Have some fun with Digital Photography
Author: DanFeildman Total views: 18 Word Count: 753
Photography is not just about pointing and pressing a button; it's a decision-making process. One of the best reasons for working photography into your activities and projects is that it helps people better understand the media images they're bombarded with every day. Photography is also just plain fun, and it's a wonderful foundation for community-based projects. If you introduce photography properly, it helps you look much more carefully at the world around you.
It is quite easy to touch the optics of a camera and leave fingerprints. The result is that your pictures do not turn out clear in certain areas. Or, the autofocus sensors (if your camera has them) can be fooled by the smudge you leave on them, and deliver blurred pictures. Regularly clean your optics with an appropriate cloth and solution (both obtained at any respectable camera store). Do not use tissue paper, your finger, spit or household cleaning solutions.
Understanding how your camera focuses will help you get better pictures. Just about all digital cameras these days have autofocus with two-step shutter release. In dark lighting, you will notice that when you press the button halfway down, a red light appears for a moment, but not in areas that are lighter. Then, when you press the button down fully, there is a flash. When you hold down the button halfway, that focuses the image, and when you depress it fully, the camera takes the focused image. If you want the subject of your photograph not to be in the center but still focused, first center them in the middle of the picture and focus the frame by pressing down halfway. Without removing your finger, reframe the picture with your subject in the right position, and take the picture. Your subject will still be focused.
One aspect of taking a pleasing photograph is depth of field. When you look at a picture, you will notice that all the area surrounding the focused subject is also focused. This area is called depth of field. In order to change the way the depth of field in a picture is seen, focused, and lit, you must change the width of your lens. The wider the lens is, the smaller the depth of field will be. To decrease the depth of field you can also move closer to your subject. To increase it, you can use a smaller lens or move further away from your subject.
A great technique that helps photographers create eye-catching pictures is the rule of thirds. This is a composition technique, create a pleasing balance between the different obects in a photograph. In order to use the rule, divide your screen into six different parts: three horizontal sections, and three vertical. The focal points, where the eye is attracted when it first looks at a picture, are where the lines intersect. Placing the subjects of your pictures at or near the focal points can help create a balanced and attractive picture.
Landscapes are the opposite end of portraits in the sense that you mostly want all the picture to be in focus. To achieve this effect, use as small a f/stop as your camera allows, say f/16. The smaller the f/stop, the greater the depth of field achieved, and objects near and far will be in focus (again, with consumer digital cameras and the short focal lengths of their lenses, good depth of field is achieved even with 'large' f/stop). You could use the Law of Thirds to capture 1/3 land and 2/3 sky, or the other way round, 2/3 land and 1/3 sky. You would surely want to use a wide-angle lens setting. Adding a foreground object might help achieve a sense of three dimensionality. If water is involved, a slow shutter speed will give the impression of flowing water. If the sea is involved, a polarizing filter will cut glare and give the 'transparent' water effect.
A tripod is a good investment in photography, especially if you want to take panoramic pictures. You'll have to set your tripod in a place where you can swivel the camera smoothly from left to right, and not up and down. You will have to figure out where you want your pictures to overlap, so that you don't have huge gaps in your resulting picture. Once you figure that out, you can swivel your camera in one direction, clockwise or counterclockwise, to take the pictures you want. Once you're done, all you have to do is put them together with a simple graphics program or photo-editing software.
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