Digital Photography - Get the Best From Your Shot

Article by Michael Wong

When it comes to photography, everyone wishes to get the perfect shot for their picture. However, things often go beyond what you want. Luckily with the presence of digital photography, you have more control over your picture. At least now you can look at your picture immediately on the LCD screen to see whether you are satisfied with your shot.

Indoor and Outdoor

Imagine that you are taking picture of a birthday girl blowing the candle. Often the candles are your only light source. When this happens, you will want to increase the ISO setting and slow down the shutter speed (if you are using a compact digital camera, this will be done automatically) of your camera so that more light can be pass into the camera.

However, when you slow down the shutter speed, your camera is more sensitive to movement and there will be high chances that your pictures will appear 'shaken'. To avoid that, you can either turn on the flash or mount your camera on a tripod. And if your camera comes with the anti-handshake feature, remember to turn that on when you are shooting under low light condition.

When you are taking picture outdoor on a bright sunny day, you can keep the setting as normal and your picture will still look good. The only thing you need to remember is to never shoot your picture with the sun in front of you as that will make your subject looks dark.

Glare

Beside that, your picture will be very glaring when you put the sun in front of your camera. It is like looking into a big spotlight.

Sometimes you can also see this glaring problem when your subject reflects off the flash. Imagine that you flashed on a recently polished silver spoon. The flash will bounce back from the silver surface creating glare in your picture. What you can do is to either disperse your flash or step further from your subject and zoom in to it.

Framing

Framing is how you make the composition for your shot. When you are framing your picture, work your way without chopping any part of your subject. When you see that you can't fit your subject into the frame, just take a few steps back or simply use a wide angle lens.

And when you are shooting with background that you can't exclude, you can remove it later with software for photo editing or you can create shallow depth of field and blurred the background.

Published 7th Apr 2009

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