essential photography tips

Essential Photography Tips

31. How to shoot moving water
Short shutter speeds do a good job of capturing a waterfall and its surroundings, but you ll achieve a far more attactive result by slowing things down. To do this without overexposing your image, start by switching out of auto and reducing your camera s sensitivity to its lowest setting (usually around ISO 100 or ISO 80), then either use a neutral density (ND) filter or, if you don t have one or can t fit one to your camera, dial down the exposure compensation to its lowest level (usually 2EV, 3EV or 5EV).

Mount your camera on a tripod, half press the shutter release to fix the focus point and exposure and then press it all the way to take the picture, being careful not to shake the camera while it s taking the shot. It ll take some experimentation to get this right, so don t be put off if you don t get the perfect results first time around.By taking this picture with a slower shutter we ve softened the water both in the waterfall and passing in front of the lens.
32. Focus on the details
When a scene is simply too big to fit in your picture without it getting uncomfortably close to the edge of the frame, focus instead on one of the details that makes it unique. An abstract crop can often have greater impact and give a more original view of a tired, over used view we ve all seen before.Zoomed and cropped: an unusual night time view of the Louvre Pyramid, reflected in the pools that surround it.
33. You can t shoot speed head on
You can t properly capture speeding subjects as they come towards or move away from you. If you re shooting track events, position yourself side on to the action so that it passes across your field of view rather than coming towards it. Shooting into a chicane works well on TV where we delight in seeing the cars snake around it in sequence, but fares poorly in static frames.
34. Focus on the action
If you really want to convey an impression of speed in your images, pan your lens in line with speeding cars, horses and runners and shoot with a fairly slow shutter speed 1/125 second or below to blur the background. Keeping the subject sharp in the frame while blurring the background gives a more effective impression of speed than static backgrounds and blurred subjects.
35. Reflect on things
Do rainy days and Sundays get you down? Don t let them: embrace the photo opportunities afforded by the puddles. The rain is as much a part of the story of your holiday as the food you ate and the sights you saw. Use reflections wherever possible for a different take on otherwise well known scenes.
36. Dont believe the megapixel myth
We re glad to see manufacturers are starting to see sense here, with many high end cameras now sporting comparatively modest pixel counts. At the lower end, however, some manufacturers continue to cram 16 megapixels and more on tiny sensors that can t cope with high levels of incoming light. Pay for quality, not quantity, remembering that as few as 10 megapixels is plenty for printing at A3 using online photo printing services.This squirrel was shot using the 10.1 megapixel Nikon 1 J1. Despite the conservative resolution, the quality is great and we d be happy to print this as a poster to pin on the wall.
37. Flickr your shopping assistant
Baffled by numbers and stats? If you can t get your hands on a camera to try before you buy, at least have a look at the shots it produces. Flickr uses the metadata attached to every photo shot by a digital camera to catalogue them by manufacturer and model, allowing you to click through a representative sample of output in its enormous online archive. Find it at flickr.com/cameras.
38. Don t be a memory cheapskate
Buy the fastest memory cards you can afford to minimise the time it takes for your camera to write each shot to the media, and how long you ll have to wait before you can take the next shot. Wait too long and you ll miss something.
Cards are ranked using a simple class system, where the class number is simply the number of megabytes the card can store per second. So, your camera will be able to write to a Class 4 card at up to 4MBps, and a Class 10 card at up to 10MBps. Faster cards are more expensive, so if you re having trouble justifying to yourself the extra expense, compare them to the speed boost you get from upgrading the memory in your PC or Mac.
39. Size really is everything
Think carefully about how you want to balance the convenience of carrying fewer large cards with the security of travelling with a larger number of lower capacity ones. On the one hand you ll spend less time swapping 16GB cards than 2GB media, but if you lose a single 16GB card, or it corrupts, you could lose all of the shots from your trip.
Splitting them across several cards, and locking full cards in your hotel safe so you re only carrying around empty cards plus the one on your camera means you ll be taking fewer risks with your digital memories.
Splitting them across several cards, and locking full cards in your hotel safe so you re only carrying around empty cards plus the one on your camera means you ll be taking fewer risks with your digital memories.Travelling with several smaller cards than one large card means you can lock your photos in a room safe while out and about.
40. Replace your cards every couple of years
Memory cards might not have any moving parts, but that doesn t mean they don t wear out. On the contrary they each have a finite life, and every time you write to, delete from or read the card you re bringing it another step closer to the end of that life. If you don t want to risk corrupting your pictures far from home, replace heavily used cards every couple of years.