If you've ever had a point-and-shoot, or a cell phone with a built-in camera, you've probably been disappointed with the quality of your pictures. Although compact cameras and camera phones take a lot of guesswork out of your hands, they don't always work the best in every situation.
Common problems that most amateur photographers will experience with small personal cameras include: underexposure, red eye and blur. Yet you can improve the quality of your pictures simply by adopting a few different techniques. Here you will find all the important strategies on how to be a good photographer.
Pre-focus Your Camera
Some of the best photos are composed with a subject slightly off-center. Nevertheless, most small personal cameras focus on whatever is in the center of the viewfinder. This can cause your images to seem out of focus.
Fortunately, most cameras allow you to pre-focus by placing your subject in the center of a picture and holding your shutter release button halfway down. The device will hold the focus as you recompose a photo.
Turn Up the Ambient Light
Small personal cameras are designed to strike a balance between the amount of light that enters the camera and the speed at which the picture is taken, which is known as the shutter speed.
If your images appear underexposed it means that there is not enough light in the room, which leads to one of two results; either the image will be underexposed, or it will have motion blur.
Motion blur occurs when the camera's shutter speed slows down to allow more light into the camera. If the shutter speed slows down to a rate slower than a person can move, the motion is recorded in a blur trail.
However, if the shutter speed is increased, as it often is in a camera's sports mode setting, the camera allows less light to enter the device. That results in an underexposed picture. By turning up the ambient light in the room, you give the camera more light to work with, simultaneously reducing both motion blur and underexposed images.
Increasing the light in the room will also decrease the amount of red eye that appears on an image. Red eye is most visible when a subject's pupils are dilated, which occurs most often in low-light conditions.
The situation is created when light from your camera's flash enters the dilated pupils of the eye. The light strikes blood vessels in the back of the eye, illuminating them. This is then recorded by the camera.
Professional photographers avoid red eye by using a camera that has a flash set far away from the lens. Yet by the mere fact that small personal cameras have a very compact design, their flashes are always very close to the lens. Some compact cameras have a red eye reduction feature that sends out a burst of flashes before taking a picture. This burst of flashes is designed to coax a subject's pupils to contract, and reduces the chances of red eye.
By turning up the light in a room, you help encourage your subject's pupils to contract, and reduce the chances that you will record red eye yourself.
If you are tired of your photos looking like a beginner's, you can improve the quality of your images with these few simple changes to the way you record your images. That way you have learned the first step on how to be a good photographer...
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