Photography
Digital cameras are pretty good these days. It's remarkable the results you can get with them. You can snap a picture, load it into your computer, attach it to an email, and: "presto chango, abracadabra... done!".
However there are good photos and bad photos. Good photos take much less time to work on and give a superior result on completion.
Or you can use royalty free online digital stock. For example http://istockphoto.com where you will find images for just US$1 which you can use on your website forever more without further charge.
But if you do decide you want to take your own pictures for your website, here are 10 basic and fun tips for your digital camera that will help you get nicer images.
- Clean your camera's lense and other bits of glass!!! You might be amazed. Remember how clean and crisp your photos were when you first got your camera? A clean will help to restore that. Special lense cleaner from a photography shop and roll-your-own cigarette paper works a treat. Don't clean anything inside the camera, though, naturally unless you know what you're doing.
- Take lots of photos! Stand in different places, crouch down, get up on a chair, get a profile shot - have fun. Even if you're not a professional, you'll increase your odds of getting a great shot by taking a lot of different shots.
- Try not to delete too many photos. Your LCD preview will only give you an idea of the photo you have taken. For example, the photo you might delete because it doesn't look right might be able to be cropped (bits cut off it) for an excellent picture.
- Don't be afraid of the delete key. This might immediately seem contradictory to point 2, but if a photo is awful - too dark, too bright, you can't see the subject etc - then delete it in favour of a nicer photo, by all means.
- Avoid your camera's flash! Generally built-in flashes have a tendency to make everything harsh, shiny and blown out. You lose shadow detail and even with red-eye reduction, red-eye still creeps in. If your camera insists on using it's flash, then try:
- waiting for another time or day when the light is bright/strong enough without it
- try bouncing light off a bright white surface. To do this, grab a white polystyrene box or piece of card and bounce the light from a window or other source of it toward your subject.
- set your camera to not use it's flash. In low light your camera will need to decrease the shutter speed, so you will need a tripod or beanbag to rest the camera on to avoid a blurry picture because the camera is shaking. Also, the lower the light the more noise the end picture will have. Ideally try to avoid resorting to low-light photos
- Try for even lighting. Your camera's dynamic range (the ability of the camera to get detail in both brightly lit areas and shadows at the same time) is nowhere near as good as your eye. So taking a picture of a subject in the shade against a bright blue sunny sky, for example, won't work very well. The sky will be "blown out" or your subject will be too dark or everything will be averaged out and nothing will come through particularly.
- Avoid flourescent lights. Generally cameras can pick up what sort of light you're taking a picture in and compensate, but the cold blue light of a flourescent light tends to make things look dull and lifeless.
- Find your camera's "sweet spots". Every camera has ideal conditions where it will take the nicest photos. Try to vary how close you are to your subject, for example, as well as using the zoom. Compare a few photos taken inside with an incandescent light bulb to nipping outside in the shade to a photo with the sun shining on the subject. What works best?
- Watch for shadows. Both your own and your subject. I've seen many people stood up against the wall and then photographed in full flash and the results are usually truly awful.
- If you're taking photos of people:
- avoid photo faces. Have an accomplice distract them. Tell funny jokes. Tell them their pants are on fire. Ask them to pretend they're looking at something over there that they really like &/or that they're concentrating on. Anything but the photo face...
- concentrate on getting their eyes in sharp focus. If you get the eyes in focus the rest of the photo nearly doesn't matter.