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Photo Tips

The key to taking good pictures is composition -- and this is something you can accomplish with a $3,000 professional camera, or a $5 throw-away camera. In fact, some of my best pictures were taken with a 15 year-old Minolta SLR. The below tips should help you in taking that perfect shot!

1. Strive to take pictures at sunrise and sunset. This minimizes shadows and gives a much warmer light.

2. Plan your photo shoots around the location of the sun. For instance, if you are going to shoot the Lincoln memorial, you want to do this in the morning since the low sun shines directly into the memorial. If you want to take a picture of the Jefferson Memorial from across the tidal basin, you would want to do this in the evening.

3. Leave the head-on shots for post card photographers – try and find the shot nobody has seen before. Not all pictures should be taken at eye-level. Try taking a picture close to the ground, or standing on a bench. Try to look at things differently, look straight up, look sideways -- get out of the habit of seeing the whole object and find interesting details that others may not focus on. It is not always important that viewer can recognize where the picture was taken.

4. Zoom lenses can make you lazy. Spend time to walk around the subject to find just the right angle and distance. In fact, the same picture taken far away with a telephoto or close up with a wide-angle will often look vastly different.

5. When using a telephoto lens, always use a tripod. Your pictures will be much sharper. I use tripods for ALL my shots -- every single one. Not only does the tripod give me stability, it forces me to concentrate on my subject, and get the composition just right.

6. For outdoor photography, use a polarizer filter to make the sky darker. For B&W, use a red or orange filter. (The Colkin filter system allows you to easily and inexpensively share filters between all your lenses).

7. When buying a new camera, put your money into the lenses, not the body. For my medium format camera, I have three prime lenses -- 250mm, 80mm, and 55mm. For my 35mm camera, I own two lenses: a Canon 24mm-80mm, and the Canon 70mm-200mm F/4L.

8. Learn from your pictures and be willing to return to the same place to try again. Many of my pictures were taken after two or three tries.

9. Until you get very good, stick with one kind of film. This minimizes the variables and helps you take much more consistent pictures. For B&W, I prefer Ilford Delta 100.

10. If you find the perfect shot, take several pictures trying different settings (e.g. shutter speed, aperture, filters). But make sure to log what you did so you can learn from your successes.

11. Make every shot count, but don't skimp. The upside of digital cameras is that you can take as many pictures as you would like for free. The downside of this is that people sometimes stop thinking, and stop putting real though behind their photo. They use the 'shotgun' approach, believing that they are bound to get a few good shots if they take enough pictures. As a photographer, you will never grow and mature with this approach.

On the flip side, people with film cameras rarely take ENOUGH photos. Film is cheap. Developing is fairly cheap. It is not unusual for me to take 3-6 photos of the same thing to ensure I get it right.

12. If you send away your film to be developed, carry a piece of paper with your contact information and ALWAYS take a picture of this on every roll. This will help ensure your pictures will never get lost in processing.

13. Keep in mind that the aspect ratio of a 35mm negative is different than our standard print sizes. In English, this means that an 8x10 photograph actually chops off one inch of each side -- to use the whole frame of the negative you would need to make an 8x12 print. When composing your photo, keep this in mind.

14. Digital cameras, in general, do not do black and white well. To compound the problem, inkjet printers do a very poor job reproducing black and white photos. If you want to do black and white, stick with film.

Both Kodak and Ilford make black and white film that can be processed at any one-hour color lab. Although the quality is not as good as standard black and white, some people love these films. Look for 'C-41' on the package -- this means that it can be developed with color chemicals.

15. This is not as much a tip as an interesting tidbit. To equal the resolution of a 35mm negative, you would need a 20 megapixel camera. To equal the resolution of a medium format negative (my primary format), you would need a 50 megapixel camera.

16. Support your local camera store, but also don't throw away your money. In the DC area, I use Penn Camera -- they are really a great outfit. But you can also get killer deals on the web, especially B&H Photo and Adorama. Their prices will often be lower than local camera stores, but their customer service is not 1/1,000 as good. I use the 20% rule -- if the local price is within 20% of the web price, I will buy local.

17. Any question you may have about photography has already been asked 1,000,001 times and answered 1,000,001 times. There is a web site that thousands of photographers use with AMAZING discussion groups, product reviews, photo certiques, etc., called Photo.net. I highly recommend that any budding photographer bookmark this page. When ever I have a question about photography, I go to this site and regularly find my answer within seconds.

If you are thinking of starting your own crafts business, here are a few tips to help you get started.