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Tips and Tricks

Photography Tips for Beginners With Point and Shoot Camera

by Victor Augusteo on May 7, 2009

So you just bought your first digital camera. You started taking photos of friends and family. Full of excitement, you printed out the photos and showed them to your loved ones. Great. Everybody likes the photos, but you wonder, can you get better picture with your simple point and shoot cameras?

When taking pictures with a point and shoot camera, you can be very limited with your creativity and flexibility. That is kind of the point anyway. However, you can still take great shots as long as you follow the tried and true compositional techniques for visual images.

In my previous post about basic photography in 15 minutes, I mentioned about the exposure versus composition. With point and shoot camera, you are very limited with your exposure setting, indeed. But you can always get creative with your composition.

Compositional techniques are not only used for photography, they are used for videotaping, painting, and any other visual media. If you can master composition in photography, you can easily take any other field that is similar. A point and shoot camera is what? A visual capture device and although it does not have the bells and whistles of SLR cameras, it still is very powerful.

Many people assume that because it’s a point and shoot camera they won’t take good pictures. People use this as a crutch and blame the poor images as the result of bad quality cameras.

I say they are wrong! Point and shoot camera can still make very good photos. Heck, you can get really good picture even with pinhole cameras! Check out this “Oatmeal Pinhole Camera Tutorial”

Apart from my previous tutorial, here is a very useful compositional tip that can help you immensely.

Keep it simple stupid (KISS) always works. Trying on creating simple compositions means isolating the subject, reducing the background clutter, and making the subject of interest very easily viewable. The viewer should instantly be able to know what he or she is to look at.

Nemo surprised! Fill the frame

You can achieve simpler photos by:

Moving in closer

Fill the frame friday - Telephone!

Using the depth of field to blur the background

Give Me A Bokeh!

Focusing on, for example, one flower instead of five

Yellow, Green and Bokeh !

Leaving unnecessary information out of the frames of the border.

Krystal Vee

You can take great photos whether you use a point and shoot camera or a digital SLR. The photo is not made by the equipment but by the eye of the photographer.

On side note, you can check out Learn Digital Photography Tips to get a free report on basic photography tutorials.

Tutorial: Learn How to do Panorama Photography part 1 (The Photo Shooting)

by Victor Augusteo on May 6, 2009

Today we will talk about the art of panorama photography. Panoramic photos in definition is just several photos stitched together with a post processing programs. Normally people use this technique to combine photos of beautiful landscapes that is too beautiful to be captured with one single frame.

This tutorial will be divided into two section. Section one (this post) will be discussing about the photography techniques on the actual scenic site where you take the photo. Where section two will discuss about the post processing techniques. Alright, lets get started!

What equipments do you need?

For distant objects in good lights, you can afford to shoot pano with handheld. But when you shoot pano in low light (dawn/dusk/cloudy) you will need a sturdy tripod with rotatable head. There are some really sophisticated Panoramic Tripod Heads ranging from US$200 – 550. Of course if you are not planning to shoot panorama that often, you can still make do with normal heads.

I use Manfrotto 190XDB Tripod and 804RC2 Head and highly recommend it. Works for me in all situation.

Now I have the tripod, what else do i need to do?

You just need to find a good scenic open area to shoot your pano! Got it? OK. Now find a place where you can see the whole scene without any obstruction. A tree branch or tower in the middle could potentially destroy your panoramic tryout.

Put your tripod on the place you think is the best to capture the image, then make sure the tripod is level. Most tripod will have some kind of water pass to see if it levels.

Is it level now? Ok, good.

Now follow these simple steps:

Set your camera to aperture priority (just do it)
Set it to ISO 100
Set the aperture to F16 or above to be able to focus on all the scene.
Set the image quality to RAW (if your camera supports it)

If you use big aperture, you will not be able to get everything in focus.

Ok, now take some test shoot to see what setting yields you best result. Then set your camera setting to Manual Mode. You don’t want the photos to not look seamless after you stitch it on the computer. Take several photos to cover all the scene you wanted.

Once you finish all the setting, turn your camera to one end of the scene (left or right)

Turn it slowly, and take another one

Make Sure your photos interlaps each others

Use remote/cable release or timer to avoid camera shake

Circular Polarizer can be really good in these scenic photos

Or you can use graduate filter if the sky is too bright

Try to include foreground/background interest

For better composition and sense of scale

I run out of things to say now

Ok, that was just an example of array of image I took last month at the Grampians National Park. Notice that there are some dust on my sensor. If your sensor/lens is not clean, you will have to do the cleaning multiplied by the number of image you are shooting. Shouldn’t be too much work though. I’ll post the final image on the next post with the step by step tutorial.

Portrait or Landscape?

There are ongoing discussion as which format is better than the other. I’d say doesn’t really matter. But shooting in portrait format might help reduce vignetting and distortion. I tried it out without and difference, so its up to you if you want to try.

Let’s Recap

Scout a good location for panorama
Get a sturdy tripod and panoramic tipod head.
Put your tripod into good position and level it.
Take several photos to cover the scene you wanted.
Take some more to make sure you don’t leave with any regret :p especially if the location is hard to reach.

Mountain Reservoir Panorama

Further Panorama Photography Readings

Panorama Tutorials by Dr. Karl Harrison
PanoWarp Tutorial
Big Ben’s Panorama Tutorials
Getting Started with Digital Panoramas
A few links to panorama tutorials and resources

How To: HDR Look From JPG Using Lightroom 2.1

by Victor Augusteo on February 6, 2009

Alright, here comes my first try at writing lightroom tutorial. I discovered this technique by accident while editing my shots from Sydney last year. I’ll post the gallery sometime later. In order to do this editing, you need to have at least lightroom v2.0 and download the 300 preset by mikelao. Alright, lets get going.

First of all, this is the plain looking JPG.

1/160 f8.0 ISO 200 at 18mm

Then we crop so the ship follow rule of third

press 'R' inside lightroom to crop

Then we apply the 300v2 preset to get this effect

Awesome effect! but the lower right corner is too dark, and the land is very underexposed!

Just up the exposure to around +0.85 to lighten the mood.

Next we will apply a graduated filter to darken the sky. change it to exposure mode and put -0.80 on the value.

Awesome sky, well lit water, only one problem left, guess which one is it?

Ok, now we will make use of the Adjustment Brush (K) to make the land brigther. Set the size of the brush a little bit smaller than the land, and set the feather around 70.

Paint it carefully, do not let your brush hit the ship, its gonna over expose. Just play around with the exposure to suit your need.

Now the final picture should look like this

Not too shabby huh!

Alright, hope you enjoy the tutorial. This proves that simple JPG is not to be underestimated.

Tips and Tricks

Photography Tips for Beginners With Point and Shoot Camera