It’s a poorly guarded secret that the public hasn’t internalized yet, but the mid-range and nicer, single-body mirrorless point & shoot cameras easily rival entry-level DSLRs for photographic quality. The simple fact is that there are many digital cameras that have sensor sizes to rival even nicer DSLRs, and with the right use of photographic technique you can fool your friends into thinking you bought your photos for the price of an expensive housing and lens.
Sony A7 review
1. Learn How Your Camera Works

You’ll read this all over the place, but the best advice remains learning how to use and leverage all your cameras features and getting familiar with you to finely control its basic settings. You can’t do anything else until you can use your camera somewhat proficiently. So read the manual and practice doing weird and conventional things until you know your camera.

2. Pay Attention to Exposure and Composition

The best camera in the world can’t make up for not knowing the basics of photography. Learn about how ISO, shutter speed, and aperture affect your exposure and what else they do to the photo. The effects may seem simple, but the results of managing these three settings adroitly alone are enough to revolutionize your photography.

Composition is more complex, and some would say it’s even an art. Start with one simple rule, “The Rule of Thirds.” Don’t position your subject in the center of the shot. It looks awkward. Important items should be on thirds lines – imagine two vertical lines and two horizontal lines separating your viewfinder into three identical columns and rows. Those are thirds lines and their nexuses are the perfect places to locate important subjects like a person’s face.

3. Take More Pictures

Just shoot. A lot. Pros take hundreds if not thousands of frames for every keeper (this number keeps going up thanks to the wonders of digital photography). Even the best photographers take some really bad photos that they later look at and wonder what they could possibly have expected.

If you take a ton of shots of the same thing, you can probably luck into a good photo or two. As long as you take the time to review your shots on the LCD every few seconds to try and identify what is and isn’t working, the exercise of shooting more photos can help you improve through every shot. Don’t worry about it. You will go through them all on a large monitor at home later and deal with deleting all the garbage then.

4. Turn Off Your Flash

Point & Shoot cameras have awful flashes, and in fact, even the flashes that come with many DSLR bodies aren’t great. You need to learn how to use natural light and control exposure anyway, and flashes create harsh contrasts and unnatural colors.

You can use it to create fill lighting if you want to shoot people outdoors and the sky is lighter than the foreground. But that’s about it.

These four simple tips will instantly help you take much better photos with point & shoot cameras, and with a bit of practice you can have them performing to rival many DSLRs in the hands of less-informed photographers.

Travel photography is a great challenge. Take beautiful photos and it will help you remember the details of your experience even better and give you fun visual reminders to share with others. But if you don’t spend the right amount of time and energy, all you efforts will be wasted and you’ll carry home a camera bag full of boring, disappointing photos. Follow these tips and your digital cameras, whether you use a nice point & shoot or a DSLR, and you’ll be much happier with the memories you capture.

1. Gear – Plan what you bring and know how to use it effectively.

Serious photographers devote serious effort to planning what goes in their camera bags. You should do the same if you care about our photos at all, whether you have a few lenses for your DSLR or just want to be sure you have enough batteries, chargers, and memory cards for your point & shoot digital camera.

You need to learn to use that gear effectively as well. When you’re taking travel shots, you might have less time to get the perfect shot because you’re also busy doing whatever you want on the trip. So you need to maximize your time shooting by becoming comfortable with camera settings and features before you leave. That means practicing manipulating settings when not in full-auto mode and experimenting with lighting and different types of photography. You don’t want to be messing with getting the exposure right as a once-in-a-lifetime shot of a local riding an elephant walks out of frame and into the distance.

2. Plan your subjects.

Pros will say to make a list of all the types of shots you want to get before you even leave, just to give you something to fall back on and ensure you don’t miss obvious shots. Even if you don’t do this, take a few minutes over breakfast to think and talk about what you plan on doing for the day and consider what subjects and types of photography opportunities might arise. Some shots are easier to see when you’re in the moment, and some when you know what to look for before you get there.

3. Zoom with your feet.

This is actually advice given to explain the benefit of fixed 50mm lenses for training new photographers to try different angles and shooting positions, but the logic holds no matter what you carry in your camera bag. Let your feet help you find the right shot. Once you know what you want to shoot, walk around it, try getting higher or lower, find foreground objects to add depth or people to create movement, and do anything else you can to help you identify and distil the core feature of the subject that makes it exciting to look at.

