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101 Tips To Improve Your Photography

by Chris Marquardt
chris@tipsfromthetopfloor.com
www.tipsfromthetopfloor.com
Initial revision: August 2006
Last update: February 2008

Foreword

Okay okay, it’s not exactly 101 items in here, more like 54 65 to be honest, but 101 sounded so much nicer And 101 is the actual goal. I consider this work-in-progress, so expect this list to grow and finally reach the magic 101!

General

1. Instant feedback. One of the most important tools that you get with a digital camera is the display on its back. Make use of the instant feedback that it provides you with. Review your shots and learn from your mistakes right after you have taken a picture. There’s no need to wait a week until your pictures are developed.

2. Don’t fall for the megapixel hype. Especially with digital point-and-shoot cameras, a higher megapixel count often results in more noise in your images. 5 megapixels are enough for most situations. Having that said, as camera sensors and in-camera processing get better over time, this might change.

3. Learn from others. Make use of web sites like Flickr or DeviantArt or the Forum at tips from the top floor to share your images and receive feedback from others. Admittedly, some of the feedback that you will receive won’t help you (”nice shot”) , but there are many seasoned photographers out there who are happy to provide you with meaningful critique.

4. Learn from others II. Giving critique is at least as useful as an exercise as receiving it is. Take time to look at others’ work on photo-sharing websites, and be selective in which pictures to critique. One well-thought-out comment on why a particular picture does or doesn’t work for you is worth a thousand well meant but unhelpful comments such as “nice” or “wow!” And in giving such comments you will realize ways in which you can develop or improve your own photography.

5. Don’t take unconstructive criticism personally. Ignore comments of the “this shot sucks” sort, unless the commenter makes it clear why they think the shot sucks.

6. Believe in yourself and trust your instincts. If you like the shot, then it’s a good shot. Period.

7. Learn to love overcast days. The dynamic difference between shadows and harsh sunlight at noon is hard to handle for most digital cameras. The diffuse light conditions on an overcast day are your friend.

8. Know the sweet spot. Many consumer lenses (and even some of the professional ones) have a certain combination of aperture and focal length, where they excel in image sharpness and contrast, the so called sweet spot. A quick series of test shots of the same subject at different focal lengths and apertures will help you learn more about your lens and in the end you’ll have one more tool to help you improve the technical quality of your images.

9. Read your camera’s manual. Quite different from what came with your microwave, digital camera manuals are usually well written and quite informative. A surprisingly large number of people have never taken their camera’s manual out of the box and therefore are down to guesswork and assumptions when it comes working their camera.

Composition

10. Learn the ROT, then forget it. The infamous Rule Of Thirds is a great way to nudge yourself away from the standard person-standing-in-the-middle or horizon-in-the-middle vacation snapshots. It’s a good last resort if you don’t know how to make a shot look more interesting. But then, please don’t overdo it.

11. Get closer. Robert Capa said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough”. Next time you take a picture, try to walk a few steps towards the subject, or even pick out a detail of a scene rather than the whole thing in one. You’ll be surprised.

12. Use the “sneaker zoom”. Walking closer to a subject instead of zooming in will give you different results in terms of perspective. Try it out.

13. One subject only. Pictures often work better if there’s a clear subject. Competing subjects are hard to handle.

14. Un-clutter your images. If there are too many things going on in your image, the viewer can easily get distracted from your subject. If there is too much going on in your picture, see above (”Get closer”, “One subject only”)

15. Don’t forget about the background. Often you find yourself paying a lot of attention to the subject (the foreground) and completely ignoring the background. The background is as important as the foreground, it is a part of your image. A simple step to the left or right will help you avoid things like branches of trees growing out of your subject’s head.

16. Change your point of view. Every day we see the world from our own perspective, usually from our own eye level. Change your perspective by shooting from a frog’s perspective or from within a fridge and create an unusual look that people won’t forget.

