Top 7 Digital Photo Tips from Frisco Style Magazine

A little while back the editors at Frisco Style magazine asked me to share my Top Digital Photo Tips, and the attached scan shows the article that ran in the magazine.

This article was written for absolutely newbies, so if you don’t have a lot of photography experience, this one is for you! These are the 7 most important tips to drastically improve the quality of your images. For ease of use, the following is the text from the article.

Digital Photo Tips

By John Pozadzides, Daniel Guajardo & Carl Chick
Digital photography has certainly arrived when even devices like phones and PDAs have built in photo and video capabilities. So, how do you get the best possible images? Well, the local experts from the Visual Arts Guild of Frisco have the following suggestions.

Camera Tips

• When choosing a camera, buy the best your budget will allow. You’ll probably only do this every few years and, as a general rule, more costly components take sharper, brighter photos.
• Use a tripod to take sharp photos. Cameras work by opening the shutter for a certain amount of time to capture an image. Movement creates blur, so a tripod will make any photo sharper. The darker the shot, the greater the effectiveness of a tripod.
• Along with using a tripod, learn to use your camera’s self timer or a remote to close the shutter. Pressing the shutter manually may shake the camera, blurring your image.

Photo Tips

• Resist the temptation to center your subject in every shot. Imagine your frame is divided into three equal sections and try aligning your subject on one of the two dividing lines on either side of the center.
• Shots taken from the traditional standing position are boring. Try shooting the same scene from an elevated or prone position to let people see an angle they don’t normally encounter.

Computer Tips

• One of the greatest benefits of digital photography is post shot editing. Many excellent programs will dramatically improve photos by enhancing lighting, colors and other effects. One of the easiest to use is Picasa, which also happens to be free.
• Always set your camera to take the highest resolution images possible, and then resize them in the computer for the intended purpose. Images for the web rarely need to be larger than 1024×768, but for printing its best to provide full resolution images. A great free program for resizing and watermarking images in Windows is FastStone Photo Resizer.