This can also help you to focus your composition, allowing you to eliminate unnecessary and distracting details such as plants, people, or other elements that are not furthering your development of the main thing that interests you.

4. Slow down, review, try again.

You take bad photos. It’s true of all of us and it will never change. The difference between you and a pro is that the pro reviews after every few shots and takes the time to analyze everything in frame on the LCD screen to improve from one shot to the next. So don’t be afraid to take four times more photos of an object than you could ever want. But make the exercise worthwhile by looking at a shot, deciding why it fails to capture the essence that drew you to snap the photo in the first place. Be critical and explicit, identifying objects that don’t belong, angles or colors that aren’t helping, and things in or out of focus that you dislike, as well as looking at what works. Then try again to address those issues.

Never rely on the LCD to evaluate and delete photos. Wait until you’re reviewing on your large computer monitor with better colors and no glare. One of the wonders of 12+MP cameras is you can often crop down to an entirely different photo on your computer if you take the time to look at shots and see what details you may have accidentally captured.

There’s more to great travel photography than just what’s in your camera bag. It is worth putting in the effort to review and use these tips so you can bring home hundreds of one-thousand-word shots from your next excursion or vacation.

Technology can help with a lot of photography, but when it comes to landscapes, you need skill and technique more than gear. Sure, DSLR tripods and a nice wide angle lens make a big difference but first you need to learn the lessons encapsulated in the first nine of these ten landscape photography tips and tricks.

Composition

Beautiful landscape photos use a number of composition tricks and techniques to create the contrast and shape that gives a still bunch of trees and sky the dynamism you crave.

1. The Rule of Thirds – Imagine the image you see on the viewfinder cut into three equally sized rows and columns, thirds. The four intersections made by the lines splitting those thirds are magic spots to put subjects. They give your photo a sense of balances that is naturally pleasing to the human eye. If you can line up natural divisions in the photo with those thirds, your photos look better.

2. The Golden Rule – The bottom right intersection is the best place to situate essential objects if your shot has one subject, like a statue. It creates the right amount of space on the frame.

3. 80/20 – Identify the important part of the photo that looks the best. That should fill 80% of the frame. This is just an adjustment of the rule of thirds (two-thirds is actually 67%, but they’re pretty close when you’re estimating anyway) that helps you prioritize and avoid cutting your shots in half.

4. Foreground & Background – Learn to identify these two planes in the photo and balance them using angles and composition to give your photo depth.

5. Lines and Shapes – This covers a number of strategies including the importance of finding three connected objects or lines and using them to focus your shot on that triangle, finding objects that help frame the subject you want to shoot, like two full trees in front of a mountain range, and using horizon lines that lead to a point.

Light
Photo By Moshe Zeira
Light and its characteristics in photography could fill a book. Learn to understand, adapt to, and play with light to infuse your landscapes with vibrancy.

6. Magic Hour – The hour right before dusk has the most beautiful light for the vast majority of photography because it is warm and diffuse. Learn to use it.

7. Contrast and Color – Whether you stop up to achieve richer colors by darkening the exposure, use a lens filter like a polarizer to brighten skies, or just develop an eye for the colors that make landscapes look best, you have to make choices about how to use color in your photos. Don’t ignore the way colors change depending on the light and the time of day.

Camera Settings

8. Aperture and Shutter Speed – These settings control how much light gets into your camera. The aperture also changes depth of field. The challenge is that you want a high aperture setting to deepen how much you can get in focus, while also letting in enough light without getting a blurry photo.

9. White Balance and ISO – White balance keeps your colors correct. If you want real control over your natural colors, pay attention to your white balance settings. Most cameras can handle an ISO of up to 800 with no loss in quality. However, lowering your ISO to 200, especially when shooting in full sunlight, can do wonders for your exposure and colors.

Gear

10. DSLR Tripods – And now to the gear. You may have noticed that the best settings for landscape photography make keeping your image crisp and avoiding blur difficult. Along with making it easier to use slower exposure settings for perfect light. Tripods help you take a step back to really choose the best composition. Get a light, sturdy tripod if you’re serious about landscapes.

