Zazzle & Photography

When you're choosing your digital camera, you have two choices. Either get the best you can afford even if it has features you won't yet use, or a cheap one to learn with. With a cheaper one you'll be restricted by the size of the products you can use for your images.
Simply, the most important point is the lens quality, followed by the number of megapixels, so read lots of reviews. Once you have your camera - use it! Gone are the days when you ummed and aahed over whether to take a shot or not as film was expensive, now you're only limited by the size of your memory card. That means you can experiment with different exposures, angles, distances etc at no extra cost.

These are some of the basic guidelines to bear in mind when you're out there practising:

1. Rule of thirds.
2. Focus and depth of field.
3. Focus on the eyes.
4. Exposure.
5. Attention to detail.

The basics of this is to divide your image area in to nine - three vertical thirds, and three horizontal thirds, and to place important parts of your image on the intersections for a more pleasing composition. While it's often acceptable, or sometimes better, to have the main subject central in the photo, it can look rather boring. I often have my subjects in the centre!

This can be quite a complicated subject for the beginner, so I'm only going to gloss over it, and if you're interested, you'll find many articles on how to achieve the effect you want by searching for "depth of field". Depth of field is controlled by the f-stop you use, basically, the smaller the stop (the higher the number - f16, f32 etc), the more of your subject will be in focus. With some cheaper cameras, you have no option to control what is or isn't in focus (generally, they will aim for maximum in focus), but if it has an aperture priority setting, you can concentrate the focus on just a small area or a larger range.

The advantages of this are concentrating the viewers eye on a specific area, and being able to blur an untidy background. In the poppy example (this is just a crop from the image), I focused on the centre of the flower and the stem - the f-stop was f8 at 1/320 of a second. Whether it would work better with the whole flower in focus is opinion, but I like the way it shows the hairy stem and the flower's centre.

On the whole, photos of people or animals do need the eyes in focus - that is the area a viewers own eye is naturally drawn to, and if it's not in focus it will make a very "restless" photo where your own eyes can't settle on anything. In my example, the eye could be a tiny bit sharper but I hope it explains what I mean. At the same time, make sure you have a fast enough shutter speed to avoid camera shake, or use a tripod.
You can see a larger original version by clicking on the image.

If your subject doesn't have eyes, make sure the important parts are in focus.

That's not exposure to the public, but how light or dark your photo is. An under-exposed photo will be too dark to see the detail clearly and have no detail at all in the shadows. Over-exposed, and it will be too light, with no highlight detail. One very common problem with digital cameras is having a reasonably exposed photo but with "burnt out" areas - that's when the white areas have no detail in them at all. It's a particular problem with skies, but can occur anywhere - water drops, waterfalls, reflections from shiny objects.
If you have a camera with aperture or shutter priority settings, or a "bracketing" setting, you can take several photos with different exposures and pick the best. A graduated filter is another way to combat it with skies, also not shooting towards the light source, or waiting until the lighting isn't so direct or harsh.

If you have some photo-editing software, it more than likely has an information window which will tell you how much colour there is in an area. In RGB the value of white is 255, in CMYK white is 0% of all colours. It will be much more noticeable when it's printed. The differences between RGB, CMYK and Pantone or other colour systems are beyond the scope of this lens, but basically you want to aim to have less than solid white or black.
The image shows the burnt out white areas, the horse also suffers from harsh lighting making the shadows too dark.

1. One of the most common faults with landscape photos is not having a level horizon. It's very obvious and very distracting to most people. It's also quite easy to correct in even the most simple software by rotating the image slightly and cropping to make it a rectangle again. This also applies to trees, lamposts, anything that should be obviously horizontal or vertical. Of course, there are times when you may want a photo of a lampost at an angle. These tips are for guidance, not hard and fast rules.
2. Horizon in the centre - see rule of thirds. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, generally it makes a less interesting photo. Again, you can crop the photo to move the centre of interest.
3. Things that shouldn't be there. Pay attention to what's in the viewfinder - I often don't and then spend hours painting something out. It's a lot easier to get it right in the photo! That means untidy objects in the background, or something brightly coloured that really stands out.
This example has a lot of faults (mainly due to the fact that I was balanced precariously on a steep bank!). It's very slightly underexposed, it's crooked - the trees and fence posts are all at an angle, it's too tightly cropped (not enough space around the cow, which as well as not being pleasing to the eye, doesn't give room to correct the angles), and the yellow electric fence post shouldn't be there at all - time to rearrange the cow.

For flower photography, someone once gave me some very good advice - take some scissors with you so you can remove any unwanted leaves and dead bits.

I hope these tips are useful. Now I better put my money where my mouth is and go out and take some decent photos!