Summer is fast approaching, and that means there will be lots of opportunities for great snapshots in the months ahead. Whether you’re planning to attend our upcoming Expo Icrontic in June or just hanging at home for a staycation, photo potential abounds. It doesn’t even matter if you’re using a high-end DSLR camera or you’re limited to using the camera on your cell phone. These simple tricks will work for anyone, regardless of level of experience and type of camera.
Ready? Great! Join me as I share five of my favorite photography tricks.
Go off center to make things more interesting
Go off-center
This is perhaps one of the most simple and yet deceptively hard things you can do to improve your photographs. Many of us are used to thinking that the most important element of the picture needs to always be directly in the middle of the picture, but that’s not always the case.
One of the guiding principles of the visual arts is something called the “rule of thirds.” The idea is to split your picture into nine equal squares, and then align your central subject on the intersection of two of the lines. As an example, if you look at the two pictures above, you can see the ceiling feature centered in the left picture, whereas the one on the right has the ceiling feature aligned on the intersection of two lines. It’s a simple trick, but as you can see it makes a big difference between an OK snapshot and a much more interesting one.
Crouch. See the world from a different perspective.
Get down
When it comes to taking pictures of people or things that are lower than your eye-level, try crouching down and putting your camera at the same level as your subject. This is an especially important trick if you want to take good pictures of children, pets, or just your awesomely-painted tabletop miniatures. Kneeling down to your subject’s level is also a good way to cure the little-kids-squinting problem that happens with sunny summer vacation photos. If a child has to look up at you, they also have to look toward the bright sky, which causes squinting.
As a case in point, I really love the Terracotta Army model at Epcot and can’t tell you how many times I’ve snapped pictures of this particular exhibit—usually from the top down. It was really frustrating that my pictures didn’t capture all the great detail I saw. By crouching down to the level of the model, which is about two feet off the floor, things changed. No longer did I have a blah picture of a model; instead, the photo made me feel like I could almost walk the dirt path between the neat rows of tiny warriors. Crouching also allowed me to capture some of the details my previous photos had failed to convey because I was so focused on taking a picture of the entire model rather than just spotlighting a portion of it and leaving the rest to the viewer’s imagination.
Sometimes a flash should be turned off
Flash is not always your friend
If you’ve ever tried to take a picture of someone on stage at a concert and gotten a fantastic shot of the back of a bunch of people’s heads, you’ve already run up against this one. The first thing you should know about using a flash in low light is that using a flash changes the location of your light source to the front of your camera, as you see in the picture above left. This, in turn, overpowers all the delicious ambient light your eyes see. The second thing is that digital camera flash modes are tied to fast exposures, and thus your camera won’t absorb much other light. The longer your exposure time, the more ambient light will be picked up, and the more it will look like what you’re actually seeing.
For those who don’t speak camera, exposure is somewhat like opening and closing your eyes. If you open your eyes for 30 seconds, you will see more of a scene than you would if you only opened your eyes for a single second. It’s the same for your camera only it moves much faster, thereby relying on the flash to add enough light to capture detail. By turning off the flash on many digital cameras, the camera will usually try to adjust by increasing its exposure time. With that said, there is a trick to this trick.
By increasing exposure time, you’re also creating potential for blur in your picture. This happens because either your subject or the camera moved while you were taking the picture. That movement turns into blur in the finished photograph. Since most of us don’t generally carry around a tripod, you’ll want to find a nearby stable object—in the case of the above right photo I used a tree trunk. By placing the bottom of your camera against that stable object before you take the picture, you can eliminate camera movement, thereby enabling you to get a better image using only ambient light—like the one on the right.
Get closer to change the way your audience sees things
Get closer
It’s a really simple trick, but one that is very often overlooked. Zoom on cameras can be handy, but the more you rely on zoom (especially when using a digital zoom as opposed to a zoom lens), the more likely you’re going to wind up with blur or noise in your pictures. Instead, try using your “sneaker zoom” by simply moving closer to your subject. Doing this can also give you a more creative take on something you’re looking at, such as the above photo. For those of you who don’t recognize it, that’s a near shot of Spaceship Earth (the enormous ball) from Epcot at Walt Disney World.
Change your angle
Experiment with angles
Most of the time we tend to take pictures in one of two ways: holding the camera regularly (landscape), or holding the camera on its side at a 90-degree angle (portrait). Taking chances and playing between those two positions can add more depth and interest to a photo than it would have had if you held the camera normally. Sometimes, a slightly tilted camera angle will even help forgive a certain number of flaws (as with the above image) because the overall image has enough interesting elements to outweigh the not-so-great parts.
Ultimately, the most important thing you can do if you’d like to improve your mad picture-taking skills is simply to snap tons of them. The more you play with your camera—whether it’s a cell phone camera or an expensive DSLR setup—the more you will find new and interesting ways to make your pictures exciting. Then you can come back with great shots and show them off in our photography forum!
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