There’s a lot to taking a good landscape photo. But it all starts with understanding your camera and the art of composing a photo. Once you’ve got a DSLR tripod, it’s up to you to use these tips in pursuit of composing a better photograph.

High-speed photography is the only take to take great sports photographs. Safe at the plate, the perfect head, crossing the finish line, or an embrace after a win; they all happen at a fast pace that requires exceptional shutter speed, and if they are on the field of play, they also require telephoto DSLR lenses. So you need three things to break into the world of sports photography: the aforementioned lens and a digital camera that can support the necessary shutter speed, familiarity with the necessary settings and how a camera performs in these conditions, and a bit of luck and good timing.
Photo by Ben Shaul
1. The equipment is the easy part assuming you have the budget. Pros use a 300mm or a 70-200mm telephoto lens, but with f2.8, but getting one that is worth the money is too expensive for most novices. A decent telephoto that reaches up to 200mm, has a low aperture to facilitate fast shutter speeds, and offers image stabilization is a good start. You also need the lens and body to support shutter speeds near 1/500 or faster so you can capture crisp images despite fast movement. Lastly, if you are shooting with a long telephoto, you may want a monopod to help stabilize the shot and support the heavy lens.

2. A fundamental understanding of how cameras work is an essential start. In photography you’re always trying to get the right amount of light. Shutter speed controls how long the iris remains open allowing light to hit the iris. The shorter it’s open, the less light, but the longer it’s open, the more still you must maintain the camera and the subject to avoid undesired blur.

The aperture setting or f/ stop refers to how wide the iris opens. A smaller number means a bigger opening, which also helps make the background in the photo blurry – a happy result for sports photography but not always the effect you want. Lastly, the ISO impacts the same details – a higher ISO captures more light in low-light environments and helps capture moving photos. The tradeoff is that at higher ISOs, images can become grainy.

So for sports photography you want the fastest shutter speed you can use that lets enough light into the photo, which means a low f/stop and a higher ISO, although most cameras lose quality quickly above ISO 800. This should help you capture bright, sharp sports photos.

3. Luck and experience are the most difficult to come by, because they cost time and take practice It starts with an understanding of where to stand. You need to know your sport to identify the best vantage points for the action. Combined with an understanding of what make for exciting moments and an ability to anticipate the game, this enables you to start shooting in the right direction.

From there, it’s just a matter of experimenting with composition, camera settings, and timing. Keep in mind that dynamic shots with the ball or sporting object and faces are the best and you’ll soon be leveraging your sports photography equipment and DSLR lenses to great effect.

If you want to get more from your DSLR cameras and take beautiful shots that will have your friends asking you for help, you need to learn about “Bokeh,” the Japanese word for photos with a nice, blurry background. The secret to leveraging your digital SLR cameras for this and other effects starts with rotating your function knob away from the AUTO setting and never looking back.

The aperture setting on your camera controls how big the aperture itself, which is the iris opening that allows in light, opens when you depress the shutter button. So it’s primary effect is helping control your shot’s exposure in conjunction with the shutter speed, and its overall brightness in conjunction with film speed as well.

But the f/ stop, the unit used to measure specific aperture opening amounts, also controls depth of field, which is the distance between the nearest and farthest object in a shoot that appear sharp, in focus. To achieve good bokeh, you need to create shallow depth of field so only your subject is in focus and everything in the background is blurry.

Fortunately, most decent DSLR cameras have the option to choose “Aperture Priority,” usually indicated on the function wheel but a capitol “A” or “AV.” This function directs your camera to set focus, shutter speed, and other settings in order to create the best shot based on the aperture setting you select.

Getting good bokeh is pretty simple at this point; the lower the aperture number the more open the iris and the more shallow the depth of field. So once you’re out shooting and ready to try, just set your aperture as low as it goes. Standard kit lenses go down to f/4.0. Then you need to set your ISO to keep your shutter speed high enough. Most decent DSLR cameras maintain image quality easily up to 800 before they start to show noise. If you see your shutter speed dropping to slower than 1/60 or 1/80, you need to increase your ISO to prevent image blur.