17. Moving subjects need space. Your compositions of a car, a bicycle or someone walking will usually look nicer if you give the subject some space in your image to move into.

18. Use negative space. Negative space is the part of an image that is not your subject. Don’t be afraid to use lots of it every now and then.

19. Compose buildings straight. Verticals lines in buildings should be vertical on your pictures, or they won’t look natural.

20. Avoid falling lines. Tilting the camera up when taking pictures of buildings will produce “falling lines”, e.g. the building will look as if its leaning backwards. Sometimes that cannot be avoided. This can usually be fixed in post processing.

21. Keep water lines horizontal. If you take an image of a lake or the sea, make sure to keep the horizon level. Even a slight skew of half a degree will make the viewer feel uncomfortable with the picture.

22. Don’t be afraid to cut off stuff. When I was young, I was always told not to cut heads off in pictures. This was simply wrong. Get closer, only shoot part of a face from a person, or select another detail.

23. Get familiar with design principles. Learn about line, shape and form, texture and so on.

24. Frame your subject. You can emphasize your subject by placing it into a frame of some sort. Stuff like an open window, tree branches, a doorway.

25. Be decisive. Either give your subject space to “breathe” (e.g. don’t close in too far with your composition or crop) or close in on some of the details.

26. If symmetry plays an important part in your composition, take some time to make sure you really are taking your picture from the best spot – dead centre in front of a tower or window, for example. Symmetry that is not quite there will bother the viewer a whole lot more than a deliberately asymmetrical image. It saves loads of time in post-processing if you can get this right beforehand; having to tilt and crop your image later could lose valuable elements of the composition and won’t necessarily solve the problem completely.

Camera Settings

27. Don’t use digital zoom. It will make your images look bad. Find a way to switch it off on your camera. If you need to, do the upsizing in post processing.

28. Avoid full automatic shooting mode (aka “Green Mode”). Program mode will do the same for you, but you’ll be able to shift exposure and aperture to your liking.

29. Try manual mode. If your camera allows you to do so, give manual mode a try, especially if you are shooting in a situation where the light conditions don’t change much. The camera’s built-in light meter is a very precise tool that will help you get the settings right once and then continue using them in order to get consistent results throughout a whole photo shoot.

30. If your camera allows you to set up different image profiles for shooting, make use of them. For example have one profile that boosts contrast and colour saturation, one that is neutral and one that has less contrast and saturation. This way when it’s a bright sunny day with harsh contrasts, you can use the low contrast profile and reduce the chance of blowing out areas of your image. Or if the light is very flat and dull, you can use the high contrast profile and this way make the picture pop a little more.

Technique

31. Focus then recompose. Many cameras allow you to pre-focus a shot by half-pressing the shutter button, and then when the right moment is there, fully press the shutter. This way you can capture that perfect moment more precisely, especially with older point-and-shoot cameras that have a longer shutter delay than more recent ones.

32. Take lots of pictures. It’s digital, it’s free. If a shot didn’t work out, change the camera settings and re-take it right there and now.

33. Use a beanbag or tripod. If you are in a situation where you want shake-free low-light images, using a tripod is a good idea. A beanbag also works fine for that purpose and it has the added benefit of being less bulky. And there’s definitely a “WOW” factor involved as well

34. Low-light burst. If you find yourself having to shoot in a low-light situation without being able to support the camera, try your camera’s burst mode. Fire away 5 images in rapid succession while holding the camera as steady as possible. Then review and zoom in on your camera’s display. Chances are that at least one of the 5 images has significantly less camera shake than the others. Discard the ones with too much shake.

35. Learn to exposure-compensate. Your camera’s light meter is easily fooled by non-standard light situations. Look at a concert where the stage background is pitch black, and just the band or actors are brightly lit. Your camera will take the black background into account when setting the exposure for the image and most likely over-expose the people on stage. Telling your camera to compensate the exposure will make your images work in those situations.

