Taking good photos

Contents

Sure, you can get good results from a little digital camera with a few scene modes. But it's fairly hit and miss and if you want a particular effect there's often no way to force the camera to give it to you.  That's because all those scene modes are incredibly crude attempts to guess what might be going on and what you actually want.

The trouble is the camera hasn't a clue, for example, whether:

• the camera is hand held or on a tripod as you take a shot of a great sunset - if you've got a steady base the camera will probably ruin the shot (using sunset scene mode) by over-boosting the ISO (film speed) and making it all blotchy and grainy.  Or if it's hand held it may leave the shutter speed too slow, resulting in a blurred shot.
• for lots of shots do you want just the subject in focus or foreground and background too?  You may know but the camera doesn't.

This guide is all about how to get in control of your picture taking and assumes you are interested enough in photography to have a camera that allows you to take charge, with control of the main variables, aperture, shutter speed and film speed.

I’m just a keen amateur photographer but this is my contribution to helping people get happier with the photos they take. Most important of all is being interested, inquisitive and being at the right place and time with a camera. That's why I have two big cameras plus a little one that doesn't take such good shots, especially in low light, but is more likely to be at hand. I also have a 5MP camera on my Android phone - not much good but sometimes the only option.

Principles

You should always be observant and try things out. With digital it doesn't matter if a lot of shots are thrown away.  I’ve found that informal shots of people can often work better than posed set piece ones.

For portraits avoid being too close (that makes people look wider than they are) – use some zoom and take shots people like.

It also helps keeping the main subject off-centre. The fancy name for this is “the rule of thirds”, but basically just try to avoid taking pictures with a main subject in the centre. Cropping once the images are on the computer can help here.

Try all sorts of different lighting conditions and remember to use fill flash if your main subject is silhouetted or darker than the background. Fill flash should be used far more than it is by most people. Try to keep learning – the camera does not take pictures that look like what your eyes see, so learn to take advantage of that difference.

Always think of the purpose and likely fate of a shot. Is it a candidate for blowing up and putting in a frame? Or telling a story? If the latter, people shots often work well. Or it may be showing how the seasons change. Here are a few shots that all feature the seaside, from Cornwall to Australia, but showing very different scenes:

The great enemy of good photos is insufficient light. The better, bigger and more expensive the camera the better it will cope but you can give a lesser camera a real advantage with a steady base. This could be a wall, a tripod, mini tripod or hiking pole with a camera mount. Most ordinary digicams really struggle with sunsets if hand held.

Be careful, particularly if posting images on the internet (eg on flickr.com), that you are not going to run into problems to do with copyright: did you know that photos of sculptures are yours absolutely only if the sculpture is on permanent display? Many exhibitions of paintings are also very restrictive. Even if the ban on photos is only in the small print of the exhibition guide you could get in trouble for publishing photos you took in all innocence. Images of children and foreign military installations could also cause problems. But the lovely little girl above is our daughter, a long time ago, so that’s OK.

I take some shots that I know are never going to be worth printing, let alone framing. But they help tell a story, maybe about a holiday or social event. They’re worth keeping on the computer. Others get printed and go into albums. My very favourite shots I copy into an “Originals” folder before doing anything to them. That way if I want to blow them up to frame them, or whatever, I’ve got the full image as it came from the camera.

Software

Don't cut corners with software. Faststone Viewer is an example of an excellent and free piece of software for viewing, deleting, rotating and renaming images. But it's not a proper image editor. 

Rather than slum it with free software such as Picasa (or what came with the camera, which is usually pretty useless for editing images) why not splash out on something much better, eg Photoshop Elements. That allows you to correct badly exposed images instantly, remove skin blemishes and power lines plus a host of other features. It’s even quite easy to add yourself into a shot you took – I find that better than the cut off heads and frozen smiles you can get from timer shots. Eg I took the shot to the right then added myself in from another photo.

Going upmarket you could go for Adobe Lightroom - very fancy although it does lack some image editing functions and I don't like the way it works - you can only see the editing changes you've made in Lightroom itself unless you re-export the images.

My post processing guide covers in much more detail how to process and publish your images after you get them onto the computer.

Camera

The camera itself is pretty important. There always seems to be a trade-off between size, price and image quality so I tend to have one or more big and one small camera at a time and accept that I'm going to miss some shots because I didn't lug a big one along. As far as I can see megapixel counts are pretty much irrelevant - it seems to be sensor and lens size that mainly determines image quality. And bigger cameras also tend to have far better flashes. Another vital factor is the zoom – all my cameras start at a nice wide 28mm but go quite long too. That helps a lot with getting shots not otherwise available, eg the cart guy in Marrakech, who wasn’t keen on the idea of a photo but with a 300mm zoom I was a long way away. Do read the detailed reviews before choosing. My opinion is that there’s no such thing as a single camera good in all situations and the ones that try to be tend to be expensive.

