Top Three Tips for New Digital Photographers
Friday, July 4, 2008 @ 15:45
Lots of people take up digital photography and then lament the fact that they are not getting the quality of photographs they used to get when working with film. Most of the time, this is simply due to some misunderstandings regarding the equipment and not to any major shortfall of the photographer's skill.
Here are a few tips to enhance your digital photographs:
1. Avoid situations presenting extremes in contrast. When highlights and shadows are too extreme, you stand a great chance of losing details in both areas. While film photography is much more forgiving of these situations, even subtle differences in contrast with digital photography can mean a complete loss of detail in the highlights. So try to avoid these types of situations when shooting digital and you'll see an almost immediate improvement in your photographs.
2. Reduce your flash output. Most digital photographers make the mistake of "over-flashing" their photographs. You can see a major improvement in your photos almost immediately by simply setting your flash to output less light (maybe set it to -1 or -2). If that still doesn't do the trick, try putting your index finger partly over the flash right at the point where you take the picture.
3. Pay attention to your camera settings. Know what settings work for various situations and which don't. Then remember what the defaults were so that you can set them back up quickly. A lot of amateur photographers will play with their settings and then forget what the original ones were when they want to set them back; some may even just forget to set them back altogether. Changing settings for certain shots in a photo session might be necessary, but you want to remember to re-adjust after those shots have been obtained. Try to train yourself to do this and you won't find that every photo taken after a certain series requiring special settings is messed up, simply because you forgot to set the white balance controls back to their normal settings.
These are just a few handy tips to use when first making the move to digital photography. There are plenty more and a lot of websites out on the net that you can visit to get them.
