I recently gave a shout out to Eric Kim who some time ago came up with 100 tips for taking great photos. His last tip was to suggest that fellow photographers compile their own list. Well, I’ve not quite reached 100 yet, lots of the ideas I thought of were already in Kim’s list and I didn’t want to duplicate, but I did manage 35 in half an hour or so.
- Look at the world around you, really see
- Photograph interesting objects, odd details, beautiful scenes, people
- When shooting kids and pets get down to their eye level
- Give kids something distracting to look at or play with rather than making them pose
- Don’t ask people to look straight at the camera unless it’s a formal portrait for their passport
- The cost of your kit doesn’t matter
- Any camera is better than no camera
- Specialist bags and pouches are nice, but only if you can get your camera out of them quickly
- Switch off “shoot without memory card” mode
- Don’t forget to charge your batteries when you get home
- Shoot in auto, it helps you focus on composition
- Don’t forget to carry a spare memory card
- Carrying a camera isn’t about you, it’s not a pose, it’s about the photos you take
- The photos you take can tell us a lot about you
- Learn how to use all your camera’s manual settings and use them
- Give the camera pre-sets a try, learn what they do specifically, and then use manual to adapt them for better photos
- Get closer if you can and zoom in to preclude the need to crop
- Think about the periphery of your composition to preclude the need to crop out extraneous distractions
- When snapping sisters, mothers and daughters or just close friends get them close to each other and laughing by suggesting they touch their heads together
- Suggest your subject lift their nose slighly, this cuts under-nose shadow, exposes and tightens the throat and often elicits a confused giggle that brings out character
- Avoid on-board flash, pre-focus lamps, and “red-eye-reduction”
- Try to tell a story with a single photo, draw people in
- Use the digital darkroom to blacken the blacks, whiten the whites and boost the shadows
- Don’t install your camera’s upload software, import with a proper PC or Mac based gallery tool
- Keep at least two copies of all your digital photos
- Digital storage, cloud backup, external hard drives, good-quality CD-ROMs are all cheap use them all
- Never delete any of your photos
- Play with image editing tools like the web-based PicMonkey, SnapSeed for iPad
- Photoshop is wonderful but it’s a sledgehammer for cracking most nuts
- Create galleries in Facebook, Google+, Instagram, flickr etc and share them with other people, read their comments
- Upload the best single photo out of every 1000 photos you take to a discussion forum and ask for opinions
- Look up the compositional tools, including the “rule of thirds”, learn how to use them well and occasionally break those same rules
- Absorb how cinematographers and even TV camera crews set the scene, they’re often masters of composition
- Absorb how painters and even sketch artists set the scene, they’re often masters of composition
- Be a photon sponge, let in the light and observe