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Digital photography

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Page 1: Digital photography
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Introduction

Whether you are using a DSLR, a point-and-shoot camera or a smart phone, the fundamentals of good photography remain the same. Sure, a high-end camera makes it a lot easier, but always have these basics in mind whenever you’re on a shoot and you’ll have a greater chance at photographic success.

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The Rule of Thirds

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Natural inclination for the beginning photographer is to put the subject smack in the center of the frame – but resist that urge. Instead, imagine a 3×3 grid laid over your image (or if you have certain cameras, you can actually turn on the grid in the viewfinder and turn off your imagination). Place your subject’s head at one of the “thirds points” – the parts of the 3×3 grid where the lines intersect. You’ll have a much more dynamic image than if the subject was sitting in the center of the frame.

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Of course, in the heat of the moment, you may not always be able to get that perfect rule-of-thirds composition going. That’s where the “crop” tool in Photoshop comes in handy (it looks like the graphic below). You can crop the image to meet the rule of thirds, and with the high resolution images produced by today’s cameras, you won’t take a huge hit in quality.

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Watch Out for Hotspots

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• Bright lights or lightsources in a photo can distract the viewer. What’s the first thing your eyes are drawn to in the above images? Those bright lights, right?

• This isn’t only the case for bright lights, but brightly-colored objects in your photos as well (how many times have you taken what you thought was the perfect photo of you and your friend, only to see the tourist with the hot pink shirt in the background?).

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• It means that when you’re shooting, you have to be keenly aware of your surroundings. In the previous cases, it’s very easy to crop the lights out of the picture and still have a usable photo.

• But there are times where that’s simply not enough. In many cases, you have to maneuver yourself out of the way of these light sources to make a picture. On the next slide is an example where your only real option is to move…

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Backlighting

Another common error that can happen in the field is backlighting. Ideally you want your light source, weather it’s the sun or a lamp, at your back so that it doesn’t A) create a hotspot in your picture or B) trick your camera’s meter into underexposing the picture (making it too dark). See what I mean on the next slide…

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So what do you do? Move around. Move your subject around. Find a spot where you can work with the light, rather than having the light work against you. The sun can be your greatest friend or your worst enemy.

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The Dreaded Polehead: Control your background

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• Watch for things growing out of people's heads when you shoot.

• Always make sure you have all the relevant body parts in the frame, watch for polehead, and never trust your friends and family on Facebook when it comes to critiquing your photos.

• Watch out for polehead’s evil cousins: lamphead, microphonehead and windmillhead (pictured above). Radiohead is OK though.

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• So what do you do when you’re shooting and you encounter a foreign object growing out of someone’s head? Simple – change the angle you are shooting at. Even a slight step left or right in any of these situations with an appropriate re-framing of the picture would have countered this problem.

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• On the note of controlling your background, another great analogy for composing your shots is to think of your photos as if you were a painter. You wouldn’t paint a stray poll in the corner of a shot, or growing out of someone’s head – so why would you make a picture that way?

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Shoot way more than you need to – and shoot a variety of shots

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• The photographer of the previous photo took 110 shots before he got that one, which he published.

• When you shoot, don’t just give yourself a few shots and move on. Work every angle. Shoot the same subject in every way possible. Zoom in, zoom out. Shoot a tight shot of their face. Then shoot one where you can see their entire body. And oh yeah, don’t forget you can turn the camera on its side for vertical shots. Those work too.

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• While you’re at it – don’t forget the basics – make sure you get a wide shot of the scene, in addition to medium and tight shots. Always make sure you have a few different wide-medium-tight choices, as the viewer needs context for what their looking at. See the next slide example for a shoot on the unusually warm weather Syracuse was having in November…

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Wide-Medium-Tight shots for one story.

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Framing and unusual perspectives

• There’s always the obvious and the not-so-obvious shot. You should get both in every situation.

• Look around at the environment. Keep an eye out for interesting architecture or objects that you can use to frame your shot. Look for things you can “shoot through” such as fences, curtains, flowers, etc. All of these will help for more interesting composition

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Two examples of using the environment around you to get a shot.

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• Speaking of interesting composition, don’t forget – everyone sees the world at eye-level. When you’re shooting, look to give us something that you don’t see every day. Get down low, stand on a chair – anything to help us see the world differently. Try to get access to places that others can’t. People are used to seeing things at 4-6 feet in front of them – get outside that range.

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• Get down on your subject's level for a more dynamic shot.

• Take that extra step and get that shot you don’t see everyday.

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Waiting for the decisive moment

• It’s all about anticipation.• Anticipate what’s going to happen and get set up

in the right location for that moment to hopefully happen.

• Sometimes, you find the perfect frame up for a picture. Don’t waste that frame – sit there and wait for the right moment. Patience will go a long way to this end. It’s probably going to take you longer than five minutes to make that perfect image.

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caption

A word on photo captions

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• One of the most common mistakes I see beginning photojournalists make is that they forget the “journalist” part of the equation. Just because you can safely hide behind a camera to get your images doesn’t mean you don’t have to walk up and talk to people. You do. That’s what journalism is all about.

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• If there’s a prominent subject in your photo, get their name. If there are a few prominent subjects, get their names. If there’s an entire stadium of subjects, than you can probably get away without a name. But where you can, err on the side of getting names and identifying information.

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• Captions should do more than merely inform us of what’s going on in the photo. “John Smith shakes hands with President Barack Obama on Sunday, March 3, 2013 won’t tell ″us much. Why not tell us why John Smith is shaking hands with the President? Give us context to the photo in your caption. Flesh it out. Use a quote in there if it helps. Just don’t state the obvious and leave it at that.

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Rules are meant to be broken

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• At the end of the day, what I’ve given you here is a set of basic guidelines to follow to get generally good photos. But that doesn’t mean you should experiment on your own – and sometimes that experimentation means bending or breaking some of the “rules” I’ve set forth here. Go for it. Sometimes you will want that silhouette that you get from shooting into a light source. Sometimes a centered composition works. Don’t feel limited by what you read here. Feel empowered to know what works most of the time, but that some of the time it doesn’t.

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Final Advice

• Above all – don’t forget that you’re supposed to be having fun. The day photography ceases to be fun for you is the day you should probably go try something else.