Terry O'Donnell Photography Services | Absolute Basics Photo Guide |

The Way You Stand
May sound odd but the way you stand and hold the camera is actually quite important. Camera shake spoils millions of photos. Snatching photos spoils millions more. To help reduce camera shake, when you take a photo try to keep your elbows as tight to your body as possible instead of pointing out sideways like chicken wings and if you keep your feet slightly apart to retain balance and cut down on body sway it will go some way to reduce camera shake. Snatching a photo is when, in your haste to capture an image, you rush the shot. By that I mean release the shutter the moment the camera is to your eye or take it away from your eye too quickly, just as the shutter is finishing it's job. To stop yourself snatching photos just say 'one' to yourself mentally when you get the camera to your eye before you release the shutter. The same once you've taken the shot. It reads long-winded but it is just a milli-second in reality. Give it a try. Experiment.

Get Closer
The closer you get to your subject the better it will look is a general rule of thumb. Filling the frame with your subject can make a terrific difference to your photographs.
If you can’t get closer, use the Optical or, as a last resort, the Digital Zoom of your camera to get a close up shot. Optical zoom is much more preferable and you can read more a little further on as to why.
When taking portrait photos, the majority of people place the subject's full body or head and arms in the shot. If the background or surroundings are of no particular relevance, try to fill the frame with your subject's face only, especially if they are smiling or are in a thoughtful mood.
With less ‘clutter’ filling the photograph, there are fewer distractions to draw the eye away from the main subject of your photo.
If you’ve got existing photos, as an experiment for your-self, try to crop everything out except the face using photo editing software and see the difference it can make. Experiment.

When looking through the viewfinder for close shots, don’t just look at your subject, look all around the viewing area for things creeping in at the edges or shadows that can spoil the photo and if you are using a compact or 'point & shoot' camera, be careful of parallax. Due to the viewfinder not being in the same position as the camera's lens, centring the subject in the viewfinder may not result in it being centred for the lens, this will result in an off-centre final picture, not that this can be a bad thing. The vast majority of digital cameras come with an LCD screen. You can eliminate the postioning problem by using the LCD screen which shows you what the lens sees rather than what the viewfinder see's. Although in particularly sunny conditions the LCD screens tend to be very difficult to see so you may need something, a piece of card for example, just to shield it enough to see it. Experiment. See Fig 1 and Fig 2 below.

Zooming
Digital cameras tend to be sold with both optical zoom and digital zoom capability.
Optical zoom uses the physical optics or lens of the camera to bring the subject closer.
Digital zoom is not really 'zoom' at all but an in camera software that takes part of the image and enlarges it. A lot of the image quality is lost because of the enlargement process, in fact any processing of digital images erodes pixels and subsequently erodes image quality so try to keep processing to a minimum at all times. Photos that have been taken with digital zoom won't look as good as those with an optical zoom facility as it has already had some processing erosion then, when worked on in your computer, the processing deterioration is far greater and more noticable.
If you feel you need to ‘zoom’ digitally, use thebphoto editing software on your computer. It is better to crop and enlarge using the photo software as you have greater control and can decide precisely which part you want to enlarge and how much to enlarge it by.
Do try to use only the optical zoom when taking photographs and if you need or want to zoom in more use your editing software to select the part to keep. Make sure your camera can warn you when it's moving to digital zoom from optical zoom or, maybe you can use your camera settings to disable digital zoom completely.
Picture clarity is important; the more clarity you have in your image, the larger the printed size can be without the image appearing blurry or hazy. I'll cover more on printing and dpi in other pages.