Photography Tips and Tricks

If you are just starting out or at digital photography these three tips should be kept in mind to get the best photographs with your digital camera.

No Noise

Noise is a problem that is unique to digital cameras. It happens when you use a high ISO setting on your camera. Noise appears as speckles or grainy texture on your photos. Here is a good example of a “noisy” photo:

To avoid noise, check your manual to see if your camera can be adjusted to a low noise setting. If your camera is not equipped to reduce noise, try to avoid long exposure times or high ISO settings. If all else fails, purchase noise reduction software that can edit your digital images to smooth out the noise.

No Shake

A close relative to noise is camera shake. It is caused during long exposure times and high ISO, as well, and can also create terrible results.

Many digital cameras have a system that prevents some camera shake. To avoid it completely, watch the digital readout on the screen. If it shows an icon that is a red hand, you’re probably shaking the camera. Place the camera on a tripod or steady object to reduce the camera shake. For the best results, use your camera’s timer to get rid of all of the camera shake. Set your camera on a tripod, set the timer, and half-way depress the shutter button to focus. When you’re ready, fully depress the shutter button and stand back while the camera takes the photo.

No Washout

To keep your subjects from being washed out or overly bright from your flash, there are a few simple tricks you can use. First, stand back from your subject so that the flash is a bit more defused. Next, make sure that your settings are compensating for a flash. For example, if your camera is on manual mode and you have a very short exposure time, then adjust to a longer exposure time to compensate for the flash. Third, if you have a detachable flash, bounce the light coming from the flash off of a white object back onto your subject.

Using these three tips will get you on the way to taking much better pictures with your digital camera.

You may have seen expansive panorama photos of a city’s skyline and wondered, “How did the photographer do that?” Well, it is pretty simple, actually, and you don’t need any special lens to do it. All you need is your digital camera and a photo editing software such as Photoshop or Photo Suite.

What is Stitching?

Stitching is taking multiple images and turning them into one long image that looks like a panorama. Basically, you’re taking the images and digitally stitching them together to make a whole image. Mirror panoramas are two photos of the exact same landscape flipped and stitched together to make one panoramic image.

Take the Pictures

First, you need pictures. Start by choosing your location. The perfect location is an unobstructed view of a landscape.

Stand facing the landscape and rotate your waist to the left so that your digital camera’s viewfinder is capturing the left edge of the landscape. After you take that photo, rotate your waist a little to the right so that your viewfinder still has a little of the scenery you just photographed, but also has new scenery. Keep doing this until you have taken photos of all of the scenery in the landscape.

Make sure that you do this quickly enough that the light does not change or the images won’t match.

Stitch the Photos

When you get home, upload all of your photographs to your computer and open your photo editing software. Create a blank project that is the number of photos you have wider than it is tall. For example, if you have five photos that you want to stitch, then you will need to make your project five time wider than it is tall. So, if you want the panorama to be 4 inches tall, then your width would need to be 20 inches if you have five photos.

Now, you can manually stitch the images together. Add your photos to the project one-at-a-time. Drag one photo so that the edges overlaps with the one before it so that the two photos match up like a jigsaw puzzle. Do this with all of the photos until you have a line of photos that look like one image. You may have to crop the edges of the project so that they are an even line.

There you have it! Now you know how to make your own panoramic images with stitching.