a1 Photo Tips

In case you don’t remember, this was a slogan used by Kodak in the early days of photo-processing. Kodak sold a really simple camera to a beginner-level market, and offered to do all processing of the film, plus printing the pictures. This was a new concept at the time.

Nowadays, with digital cameras dominating the market, some things still remain the same. There is still a huge market for the “push-the-button” type cameras, which supposedly take perfect pictures with absolutely NO effort required from the photographer!

Recently, I happened to notice reviews of some entry-level digicams. There was for instance a Panasonic FX500 digicam, which seems to do most of the thinking for you: …”An Intelligent Auto mode analyses the scene and automatically sets the Panasonic FX500 to the proper Scene mode, and Face Detection is capable of detecting up to 15 faces in a scene.”
Not bad - fifteen faces! This little wonder also sports 10.1 Megapixel image resolution, a 5X zoom factor, and a 3-inch, touch-screen, LCD viewfinder. All of this for a little over $300.

Or how about this Canon SD790 - a similar point-and-shoot camera which you can get for around $250 or less:
…”All I had to show them — no matter their age — was where to find three buttons: the Power button, the Shutter button and the Zoom ring … there are buttons and a dial and they do offer useful functions … But the beauty of this ELPH is that you rarely have to use them“…

So, I guess what most people want in a digital camera is still the same that Kodak offered to give them about a hundred years ago: an instrument that doesn’t make them think!

The difference is that with today’s advanced technology, you can easily manufacture a camera which *almost* thinks for you. Is that a good thing? Yes I guess it is. It is much more fun to use a tool if it does a decent job for you with as little effort as possible from your side.

Most people don’t have the inclination to spend much of their time learning about how to make better pictures. All they want is to make some snapshots from vacations and family events, without needing to spend time figuring out how to use a camera.

Sure, if you are really interested there is LOTS of information out there! For instance, you can buy e-books (yes, downloadable - you don’t need to go to a bookstore!) - with loads of useful tips and in-depth information on how to get the most out of your digital camera. Here are some examples where you can learn digital photography technique: Example#1 and Example#2.
Take a god look at these - even by simply taking advantage of the free offers, you have a chance of improving the quality of your pictures! Plus the e-books come with a rock-solid money-back guarantee.

However, it does take some of your time to actually absorb this information. I’ve noticed that one type of sales argument for these Photography e-books is something like …”learn the closely guarded secrets of photography that the pros don’t want you to know!”…

In my opinion, there is no such thing as “closely guarded secrets of photography”. The information is out there - available to anyone who is committed enough to bother with the effort of absorbing it!

But most people aren’t. They prefer to buy a little camera which “automatically detects … up to 15 faces in a scene”.

Photo Credit: Frog picture by “Hamed Saber“.

Ever given a thought to how a picture changes just by you lowering or jacking up the camera position? Such a simple change can have a huge impact on the result. If you give some creative thought to the angle you choose when snapping your picture, the result will be so much more fun to watch!

This works in a couple of ways, but let us consider the effect on the main subject of interest here. (It is also likely to affect the appearance of the background in major ways, more on that in another photo tip.)

Here I made a picture of a pretty but poisonous plant: the red baneberry (Actaea rubra). First I somewhat lazily held the camera at waist level, and since the plant is much shorter than me it was then shown from above.

Then I looked at the result and felt it was a bit dull, although it does show the fruit and the leaves OK, and the background is neutral. However, the image feels kind of flat - almost like a pattern on a wallpaper.

Next, I lowered the camera to almost ground level - only some cm. (a few inches) above the ground, and made the second image. Here, I like the result much more! The three-dimensional shape of the fruit cluster now stands out, and you feel a much stronger presence.

Everything else is the same. It is the same fruit cluster, similar distance, and the same light conditions. But by lowering the camera I changed the viewing angle radically.

So - get out of your comfort zone! Test unexpected camera positions, even if it means having to kneel on the ground, or climb up on something to get a birds-eye view.

The famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams took many of his best pictures from - the roof of his car! He had a special camera platform up there, and from that vantage point he found a more interesting angle on his landscapes than from the ground.

I must admit that it sure helps if you, like me, happen to have a digicam with an electronic viewfinder which can be rotated in almost any direction - like my old Canon Powershot G2. This type of viewfinder is not very common nowadays, I am not even sure if the latest Canon Powershot camera models still come with this very handy feature.

Now another example: how the appearance of objects is changed by snapping the picture from different angles.

This ornate urn is on display in a public garden in my home town. The first picture I made of that urn was taken from my most convenient level - eye level. You can see how the urn is shown as narrowing toward the top, when in fact that part is perfectly cylindrical. Also the beautiful flower arrangement in the mouth of the urn doesn’t show so well.

By raising the camera high above my head, I was able to get it at about the same height as the urn. Therefore its shape is now more realistically rendered, and the flowers show better. (There is only a minute or so between these two exposures, but in that short time span the light changed; it became more overcast and therefore the relief decorations and the Satyr’s head show less well since the light is now softer.)

I hope these modest examples of changing the camera level will get your creative juices flowing!

When trying to give you, the reader, something useful and simple, I guess a good point to start is giving you some photo tips about composition. Putting all technical stuff aside for now, just put your attention on how you see the object you’re trying to capture in the viewfinder of your camera.

The idea is that you can make your pictures so much more interesting if you focus your conscious awareness on how you “frame” whatever-it-is-you’re-trying-to-capture before pushing the camera trigger.

There are many aspects to this, for now let’s introduce the first rule in the book:

§ 1: Rule of Thirds!

Imagine you divide the scene you see through the camera’s viewfinder into three parts, both vertically and horizontally, like this:

- it is really much easier to show than to explain in words.

Note that the intersection of two lines falls right near the middle of the woman’s face! And feel the tension and sense of movement created by all that mysterious black space to the left!

The idea behind this old rule is that a picture usually becomes more interesting if the major, dominating, elements are a bit off center.

The Rule of Thirds is a simple tool to help you avoid the boring habit of putting everything smack in the middle of every picture. Instead, keep imagining those lines, running as shown above, and try to place your object of interest somewhere along those lines.

This will introduce a sense of movement to your pictures. Imagine a picture of a person for instance. Put her right in the middle - what do you feel when you see that? Is she going anywhere? No, it seems she has already arrived! Ho-hum… But put her off center, at either of the vertical lines. Then what? Well, she may be on her way into the picture, or disappearing out of it (depending on which way she is positioning her body).

Every time you are about to snap a picture, ask yourself: “How can I use the Rule of Thirds to make this picture more interesting, with more of a sense of movement?” Keep doing that and I’m sure your photographic skill will improve visibly.

Here is another example:

- The picture has been digitally mastered in Photoshop to emphasize the massiveness of the rocks.

Take for instance the horizon in the picture above: it so happens that it is exactly two thirds of the way up! I didn’t plan it that way, I guess I did it by instinct.

If I had put the horizon exactly halfway up, dividing the picture into two equal-sized halves, the result had been felt as more static; less dynamic.

Note also that I’ve placed the largest rock formation slightly off center, a bit toward the left. (In this case, putting a massive dark form very much off center, with nothing but the light-colored sky and water surface in the rest of the image, could have created an “off-balance” feeling. Like every rule, the Rule of Thirds needs to be used with common sense.)