Digital Photography Composition 101

Darren writes "With the 'Rise of the Digital Camera' I suspect we will also see the 'Rise of the Dodgy Digital Photo'. As digital cameras get in the hands of more and more snap happy photographers there will be more and more average images cluttering the PC's of the world. Already there must be millions of self portraits taken at arms length (complete with double chins), countless pictures of Aunt Mildred (cut off at the knees) and just as many out of focus shots of everyday objects in the living rooms of new digital camera owners too lazy to move from the couch. Its time to learn how to take good digital images before its too late! Digital Photography Composition Tips aims to teach the world a few basic guidelines for improving digital photographer's skills everywhere."

Comments

On a related topic..

[iantri]

Can anyone reccomend a good book on digital photography?

Most of the books I have found assume you are already a film photographer and only cover the difference between film and digital; the books about film photography are not always entirely relevant to digital photography. The books about digital photography seem to assume you can't even take an autofocused picture with flash without help -- that's about as far as they seem to cover.

I'm looking for something that explains what all the complicated settings on my digital camera (regarding white balance, metering, aperature, and so on) mean and do.

Any suggestions?

Re:but i'm lazy....

[Didion Sprague]

There's also the Holga -- sorta like an analog version of the camera phone. All plastic camera, a single aperture, uses 120 film. It's low-tech, but sometimes low-tech is good -- especially because it forces you to concentrate on the composition as opposed to all the bells and whistles.

Some cool sites:

www.toycamera.com
http://www.digitalsucks.com
http://www.eyecaramba.com
http://www.metaincognita.com (Disclaimer: this is some of my own stuff)

Beware, though: the Holga is controversial. People don't like it because the photos tend to look similar. I'll agree with that. They're similar -- but sometimes they're pretty interesting.

some personal tips

[Ubergrendle]

I'm not a professional nor even a good amateur photographer. However, using some common sense I've found that I can consistently come up with some excellent shots that are comparable to my hard core photography-obsessed friends.

#1. Its digital. Take a ton of shots. Take shots you don't think will turn out; take lots of the obvious shots. Shoot your camera with reckless abandon. It costs you ~nothing~. This technique was validated by a professional photographer friend later on...he claimed that at professional shoots you sometimes have a ratio of 10:1 or 100:1 of good vs bad shots, even with an optimum setup and years of experience on his side.

#2. Know the limitations of your camera. If you don't have an big zoom lense, don't expect long distance shots to turn out. Digital zoom is pretty useless. Most digital cameras have a good short-to-middle distance focal length. Anything beyond that and you're pushing beyond your camera's limits.

#3. Next best investment you can make to getting a good camera = tripod. Extend the exposures to get more clear pictures in low-light conditions, or dark coloured subject matter. Lots of shots I took at the time looked good in the LCD screen, but later turned out to be slightly blurred.

#4. Avoid use of the flash. Its a 'brute force' attempt to get good lighting. Work with your ISO setting and exposure levels first. (remember your tripod!). If you don't know about ISOs or exposure, who cares, just take the same pic 3-4 times with different levels...you learn.

5. Be brutal about your pics. Take 200, delete 190. Don't be the guy with the unending home movies... only keep and show the best of your best pics. You'll also get a good rep for taking good photos this way.

6. Learn the basic filters in Photoshop and touch up your digital pics if necessary. I prefer Photoshop sepia and B&W to the filters that come with the camera.

For hard core photographers this may all seem obvious, but for us beginners I found these 5 or 6 tips are what really made the difference for my pics. And they're easy to execute.

Tip #10: Don't use a digital camera.

[BlueStraggler]

A good quality Digital SLR costs many thousands of dollars, once you buy a decent selection of lenses. A similar film SLR, complete with a selection of quality lenses, can be picked up for as little as a hundred bucks on the used market from some older techno-geek who has gone digital. Add a scanner with a negative carrier, and you can digitize anything you shoot at any resolution that suits you. And, don't forget: never order prints when you get your film processed - request developing only. It's only a couple bucks a roll.

It takes longer than pure digital, it's more complicated, it requires detailed technical knowledge, there is exotic machinery that must be mastered, every tip in this article still works, and you end up with amazing digital images with the warmth and tone of film, much to the amazement and envy of professional photographers everywhere. What's not to like?

It is an I/O bottleneck, not a firmware problem.

[Jim McCoy]

Slow burst speed is not a problem with the firmware or the lens/focus hardware, it is a simple I/O problem. Do the math here. If your digital camera could take 5 fast shots of 4 megapixels each, where would it put the data? It can't get it through that slow CF or SD interface that fast, so it has to buffer it somewhere. What the expensive cameras have that the cheap ones lack is RAM for the buffer so that it can store the shots while waiting to push them off to the storage device.