36. Learn to exposure-compensate II. A different situation where exposure compensation comes in handy is when you take pictures in snow. The camera will have lots of light to deal with, and will therefore most likely under-expose the picture, ending up with gray dull pictures. By telling the camera to over-expose the picture, your snowy background will look as …err… white as snow.

37. Shoot in colour and convert to black-and-white on your computer. Converting to black-and-white on your computer will give you more freedom when it comes to how the colours are rendered.

38. Or… compose in black-and-white on your point-and-shoot camera. Composing in black-and-white using the display of your point-and-shoot will help you learn how certain colours come out when seen by your camera in black-and-white.

39. Use the histogram. It’s an invaluable tool for you to see right away if your image is over- or underexposed. If the graph is cut off to the right, it’s over exposed, if the graph is cut off to the left, that means underexposure. It’s fine to overexpose if that’s what you want, but the histogram will actually let you *know*. Overexposure is usually worse than underexposure.

40. Shallow depth-of-field is a great way to handle a busy background that would otherwise interfere with your subject. To get to a shallow depth-of-field, use a long focal length, open the aperture as wide as possible and get as close as possible to your subject. This works best with DSLRs. It’s an effect that is hard to achieve with a point-and-shoot camera.

41. Don’t be too afraid of noise. In the good old days of film photography (well okay, it’s not entirely over yet), films with a high sensitivity used to produce a lot of gain, which in turn gave those images a moody look. Today’s DSLRs can get the same images virtually noise-less, which on the one hand is cool, but on the other hand lacks some of the mood from those good old days. In order to get that look back, crank up the ISO to its max, or add artificial noise to your images. This effect works best with black-and-white pictures.

42. Shooting at the exact right moment can be hard, especially with a point-and-shoot camera that has a long shutter delay. You can shorten the shutter delay by pre-focusing your images.

43. Have your camera ready. If you first have to take your camera out of its bag, switch it on, remove the lens cap, set the ISO, start to compose, and so on, your once-in-a-lifetime snapshot opportunity is gone. Have the camera ready to shoot. Have it switched on (you can recharge the batteries). Have the lens-cap off (you can clean the lens if it gets dusty). Have the ISO set for the environment you’re in so you don’t lose valuable time.

44. Set the proper white balance. If you want accurate colours, the best way is to use custom white balance. For this you take a picture of a white or gray surface, then tell your camera to use this image as a white balance reference.

45. Experiment with white balance. If you want to be more creative about your images colours, try shooting with the “wrong” white balance for the situation. Try tungsten white balance in an environment lit by fluorescent light or vice versa for some fun colour effects.

46. Use a polarizer to bring down the brightness of skies. This works best with blue skies and when the sun is to your left or right. Polarizers also increase the saturation of the colours in your image.

47. Use an ND grad filter. This is another way to bring down the brightness of skies to be closer to the foreground. ND stands for Neutral Density, which means gray. Grad stands for graduated, which means that half of the filter is gray, and the other half is translucent, with a gradient in between.

48. Use higher ISO. Contrary to the things you might have read and heard, it’s not always best to use the lowest possible ISO. The reason is that some cameras can’t actually handle large contrast differences that well at lower ISOs, which can result in colour fringing, similar to chromatic aberration. Cranking the ISO up one step can help you overcome this problem.

49. Don’t worry too much about sensor dust. Yes, it’s an issue for many DSLRs. Dust will eventually creep into the camera and sit on the sensor where it starts to show on pictures. But it is much less of an issue than producers of expensive sensor cleaning kits want you to believe. Dust will only show at small apertures, and in 90% of your pictures, you won’t even notice it. And with the remaining 10% of your images, the dust specs can usually be cloned out using something like Photoshop. If it gets too bad, either clean the sensor yourself or take it back to the camera store to get it cleaned.

