Been There Done That Series-Part 2

1. Warm Up Those Tones

The default white balance setting for digital cameras is auto, which is fine for most snapshots, but tends to be a bit on the "cool" side.

When shooting outdoor portraits and sunny landscapes, try changing your white balance setting from auto to cloudy. This adjustment is like putting a mild warming filter on your camera. It increases the reds and yellows resulting in richer, warmer pictures.

2: Sunglasses Polarizer

If you really want to add some punch to your images, then get your hands on a polarizing filter. A polarizer is the one filter every photographer should have handy for landscapes and general outdoor shooting. By reducing glare and unwanted reflections, polarized shots have richer, more saturated colors, especially in the sky.

If you don't have or want to purchase a filter, try a pair of quality sunglasses, then simply take them off and use them as your polarizing filter. Place the glasses as close to the camera lens as possible, then check their position in the LCD viewfinder to make sure you don't have the rims in the shot.

3. Using Your Flash Outside

One of the great hidden features on digital cameras is the fill flash or flash on mode. By taking control of the flash so it goes on when you want it to, not when the camera deems it appropriate, you've just taken an important step toward capturing great outdoor portraits.

In flash on mode, the camera exposes for the background first, then adds just enough flash to illuminate your portrait subject. The result is a professional looking picture where everything in the composition looks great.

Been There Done That Series... The Best Photography Tips

1. “Photoshop is cheating”, Strive to take ‘good’ photos, rather than photos that I can ‘improve’ later on.

2. If your photo is not good, you are probably not close enough!


3. When shooting portaits in bright sunlight use a flash to reduce facial shadows.

4. Have the subject stand with their body at a 45 degree angle to you but have their eyes look directly at you.

5. “Think BEFORE you press the shutter”
Therefore, putting much more effort in the photos.

6. Examine the 4 corners in your viewfinder.

Make sure there is nothing in the corners of the viewfinder that is distracting form the central subject. For most of us it is relatively easily to focus on the main subject and to find an interesting perspective to capture what we find interesting, but we tend to be so focused that we may forget to examine the rest of the scene for objects that don't fit. Bright highlights, disconnected object sticking in. Things that distract from the image.

7. “Don’t take photographs of subjects, take photographs of the light”

8. “Take three steps closer.”

Superficially this seems pretty vague, and you can even think of lots of shots in which this might actually be the wrong advice. But in terms of getting one to focus on the main subject - or even to make sure that there is a main subject.

9. “Shoot often and shoot many.” Especially in the age of digital, don’t shoot one, shoot five pictures, 10 pictures, try different settings. The more experience you have, the more you’ll learn and the better a photographer you’ll become.

10. The difference between great photographers and a not so great photographers is that the great ones don’t show their crappy pictures.

And Lastly for this series, don't forget your camera and take off the lens cap.

Composition

Learn the ROT, then forget it. The infamous Rule Of Thirds is a great way to nudge yourself away from the standard person-standing-in-the-middle or horizon-in-the-middle vacation snapshots. It’s a good last resort if you don’t know how to make a shot look more interesting. But then, please don’t overdo it.

Get closer. Robert Capa said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough”. Next time you take a picture, try to walk a few steps towards the subject, or even pick out a detail of a scene rather than the whole thing in one. You’ll be surprised.

Use the “sneaker zoom”. Walking closer to a subject instead of zooming in will give you different results in terms of perspective. Try it out.

One subject only. Pictures often work better if there’s a clear subject. Competing subjects are hard to handle.

Un-clutter your images. If there are too many things going on in your image, the viewer can easily get distracted from your subject. If there is too much going on in your picture, see above (”Get closer”, “One subject only”)

Don’t forget about the background. Often you find yourself paying a lot of attention to the subject (the foreground) and completely ignoring the background. The background is as important as the foreground, it is a part of your image. A simple step to the left or right will help you avoid things like branches of trees growing out of your subject’s head.

Change your point of view. Every day we see the world from our own perspective, usually from our own eye level. Change your perspective by shooting from a frog’s perspective or from within a fridge and create an unusual look that people won’t forget.

Moving subjects need space. Your compositions of a car, a bicycle or someone walking will usually look nicer if you give the subject some space in your image to move into.

Use negative space. Negative space is the part of an image that is not your subject. Don’t be afraid to use lots of it every now and then.

Compose buildings straight. Verticals lines in buildings should be vertical on your pictures, or they won’t look natural.

Avoid falling lines. Tilting the camera up when taking pictures of buildings will produce “falling lines”, e.g. the building will look as if its leaning backwards. Sometimes that cannot be avoided. This can usually be fixed in post processing.

Keep water lines horizontal. If you take an image of a lake or the sea, make sure to keep the horizon level. Even a slight skew of half a degree will make the viewer feel uncomfortable with the picture.

Don’t be afraid to cut off stuff. When I was young, I was always told not to cut heads off in pictures. This was simply wrong. Get closer, only shoot part of a face from a person, or select another detail.

Get familiar with design principles. Learn about line, shape and form, texture and so on.

Frame your subject. You can emphasize your subject by placing it into a frame of some sort. Stuff like an open window, tree branches, a doorway.

Be decisive. Either give your subject space to “breathe” (e.g. don’t close in too far with your composition or crop) or close in on some of the details.

If symmetry plays an important part in your composition, take some time to make sure you really are taking your picture from the best spot – dead center in front of a tower or window, for example. Symmetry that is not quite there will bother the viewer a whole lot more than a deliberately asymmetrical image. It saves loads of time in post-processing if you can get this right beforehand; having to tilt and crop your image later could lose valuable elements of the composition and won’t necessarily solve the problem completely.