Digital Photography for Beginners

Before you start

• Read the manual and take the time to carefully study your camera before you take it for a trip for the first time. When the sun sets over the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower, it will be too late to find out about night exposure settings.
• Consider your camera a "toy". There are absolutely no materials it consumes. Play and experiment with it. It doesn't matter if you take 10 or 100 photos. To take a good picture, you need to take many pictures, keep one and discard all the rest. To take many good pictures, you need to take lots and lots of pictures, keep some and discard most of them. (Besides, that's exactly what pro's do anyway.)
• Learn the basics in photography and its scientific background rules. Get familiar with terms like exposure, light temperature, focal length etc. It will help you understanding your mistakes and correcting them. Most camera manuals explain these things anyway. If you like, you can consult any (analog) photography site or book for this matter.

• Buy enough battery sets so you will always have one fully charged spare set with you. Running out of power in the wrong moment will make you miss opportunities that might never come back.
• Get yourself a useful camera bag. It protects the camera and is more comfortable if you plan to carry accessory items with you.
• A tripod is strongly recommended. You WILL need it not only for night shots, but also for high quality panorama pictures, self timer controlled group photos of everyone including yourself, indoor shots where flash is not allowed or not recommended and more. You don't need the heavy, clumsy and expensive ones, since most modern cameras are very light. A small pocket tripod does the job and it's small enough to fit into your bag so you will never forget it at home.
• Many big tripods have water-levels built in. You guessed it, the small ones usually don't. So get a tiny water-level expecially made for photographers. It's usually impossible to adjust the camera correctly without this little helper when taking a night shot in complete darkness.

• If you take many pictures over a longer time period, don't shut down the camera between pictures. Just close the lens with the protective cap and wait for the camera to switch to sleep mode. Booting the computer and extracting the zoom lens takes precious time and also drains the batteries.
• Don't leave the camera in Auto-Mode. The flash will be powering up all the time, even in full sunlight. This drains the batteries.
• If possible, use the big screen only if really necessary. It is the major power comsumption in any camera.

• General rule: Try to take the perfect picture. Don't rely on digital enhancements afterwards. If you got a bad picture, you won't make it a lot better. Blurred or heavily over/underexposed pictures can never be fixed, because you cannot create data that didn't exist in the first place.
• Use the highest resolution possible. If you bought a 3 megapixel camera and you use only 2, you just wasted a lot of money. Get more memory cards if needed. It's worth it.
• Test the white balance of your camera. Some cameras are not perfectly calibrated when using auto mode. If in doubt do a manual white balance and be on the safe side. Especially at night or when the scene is illuminated by an anusual light source, you should do a manual white balance.
• For landscape pictures, hard sharpness is recommended. For portraits it's the opposite. Many cameras have presets for these conditions which also take aperture settings into account.
• Don't use the digital zoom. In my opinion it's a completely useless feature, invented for the sole purpose of tricking the buyer ("15x zoom lens!"). Any painting software can do a better pixel magnification job.

• Try to keep in mind the "Golden Ratio". Horizontal and vertical lines should divide the picture in appx. one third / two thirds. Important objects should be placed in one of the four crossing points. Following this classic design rule, you will always create pictures with a peaceful aesthetic impression. Some people might call this boring and "un-artistic" -- but keep in mind that this rule has been followed by artists for about 3000 years...
• Horizontals like building's roofs must be strictly horizontal. Especially the horizon itself MUST be straight. Don't let the water "drip" from the edges of your picture. Be careful about this trap: A picture with a heavy tilt is very hard to fix afterwards because after rotating it you will have to fill in sky and land texture by copying. Otherwise you will lose pixels.
• Avoid big empty areas. A picture with two thirds of plain blue sky is usually boring and out of proportion.
• Sometimes keeping a perfect horizon is hard to accomplish, especially if you have to rely on the small LCD screen. When using a tripod, always check its position with a water-level. Take your time for this. Don't let two seconds of saved time ruin your photo.