The last ingredient is practice. It takes some experience to figure out the right angle of light and composition to create the right portraits and still-life shots even with great use of aperture. So just spending a bunch of time with angles and then reviewing your shots can do a lot to move you from an absolute beginner to an “experienced” Bokeh beginner.

And that’s it. From absolute DSLR camera beginner to blurred background novitiate.

The first question to ask yourself is why you need to consider camera tripods in the first place. The most common uses are for low-light photography where you need a slower shutter speed, night time photography of stars or the moon, to take self-portraits with a timer, and to hold heavy gear. There are other uses but these are the most common. If you can’t think of a good reason why your photography would benefit from the stability of DSLR tripods, save your money and come back in three months.

Be clear, the benefit of a tripod is a sharper, clearer photo, perhaps with better composition. Of course, that’s only true if you face some of the challenges mentioned above, which make a sharp photo more difficult. So you have to consider your needs and constraints.

How portable do you want it to be? What kind of photography do you want to use it for. How much can you afford? These answers help you sort between all the available specifications to find the right tripod for you.

Material

The most common options are carbon fiber and aluminum. The former costs about twice as much, is much lighter and stronger, and offers faster vibration stabilization. If you can afford carbon fiber, you should opt for that option, unless weight and portability are incredibly unimportant to you and saving money is a priority.

Height

Typically, you want a tripod that can telescope to within six inches of your height. The attachment and camera make up the last six inches so you can shoot comfortably. However, if you plan on doing a lot of macro or ground-level photography, you want a tripod that allows you the remove the centerpost easily so you can stabilize the camera much lower to the ground.

Legs and Feet

Telescoping legs are the order of the day, and your primary choice is between three and four segments. Typically, fewer segments (and fewer joints) make for a stabler, lighter, more durable tripod that is easier to use and will last longer. Just be sure you find a tripod that has easy-to-use locks that still provide a strong, secure hold.

The feet that come with most tripods include rubber feet for indoors that can screw back to expose metal spikes for outdoors. These are fine for most people, although more expensive options allow you to change the feet.

Centerpost and Head

The centerpost is the telescoping element that lets you customize the height of most tripods. However, this advantage comes at the cost of decreased portability, increased weight, and potentially more problematic vibrations.

The head is the most important piece of the tripod for a lot of people. You have to decide if you want a level bubble, a good quick release mount, and how much control over panning and the angle you want. Better tripods also actually come without a head, expecting you to buy several interchangeable options.

With all of these aspects of camera tripods, you should think about what you want to do with your tripod and the go experiment with some options in the store to get a feel for what you like. Rely on review to determine how portable they are, and then compare your preferences with your budget to find the right option for you. Be sure to plan ahead so that you don’t need to replace your tripod in six months when your kit grows heavier or your needs change.

When you pick up the OM-D E-M1, you notice it is more compact and feels a bit more like old SLR camera housings than the typical modern DSLR. This is the benefit of MFT cameras. It has the sturdiness and intuitive, flexible button configuration of most Olympus digital cameras. Combined with this slimmer, less modern profile compared other new cameras, this makes the OM-D E-M1 one of the most easily carried Olympus cameras, ideal as a backup for a pro and comfortable to carry around your neck all day.

Several obvious aspects of this camera mean it make it have a strong first impression on focused amateurs and part-time pros. The ergonomic controls give you the use of multiple digits, and the variable function dials and wheels ensure that you always have quick access to the settings you want, whether shooting in full manual or the new art mode. It does take some time to learn what all the controls do, although they are fairly intuitive, because there are so many buttons, knobs, and dials.

The size, weight, and new grip make it comfortable to carry and shoot with for most people except those with especially large hands whose pinky might drop off the bottom of the smaller body. Furthermore, the durable housing is rugged – waterproof, dustproof, and freezeproof – and it looks tough.

The range of controls give the user quite a bit of customization control to make for quicker settings changes, if switching button functions is appealing to you. The mode rotator is comfortably weighted so you won’t bump it into the wrong mode, and has a unique locking button just to be safe.

The incredibly high-resolution, articulated electronic view finder is another source of praise. The LCD angles possible make overhead and ground level shooting easy and comfortable, while the quick response of the drivers powering the LCD mean you can quickly pan to take advantage of the E-M1’s very high FPS without any stutter. Of course, most pros will prefer an optical view finder to an EVF for higher integrity on contrast and composition, but as far as electric VF’s go, this is one of the best.

