anyone got any easy tips for taking better photo’s.
nothing too serious, just good quick easy tips.

rule of thirds!

http://www.digital-photography-school.com/rule-of-thirds%5D

Pinkbike

Obey the rule of thirds, then…
Disobey the rule of thirds

Read the manual.
Yeah, I know, it’s only a box with a hole in, but if you know how it works, it’s miles easier to take the pictures you want.

Best time to take outdoor pictures is after dawn or before sunset.
Your eyes don’t register it but the colours are amazingly intense at these times.

Get a tripod or lean on something.
Your pictures will be much sharper.

– Something is moving (bike, car, person, bird etc.) – move the camera with it to capture a still-ish subject and a blurred background….gives a sense of movement too.

– night portrait – use the night portrait setting to get some detail in the background, but keep the camera still for a while after the flash has fired (as the shutter will be open recording background detail) and tell your subject to stay still too

– don’t just stay standing – photo of kids so crouch to their level, photo of something high so lift camera above your head. Too many photos are taken from eye height.

– make sure batteries are charged.

GENERALLY, don’t stick the horizon halfway down the frame. As above, read about Rule of Thirds, but also decide to ignore if not working.

– taking portrait photo’s of a person with a compact, fairly close up (head & shoulders)? Stand back a bit & zoom a little, as the wide angle of a zoom distorts features.

– don’t just look at the subject when composing a picture. Take a few secs to look ‘around’ the frame looking for parked cars, dogs taking a crap, telephone masts sticking out of people’s heads. Move slightly or zoom if required.

– if you aren’t taking pics of things closer than ~10m with a compact (inside a footie stadium, large building etc.) turn off the flash…otherwise it will fire pointlessly & you’ll get darker pics. Turning it off tells the camera that it may need a longer exposure and the flash wouldn’t have reached anyway…

– don’t be afraid to experiment

– if the camera is struggling to focus due to low light (or something else confusing it), turn macro mode on – sometimes it helps as the camera will try to focus for longer….

– if the camera is struggling to focus due to low contrast, look for an edge to focus on & then re-compose the shot.

– taking photo’s of pre-dominantly snow? Look for the ‘beach/snow’ setting in your camera or add +0.7 or +1 exposure compensation to avoid the snow looking murky grey (the camera will ‘see’ too much white & will under-expose unless you tell it otherwise.

Great stuff stumpy, keep em coming!.

FOREGROUND INTEREST!

Get closer (unless it’s a portrait – then use your zoom).

Think about what you don’t want in your shot and compose appropriately.

LIGHT

Broad ranging question on which entire books are written. Have a look at some one like joolze dymond and her bike photography for some inspiration and then get out and experiment. Are you using dslr or standard?

Remember that you’re capturing light. If that light’s crap the picture will be crap. When the light’s good watch for big dirty shadows and flat spots that will spoil it.

And in light of the above (pun intended) get to know your camera and how it reads light. For example if have a huge portion of sky in your photograph it’s likely that whatever is on the ground will come out underexposed. (Sky and ground generally require different exposures as they emit different amounts of light). The reason it comes out underexposed is because the inbuilt light meter in the camera reads the light from the sky and adjusts accordingly.

If your camera is fully automatic and doesn’t offer any way of adjusting exposure you might have to adjust the composition, for example to include more foreground. The important bit to remember is to simply notice when the camera is doing this. And if you have a live view led screen you can quite easily adjust accordingly.

That and the rule of thirds should get you somewhere on the way of taking pleasing images.

This one from my rambling post above:

– if you aren’t taking pics of things closer than ~10m with a compact (inside a footie stadium, large building etc.) turn off the flash…otherwise it will fire pointlessly & you’ll get darker pics. Turning it off tells the camera that it may need a longer exposure and the flash wouldn’t have reached anyway…

should have read further where the bold type is!! D’oh!!

I would suggest skipping the “rule of thirds” and looking up asymmetrical balance instead. You’ll end up at a place where “rule of thirds” is shorthand for a certain important subset, but you’ll be much better informed along the way and be more able to know when and how to break the “rule”.

Other than that: find and read “rules”, understand why they’ve become “rules”, then understand there’s no such thing as a rule, use experimentation to figure out when and how to break the so-called rules and when to use them, and user others’ photos to suggest things you might not have thought of yourself. And talk to people, preferably people with experience, about images and why they think an image does or doesn’t work.

Wasn’t Ben (Singletrack) running courses with Ed (Great Rock) last year ?
“Stop taking crap photos” IIRC. Might be wrth an email to see if he’s doing something this coming year?
http://benjimedia.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/moving-v-still/

just good quick easy tips

If you want to take photographs use a camera not a telephone.

Read a book by / about Henri Cartier-Bresson recently. The short version is he trained as a classical painter then picked up a camera. Point was Artists spend most of their life mastering composition.

If there was a parade he wouldn’t just turn up and start snapping. He’d scout the area days before, track down the perfect spot, then sit there for hours usually up a ladder, waiting for something interesting to happen.

Tis a bit more complex than the rule of thirds but learning about fine art composition is a good place to start.

Rider instructions:

Do something rad
Wear a single block colour T-shirt
Stick your elbows out to make you look faster

Quantity. Take lots of photos. Once in a while, you’ll get lucky and one will actually be pretty good! 😉

pulls up chair and watches thread with interest 😆