• You can attract the viewer's attention to a certain object by focusing on it and blurring the background. For portraits this is a general rule. You create this effect by setting a low aperture number or zooming into the object. In macro mode the background is blurred by default.
• When in doubt of the correct exposure time or any other setting, take several pictures by altering the settings. This is called bracketing. Some cameras can do to automatically. You don't have any material to waste. Just delete the pictures you don't like.
• Try to avoid the flash in dark conditions as much as possible. If there is no moving object, use a tripod and take the picture without flash. It creates a much more realistic and vivid atmosphere and shows the actual light conditions of the scene, i.e. colorful lights in nightclubs. the flash would destroy the impression. In larger rooms like cathedrals you must not flash. The flash reaches only a few meters and will show almost all of the room in complete darkness.
• If your model is in the shade (e.g. when you take a picture against the sun), fire the flash. You will have to force the camera to do it. If you get weird looks for using the flash in bright sunlight, don't bother. By using the fill-in flash your model's face (or whatever subject) will be correctly exposed, even against the sun.
• Ususally the camera auto-focusses on the middle of the screen. If you want to focus on an off-centered object, you have to center the object, focus on it and press the shutter release halfway to save the setting, and then move the camera to its final position to take the picture by pressing the shutter release fully.
• To capture moving objects like birds in the perfect moment, use the serial picture feature. After choosing the setting in the menu, hold down the shutter release button to take about 8-15 pictures quickly in a row. When the camera's RAM is full, it will stop to save all of them.

• You will need a tripod for all night pictures. If you forgot it, you will have to find a place to rest the camera and keep it steady.
• Use a water-level to adjust the camera horizontally. In complete darkness it's too tricky without it.
• Experiment with the exposure/aperture settings of your camera to find the easiest way to take night shots. Some cameras have specific program settings for this. I prefer to do it manually.
• If you want to take a picture of a foreground object and a "night" background together (e.g. a person in front of a lighted building), you need to use the slow funtion. The camera will take a long exposure to capture the background and then fire the flash to light the foreground (or the opposite). If you just flash normally, the person will be standing illuminated in front of a black background.
• Instruct the person(s) not to move at all until the long exposure is finished. Listen for the signal to indicate that the picture has been saved. Then you can move!
• Moving objects which do not emit light are invisible in long exposures (thus the transparent head). If the moving object is a light source itself, it will be blurred. This can be a desired effect, for example car lights which draw neon like stripes. Illuminated water surfaces will look like ice.
• Long exposure collects more light than the human eye can see. You might get interesting surrealistic effects.
• If you want to avoid tinted light like orange street illumination, you have to use manual white balance.
• Be careful not to shake the camera while the shot is being taken. If you don't have a remote control, use the self-timer control.

• Turn the camera 90° to use the classical portrait format (if you like).
• Use soft sharpness so wrinkles and skin imperfections will be less visible.
• Blur the background by opening the aperture (if your camera has a portrait preset, it provides both of these functions.)
• The dominant eye is usually placed at the vertical center line (this is not a law but a suggestion).
• It doesn't matter if you take a portrait of a person or for example a cat: The rules are the same.
• Go back a few steps and zoom to the subject instead of holding your camera into their face. If you're too close, the extreme focal length will create a big nose and a distorted face. Besides, the zoom solves the blurred background issue.
• No grinning or unnatural smiling. This is just plain stupid, sorry. :)
• Use powder if the person sweats. Shiny skin looks bad. White highlights on noses and foreheads are also hard to fix afterwards, because faces are quite sensitive subjects. You make them look unnatural quite quickly.
• Be careful with the flash. It can create ugly shadows behind the subject or reflect in eye glasses. If it's a built in flash, they subject's eyes might turn out red.
• If the subject is a female you can retouch the picture later on the computer to create a make up effect just like on magazine covers. You can download special filter software for instant retouching. Don't temper with male faces. They will look like drag queens.