Lastly, for an MFT, the image quality and crispness leaves nothing to be desired. It used to be that the smaller sensors on MFTs meant you were sacrificing quality for portability when compared to DSLR options. Not so with the E-M1, which offers incredible crispness up to 3200 ISO, and serviceable clarity that can be improved with a bit of work up to its top ISOs. In other words, unless you want photos that you can print larger than 13” x 9”, you have no reason to need better quality than this.

With its combination of powerful features and settings, on-board image stabilization, compatibility with over 50 Olympus lenses as well as several Panasonic options, comfortable shape and convenient size and weight, and impressive EVF and LCD, the OM-D E-M1is one of the great new Olympus digital cameras, perfect for those who want a reliable, portable backup or who are ready to take a step up to a better digital but don’t want to burden themselves with giant lenses.

Find a full hands on review of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 here!

Digital SLR cameras are not as delicate and temperamental as they used to be, but you still need to know how to properly care for and use, clean, and store your cameras, DSLR lenses, and other gear to maximize their life and effectiveness. Follow these suggestions to protect your camera while using it, storing it, and conduct a basic cleaning of cleaning DSLR cameras and their components. This guide uses the phrase “camera” to mean everything from the body to the sensor to the lens as a whole unit.

Protect Your Camera from Dangerous Elements While Shooting

Everything from humidity to heat to salt, moisture, sand, dust, and water can sneak into a camera. Whether they just get dust on the sensor, put small scratches on internal piece of your lens, or fry electronic components of the DSLR, they are bad news. So it’s important to exercise care when shooting in any environment where these are a risk, and this requires planning ahead.

For environments where dust, sand, salt, or precipitation are likely, bring a good cloth for drying, several microfiber cloths for wiping dust and dirt off the lens, and a plastic bag or rain hood to keep water off. You may also want a cleaning kit with an air blower to get dust and sand off the lens before you wipe it down. You should also inspect and wipe your camera clean after shooting in conditions like these, to be sure nothing on the outside finds its way in or gets ground in through use.

Humidity and temperature change present their own set of obstacles, and dealing with entering and exiting buildings that are significantly warmer or cooler, and thus more or less humid than outside is an entire separate subject for camera care. In a nutshell, you either want to make the temperature shift very gradual when moving from cold to warm, or find a way to keep your camera from ever getting cold.

If you’re worried about dropping your camera in water, just be sure to have a good neck or hand strap. Some people have had success drying their cameras off by dropping them in a bag of rice to remove all the moisture, but don’t count on this as a reason to be careless.

Lastly, be mindful of your camera itself. Bumps can crack the lens or other internal mirrors and ruin the hardware. Be cautious at first until you are comfortable and familiar with how having a carrying a camera changes the way you should move.

Store Your Camera Intelligently When You Aren’t Using It

Heat, dust, and moisture are the big threats. Store your camera in a good camera case that pads it to prevent physical trauma and locks out dust, and be sure there are some silica gel packs in the bag or case to control the moisture. As for heat, just don’t store it in a place that gets below 40 degrees or above 80 or 90. That means don’t leave your camera in your car on a hot day nor in your unventilated closet.

If you’re going to be storing it for longer, pros advice removing the battery and memory card. This prevents the battery from doing anything to your camera in the heat and ensures no moving parts get jammed. You should also take off the DSLR lens and replace all the caps on both sides of the lens and on the camera body. This is to keep any moving parts from sticking. Also consider turning your camera on and using it at least once a month so the mechanics stay in proper working order.

Clean Your Camera Every Once in a While and After Exposing It to Moisture and Dust

Cleaning cameras well is an art, but any novice can at least wipe down the body. Even before you opt for a professional-quality cleaning kit and the difficult task of cleaning the sensor, you should get a high-quality microfiber cloth and use it to clean the exterior and cracks of your camera body every time you get back from a shoot. Once you have removed all the dust and dirt you can see, you should also carefully remove the lens, ensuring any dust still in the cracks doesn’t fall into the back of the lens nor inside the camera onto the sensor. Carefully clean the grooves and cracks. This is also a good idea before you put the camera away for storage.

