be somewhere

close by (convenient). Mine is the Atlanta Botanical Garden. It sometimes takes me years to get what I think is a

really good shot of some place in the garden. It's a good exercise.

 

Another tip I liked was to go somewhere with your black and white film camera (I used my Leica M2) with say Kodak

Tri-X and your DSLR and take a bunch of the same pictures with both. Then work in photoshop to see what it takes

to replicate the look of the Tri-X in digital. Can be very illuminating.

 

That's all I can think of. Keep in mind I'm just an amateur.

Carry your camera with you everywhere.

 

Bring the smallest possible kit you can live with.

 

Have it out and ready to go.

 

Be kind and respectful to others, but don't apologize or feel guilty for having a natural curiosity about the world and

the people in it.

 

 

Now shoot everything that interests you (refer to above as needed)

Good stuff here.

Look for some good light, then look for an interesting subject to photograph. Works most of the time.

The more nervous you are to approach someone to take their picture, the more you should do it.

 

Don't pose people right away. Start taking casual shots while a person is relaxed and ask them to come up with poses that they feel

comfortable in. Then work from there and take control if you need to.

 

 

James

Here's three of mine:<p>

1. Make sure there is some pure black in a photo to make the colours pop.<p>

2. Check that there is film in your Leica M6 before shooting.<p>

3. Getting a good shot is only half the job. Turning a good shot into an excellent shot is most of the time done in post-processing. Play around with settings and adjustments, find styles you like and learn what images make the best starting points for your favourite look.

Look for "light", not for "objects"

 

Use a hand-strap instead of a neck-strap.

 

Don't shoot your daughters' (or sons') weddings (no - I' not a wedding photographer)

 

Whenever time permits and for all critical shots, carefully "examine and evaluate" (aka - don't just look at) the

entire viewfinder frame, completely, before you release the shutter

 

Learn to properly apply flash to a wide variety of situations

 

Almost always take flash wherever you take a camera (not just the little one built-in to some cameras)

 

Take a camera, of some kind, wherever you go (already stated above, but, worth repeating).

 

Thanks For All The Tips...

 

Cheers! Jay

Read threads like this and glean all the info you can!

1) Use polarizer filters. 2) A beanbag (can be homemade with coffee beans) can be a good camera support when you don't have a tripod. 3) If your camera uses AA batteries, lithiums last a long, long time but carry spares everywhere (lithiums are great if you are traveling abroad where electricity is problematical). 4) Padded, insulated lunch bags make a good cheap camera holder, especially when it has those blue ice thingies than can protect cameras and film against heat. 5) Camera equipment left in an auto is guaranteed to be stolen. 6) Multiple moderate sized memory cards provide security against card failure compared to using just one megacard. 6) Setting the white balance to "cloudy" rather than "auto" on sunny days can often produce more dramatic colors. 7) When showing digital photos to a group of friends, using the camera hooked to a digital TV is much more effective than everyone huddling around a monitor. 8) If you are a passenger in an auto going through interesting places, taking digital photos through the windows as you go along can result in some neat photos. 8) Costco can make very nice 12 by inch prints for $2.99. 9) photos can be emailed to Costco for print production and will be ready for pickup in just an hour or so. 10) Using the internet to purchase equipment out-of-state can save you a bundle on sales tax. 11) You can get some good deals on used equipment by looking for trade-ins at your local photo shop and can handle the product. 11) A digital camera can be used as a light meter for your non-metered film cameras. 12) Don't be afraid to ask questions on photo.net. There are scads of well informed good people eager to assist you.