Natalie’s Camera Tips
1. Camera Tip Number One
October 2009.
Each month we will provide a camera tip to help you photograph better. Although we would love to be there for every special family event, sometimes things happen when we are not. Since Photography is how most people document their family history, we want you to have great pictures, that tell your family’s story. We hope you will find these tips helpful.
Of course, we suggest that you begin by reading your camera manual. This is a step many people overlook and skip. After all it is a Point and Shoot. Do you really need more instruction than that? Well, yes. Your manual tells you what the buttons do and gives you a wealth of information about basic photography. Don’t get scared off by “ISO” and “white balance.” In time you’ll have a good understanding of these basics.
So here we go with tip number one…..
Just say no!
Just say “no” to on-camera flash. Your eye needs shadows to make out shapes. When the light is coming from the same position as the lens, there are no shadows to “model” faces. Light from a point source like the on-camera flash falls off as the square of the distance from the source. That means things close to the camera will be washed-out, the subject on which you focused will be properly exposed, and the background will be nearly black.
Virtually all point and shoot cameras allow you to control the on-camera flash. What you want to do most of the time is press the tiny lightning bolt button until the “no flash” symbol is displayed. The “no flash” symbol is usually a lightning bolt with a circle around it and line through it. Now the camera will never strobe the flash and will leave the shutter open long enough to capture enough ambient light to make an exposure.
A good point and shoot camera will have a longest shutter speed of at least 1 second. You can probably only hold the camera steady for 1/30th of a second. Your subjects may not hold still for a full second either. So you must start looking for ways to keep the camera still and to complete the exposure in less time. You can:
- look for some light. Move your subjects underneath whatever light sources are handy and see how they look with your eyes.
- set a higher ISO sensitivity, e.g., ISO 400 or ISO 800
- steady the camera against a tree/rock/chair/whatever as you press the shutter release
- leave the camera on a tree/rock/chair/whatever and use the self-timer so that the jostling of pressing the shutter release isn’t reflected on film.
- use a little plastic tripod, monopod, or some other purpose-built camera support
Just say yes
Just say “yes” to on-camera flash. The on-camera flash on a compact digital camera is useful. It just isn’t useful for what you’d think. As noted above, it is not useful for lighting up a dark room. However, it is useful outdoors when you have both shaded and sunlit objects in the same scene. A JPEG photo or a print cannot handle the same range of contrast as your eyes. A picture that is correctly exposed for the sunlight object will render the shaded portrait subject as solid black. A picture that is correctly exposed for the shaded portrait subject will render the sunlit background object as solid white.
Pressing the little buttons on a P&S camera until a single solid lightning bolt appears in the LCD display will keep the flash on at all times. Note that a side-effect of the “flash on” mode is that you also get the same long shutter speeds for capturing ambient light that you would with “flash off” mode. The standard illustrative picture for this has an illuminated building at night as the background with a group of people in the foreground who’ve been correctly exposed by the flash.
Experiment with your now new thinking about flash and it’s uses and let us know what you think.
A new tip will be up in Mid November. Thank you.