Most people also suggest reading up on professional cleaning, which you can actually do yourself with a digital SLR camera cleaning kit. You have to be very careful to avoid damaging internal components, but there are a number of detailed guides that walk you through using air blowers and clothes to remove dust from inside your lens, on your imaging sensor, and in other sensitive locations. Any dust that doesn’t come off with the air blower should be left alone, and if it really bothers you, you can take your camera to a camera cleaning technician.

The majority of good care for digital SLR cameras is preventative. Keep harmful elements out, remove them from the housing, and protect your camera from heat and humidity. Keeping this in mind when you use and store you camera helps you prolong its life without difficult or expensive cleaning. A bit of maintenance cleaning is usually enough to compliment this protective behavior and keep your camera in proper working order.

Halloween and all the incredible, creative costumes people put together are the perfect opportunity to put digital cameras to use, but unless you have access to special low-light cameras and hardware, you need to learn how to use your digital point-and-shoot or SLR in the low light conditions of All Hallow’s Eve. Because the holiday is only fun after the sun goes down, but that certainly doesn’t make for easy, beautiful photographs.

This guide assumes you are not going to purchase special low light tools and don’t have a camera that is especially effective at capturing photos in low light.

The basic challenge of low-light photography is getting enough light to hit the sensor so that you can see the subject of the photo. Even with an 800ISO or 1600ISO setting and a very wide aperture open as wide as it gets, you typically have to slow down the shutter speed to accomplish this, and that’s why night photos often come out dark or blurry. And if you have typical digital cameras, you don’t have those more powerful ISO and aperture settings.

If you don’t understand this vocabulary, go spend a few minutes reading about three digital camera settings and how they impact photos: aperture and f/stop, film speed (ISO), and shutter speed.

So assuming you can’t just switch out your lens for a wider angle with a bigger aperture and you don’t want to carry around an extra flash, there are a few things you can do. Also, if you care about taking good photos and you’re stuck with the kit lens on your DSLR, you should start saving to buy a better lens. It will help a lot.

1. Fix the aperture and film speed to the best low-light settings. This means increase the ISO as high as it will go up to about 1000, and set the aperture or f/stop number as low as it will go, typically f/3.5 or f/5.6. This lets way more light in onto the sensor so you will be able to see your subjects.

2. Play with shutter speed, but set it manually. Most people can’t avoid image blur with a shutter speed of slower than 1/60 of a second, even if that’s what the camera’s full-auto or aperture-priority setting would select. Manually try a few settings around that range and see how low you can push it while still getting crisp details. Again, the purpose it more light.

3. Find a natural light source. This seems obvious, but if you’re shooting full-body costume shots at a party, position your subjects near some light that isn’t directly behind them. They’ll be more illuminated than the average person at the party, and all it takes is a bit of patience and a request that they move a few feet. If you don’t have the option of positioning your subject, scope out light sources that could make for good photos and then be ready to snap the shot when a subject approaches the light.

4. Test your flash. Flashes typically wash out a photo and destroy a lot of interesting details around the main subject. But sometimes you can get the shot you want, especially if you have a crude diffuser like a paper napkin. You won’t know until you try.

5. Shoot in burst mode. If you can put your camera into burst mode so it snaps several shots with one depress of the shutter button, you increase your chances of getting that one perfect shot with crisp lines and beautiful lighting. This is especially helpful for Halloween shots in which people are almost always moving.

6. Use Single-point Autofocus. New cameras often can set multiple focus points. This averages the lighting and color needs of multiple faces in the shot, for example, to get the exposure right. But in the dark, you need to be able to choose the focus point based on lighting, and single-point AF makes your cameras focus on just that one thing so the computer doesn’t over-think it and ruin your exposure as a result.

7. If you have the opportunity, try long exposures with a tripod. Slower shutter speeds not only make sure you get enough light, but also give you more flexibility with your other settings. The tradeoff is that you need a stabilizer like a monopod. But you can take some beautiful nighttime shots of settings and decorations, or even parties if you want the moving light to show the energy of the scene, with a longer exposure.

Digital cameras can struggle to produce the photos you see in your mind when you’re shooting in low-light settings, but you have to figure out a strategy for these conditions if you want to capture Halloween and get the perfect spooky photo.