• Almost all of the filter kinds used in analog photography are obsolete when using a digital camera. Any added color shade, color temperature, or special effects like stars or lens flares can be added later at home at the computer. Many photo editing softwares even produce better results than analog filters. There is only a small range of filter effects which cannot be simulated by editing.
• One of them is the effect of a polarisation filter. It kills reflections and enhances the photo's colors. The blue skies on post cards are the result of polarizer photography. The filter in the example picture cancels the water's reflections. The haze caused by looking into the sun makes the colors look weak and "washed out". A polarizer prevents this effectively. The effect can not be simulated by software.
• There is another part of a digital photo which cannot be changed once the pictures was created: exposure time. Overexposed does not mean "too bright - let's make it darker" and underexposed does not mean "too dark - let's make it brighter". You cannot fix these flaws afterwards without severe loss in picture quality, because the software cannot create data which was destroyed by too much light or has never been created at the first place because there was no time to collect enough light. Especially the sky usually turns out overexposed, or, if you want to catch interesting cloud formations for example, the landscape turns out black. To avoid this, you will need a gradiant filter. (The right and the left photo were taken without the filter, the one in the middle with the gray grad.)
• Neutral gray filters help you to encrease exposure time. You can make moving objects actually look moving, like cars for example. The classical situation for this filter is flowing water, like rivers or waterfalls. If the lens of your camera is small enough, you can save the money and use your sunglasses. Don't forget a manual white balance :-D

Example photos - before after: Using basic accessories to enhance your photos

• Neutral density gray filter
• Gray grad filter
• Polarizer
• Wide angle converter
• Bounced flash

• Always ask for the lens manufacturer. Most digital cameras are advertised by their digital features such as megapixels only. But a no-name lens 5 megapixel camera takes worse pictures than a brand named 2 megapixel one.
• Size matters. A small camera is more handy. But keep in mind that a smaller lens always catches less light than a bigger one. So if you want a small camera, make sure that its lens is not just a tiny hole.
• Zooming is great. You can catch distant objects easily and create more interesting photos. But be careful: "digital zoom" sounds promising and modern, but in fact it's a plain lie. "Digital zoom" means increasing the number of pixels while storing the same amount of data. It's like resizing a photo in a paint software. The real zoom number is the one mentioned on the lens itself!
• What will you do with your camera? Snap shots on vacations or semi-professional photos? For snap shots you need a handy auto-mode because you won't want to be bothered with hundreds of settings. If you want to control the result though, make sure it is possible to disable all auto-settings.

• Avoid proprietary parts:
  • Proprietary memory media (flash, hard drive, minidisc) limit you to buy at one single manufacturer. It`s obvious that such parts will be higher in price and much harder to find when you need them (when you run out of memory on a trip).
  • Proprietary batteries limit the usage of your device. If you run out of battery, you can only buy one single kind. This is very bad for a portable device you usually take on trips.
  • Proprietary file transfer software is just a superfluous pain. Any USB device can be built as a plug and play removable disk, so you will be able to use your camera at any computer, be it linux or windows, without the need to install drivers and software
• Avoid built-in parts:
  • A built-in battery is a no-no in a camera, even though it might be advertised as a "high capacity li-ion or li-polymer type". It doesn't matter how long the battery lasts - there is always a risk that you might end up with no power left in your device while traveling. You won't be able to just hop into a gas station and buy a 4-pack of AA alkalines. You won`t take photos at all!!
  • Built-in memory is rarely seen in cameras. In mp3 players it's common though. It is the other no-no for a portable device. It limits the usage drastically, since you cannot add more memory and you are stuck with the built-in USB interface.
  
  This is a non-commercial site. I will not give you any tips on which brand of camera to buy. General hint: Stick to known camera and lens manufacturers.
  
  

  Dynamic Range Increase (DRI) Tutorial

  Now for Paint Shop Pro (PSP)! Enhance your night shots in only a few minutes!
  
  
  

  Links

  • Panorama Factory - Free software for panoramas pictures
  • Mediachance - Free stand-alone filters
  • Paint Shop Pro - The image editor I use
  • Exifer - Free software to edit exif headers (photo data stored in jpeg files)
  • An eye-placement principle in 500 years of portraits