Link of the Day: 65 tips to improve your digital photography

Posted on 17 March 2008 by Brandon

Want to bump up the quality of photos you’ve been taking? There’s a website for you.

Tips from the Top Floor have 65 points about how to improve you photos. Here are some of my favorites.

2. Don’t fall for the megapixel hype. Especially with digital point-and-shoot cameras, a higher megapixel count often results in more noise in your images. 5 megapixels are enough for most situations. Having that said, as camera sensors and in-camera processing get better over time, this might change.

Also don’t think that because you have a point-and-shoot you can’t take good photos. Cameras are only as good as their photographers and some amazing photos have been taken by point-and-shoot cameras. Not having the most amazing camera makes you think outside the box and get creative. Relish it.

12. 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.

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

14. 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”)

Beginning photographers almost all seem to have photos that are distant, not person and very,very busy. The more stuff you have in the photo doesn’t necessarily mean its better. The simpler moment means its easier for a person looking at the photo to understand the story that is going on. Go clean, and get closer.

29. Try manual mode. If your camera allows you to do so, give manual mode a try, especially if you are shooting in a situation where the light conditions don’t change much. The camera’s built-in light meter is a very precise tool that will help you get the settings right once and then continue using them in order to get consistent results throughout a whole photo shoot.

Presets are the creation of the Devil.

48. Use higher ISO. Contrary to the things you might have read and heard, it’s not always best to use the lowest possible ISO. The reason is that some cameras can’t actually handle large contrast differences that well at lower ISOs, which can result in colour fringing, similar to chromatic aberration. Cranking the ISO up one step can help you overcome this problem.

Also while a lower ISO may be nice and not grainy, an underexposed photo isn’t very attractive either. Use the right ISO. Don’t sacrifice!

55. Make use of backlighting. Try this for spectacular lighting: place your subject with the back to the light source, then use the camera’s flash to fill in the missing light in the foreground. If your camera has “flash exposure compensation”, make use of it to dial down the fill flash to the minimum needed in order to get a well balanced result.

This is very simple and has a nice effect. Try it out if you can.

The full list from Tips from the Top Floor will have you shooting awesome photos in a short amount of time. Check it out!

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