With a camera that doesn't allow you to be in charge (eg most small digicams) do try to learn how its different modes work. Try out portrait, landscape etc modes. I tried them all on my little Ricoh, pointed at a wet garden, and was a bit shocked to find (when I checked the images in Fastone on the computer) that all of them had pretty much the same settings: 1/65 sec, F4.5, ISO 100-110 with the sole exception of sports mode, which kept to F4.5 but reset the shutter to 1/230 sec and wound the film speed up to ISO 320. That keeps things sharp at the expense of graininess. So basically I had no control over depth of field with my little camera and the little Fuji that replaced it is only slightly better.

Infinity focus is something to find out how to set - any time you take a picture though glass, eg from a plane, there is a danger the camera will ruin the shot by focussing on the glass. If there is no infinity focus lock then landscape mode may work.

My camera buying guide has much more information on choosing a camera.

Being in control

If you have a camera with semi manual modes such as aperture priority you are in for a real treat because they let you learn to get the very best result you can in different conditions. The three main variables you need to manipulate are:

• lens aperture
• shutter speed
• film speed

The smaller the lens aperture is set the higher the 'F number' will be and the more of the image will be in focus; eg at F8. But the narrower the aperture the slower the shutter speed must be or else you need to boost the film speed to compensate. A lot of professional images show a deliberately restricted depth of field (what’s in focus) due to a wide aperture, eg F2.8. This means that only items at around the same distance as whatever you focus on will be sharp; nearer and farther objects will be out of focus to a degree (more so with a big lens). This is actually very much like our eyes work anyway, so such images can look superb.  A wide aperture, letting in lots of light, also takes the strain off the shutter and film speeds. Because aperture and depth of field are so important I usually leave my big cameras on aperture priority (where you set the aperture and the shutter speed is adjusted automatically). If the shutter speed gets too low I just raise the film speed. I know when that's necessary - some stupid automatic scene mode doesn't.

The diagram shows how aperture determines depth of field – open your lens (eg F3 or so) to deliberately focus just on the main subject and close it down (eg F8) to get foreground and background in focus too. Get in control! On my Pentax SLR I've got a second hand F2 50mm non zoom lens and have found (with a big SLR sensor) that that is more than enough to get an extremely shallow depth of field.

Generally you want a shutter speed that will avoid camera shake.  The camels were lurching so much I had to set the film speed to ISO 400 and open the lens wide (F2.8) to get the necessary 1/1000 sec shutter speed.  The crucial values will vary according to how steady you are, whether you have anything to lean on, the size of camera and whether it has mechanical anti-shake. This is where the sensor or lens elements are moved to compensate for camera shake that happens while the shutter is open. I find that anything slower than 1/60 sec is pushing it hand held with a small camera. A tripod is one answer and even a hiking pole with a camera mount can help a lot. And bigger cameras are easier to hold steady, especially with anti shake as in my Pentax k-r.

Film speed is a residual. The lower the film speed, eg ISO 100, the better the image quality. As you raise the ISO value, eg to stop the shutter speed falling too low, the image starts to lose quality and become grainy. Depending on the camera and the quality/size of its sensor this can start happening by ISO 400. At ISO 800 and above there's often a lot of speckling, eg dark areas with speckles of green and purple on what should be a plain colour. But sometimes a high ISO is necessary to get any sort of shot in low light out of flash range. And my Pentax k-r is still very crisp at ISO 1600 or even 3200. It only goes a bit speckly at the extreme ISO settings of 6400 and 12800.

Here’s a table of equivalent values, looking at a single (rather gloomy) view on a tripod with my big Fuji:

Now you've waded through that heavy table of equivalents it's time to go out and take lots of shots in modes such as aperture or shutter priority.

Try varying film speed as well as aperture and shutter speed.  When you unload the images look at them carefully to see what the differences are.  Years of fun ahead!

Taking good videos

Not something I've done much of (I use my cameras for occasional video clips) but here are some words of wisdom from my brother:

Think carefully about what works professionally, on TV and in films. Above all:

• What is your story?
• Will it be interesting to the intended audience?
• Can it be made shorter without losing essentials?

Use a tripod for most scenes (even if the camcorder has image stabilisation). Avoid extravagant panning and zooming. Probably what works best is a succession of short scenes, well lit and each taken from a fixed position. When stitching them together avoid fancy transition effects and be ruthless at discarding less good scenes.

By all means add background music but don’t let it dominate and make sure it’s not breaching copyright.