Sunday, March 18, 2012

Fantastic Photography Advice To Improve Your Picture Taking!

By Victoria Greengrass


Whether you take one picture every few years or take dozens a day, you may be wondering how you can make your pictures more impressive. Here, we'll give you a handful of suggestions to make your pictures stand out more, be more clear and capture exactly what you're seeing and want to capture on film.

Meeting up and joining with fellow photographers is a great way to hone your craft. Think about it: Everyone meets up in a vocation like this, from cyclists to soccer players. It's only natural that photographers group together. Holding friendly little competitions and exploring the world together can improve your skills.

Use the "rule of thirds" when composing your photographs to give them more intrigue and eye appeal. When you're taking a picture, imagine the frame divided into a tic-tac-toe shape, with three vertical lines intersecting three horizontal lines. Place your subject where the lines cross, so that it ends up being slightly off center. You'll notice your pictures gain a feeling of tension and excitement.

A great photography trick that can help you out is to aim lighting away from your subject. You don't always have to aim lights right at your subject. You can aim the light away to create a much more subtle and diffused light. Try this next time you shoot.

Use Photoshop to whiten your subject's teeth. Upload your images to your software program, and manually brush brightness onto the teeth. It is going to give the subject a natural looking white smile. Simple changes like this are going to go a long way in making the subject look great.

It's time for your tripod. Take it out of the closet and find the cable release. Still have those neutral density filters? Get them too. You're going for a night shoot at the school fair. You have arrived. See the pretty colored lighting at the booths and rides? You will photograph the Ferris wheel, exposing not for the overall scene but for the lights. Place the camera on the tripod and attach the cable release. Set the ISO low, at 100 or if possible, lower. Use a shutter speed of maybe fifteen seconds. Set the aperture at f/16 or smaller if your camera can do it this will make pinpoint lights look like stars. Take some test exposures and make adjustments, and use your neutral density filters if necessary. You have a finished product! Thanks to the tripod, everything is sharp except for the ghostly images of fair goers moving about, and the turning Ferris wheel appears as a circular streak of gorgeous colors. The lights at the booths shine like stars.

If you would like to explore the forgotten art of film photography, but worry about the costs associated with development, consider setting up your own little dark room in the basement. You can even set up a portable dark room in a washroom. Since most photographers have switched to digital, you can often find inexpensive dark room equipment at thrift stores and on internet sites.

With these suggestions in hand, start looking at your most recent photographs and see if these tips would have made the pictures even better. If you start noticing that there is a suggestion or two that would greatly improve a few of the photographs you've already taken, try finding a way to incorporate that suggestion into every photograph you take from now on.




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