50. Use a lens hood. If you’d open up a lens, you would find lots of individual glass elements. Reflections of bright light between the surfaces of those elements can ruin a picture. This is even true if the sun shines at your lens from an angle where you can’t see it in the viewfinder. A lens hood will keep the sun from interfering with your pictures.

51. Get coated filters. Filters are another potential source of reflections that can cause problems. Good coated filters will help you minimize the potential issues.

Lighting (Available light & Flash)

52. Don’t use on-camera flash. Especially on point-and-shoot cameras this tends to flatten out images (think “full moon faces”). If you can’t shoot hand-held without a flash because it would introduce too much camera-shake in a low-light situation, position the camera on a sturdy surface or against a wall to give it stability.

53. Don’t use red-eye reduction flash. Red-eye reduction fires a pre-flash in order to make the pupils of your subject shrink so that the retina won’t reflect as much in the image. But it also gives your subject a fair warning that they are about to be photographed, which in turn allows them to put on their “photo face”. Kills spontaneity.

54. Your flash doesn’t reach far. I’ve seen people try taking pictures of bands on stage 100 ft away using the flash. Your camera’s built-in flash won’t reach that far. 10 ft is a good bet. 5 ft is more likely to work fine. For everything beyond, flash is a waste of battery, it simply will never arrive there.

55. Make use of backlighting. Try this for spectacular lighting: place your subject with the back to the light source, then use the camera’s flash to fill in the missing light in the foreground. If your camera has “flash exposure compensation”, make use of it to dial down the fill flash to the minimum needed in order to get a well balanced result.

56. If you can choose when to shoot pictures of outdoor subjects, consider at what time of day the light might be best. Harsh midday sunshine can make it difficult to get good results; this is probably why early morning light or the “golden hour” just before sunset are favourite times for many photographers. It can be a good creative exercise to take the same shot at different times and under different weather conditions, to see what a difference these can make.

Post-Processing

57. Take control and post-process your images. Especially with a DSLR you can get a lot out of your images by using the “digital darkroom” (i.e. your computer and some image processing software) to work on colour balance, contrasts and image sharpness.

58. Sharpen your images. Working on pictures, especially downsizing them, often results in a lack of image sharpness. The last step in your digital workflow should be to apply a bit of sharpening

59. Straighten your images. If you didn’t get your images straight during shooting (happens to me all the time), straighten them during post processing.

60. Crop. Sometimes a creative crop can spice up a composition that otherwise would be dull. The vast number of megapixels in today’s cameras often allows the cropping of images without too much damage. This is especially true for images that you resize for the web.

61 Process a copy of an image rather than the original image itself. This way it’s not a disaster if you make a mess of it in post-processing and can’t repair the damage, and it means the original is still available in case you want to edit further copies of it in different ways. Who knows, you might discover a new post-processing technique or style that you like, or you might want to process the image for a different purpose.

The Creative Process

62. Find yourself in a creative rut? The solution: Assignments. Force yourself to think outside the box by going out to shoot pictures with an assignment in the back of your mind. For one day, only shoot images that illustrate a concept (”contrast”, “hot”, “sweet”) or a colour (”blue”, “purple”) or a shape (”triangles”, “zig-zag”, …) - you name it.

63. Limitation is great. Yes, another good way to help you advance your creativity is another form of limitation. “Lock yourself in your bathroom and take 100 pictures” - “Shoot 100 pictures from the same spot”. Give it a try.

64. Allow yourself to be silly. It’s time to experiment! Yes, place the camera in your fridge between the butter and the orange juice and use the self-timer to take a picture of yourself while you grab something from the fridge. Or place the camera inside the washing machine, under a table, on a shelf, inside your car’s glove compartment, …

65. More limitation. Stick with one focal length for a whole day. Easy to do with a prime lens, harder to achieve with a zoom lens (the “zoom reflex” is strong in you). In case of zoom withdrawal symptoms, or inadvertent zooming out of habit, use sticky tape to fix the zoom ring in one position.

© 2006 Chris Marquardt, top floor productions