How to Take Good Photos of Most Things

I take lots of photos at parties and work events. Nothing freaks me out more than when a bunch of friends insist that I be in a photo with them. I have to hand my camera over to a stranger who doesn't know the difference between aperature and sutter speed. These photos often wind up misframed and poorly exposed. I usually delete them afterwards and pray that my friends won't ever ask me to e-mail these hideous photos to them.

So I thought I'd write up some photo-taking tips. In the likely case that I'll have to hand over my camera again to someone at a future event, my hope is that they will have read this and take awesome shots as a result.



Tip #1: Frame the image properly. Framing is everything, but don't frame everything. You can fix exposure problems in Photoshop, but if you frame your image poorly, your photo is ruined. A couple of basic tips:

• Use the rule of thirds when framing your photo--make sure your subject is in the top/bottom or left/right third of the photo. Off-center is key. Never have your subject smack-dab in the middle. (This is by far the most common framing error of novice photographers).
  
• Fill the entire photo with your subject for a more dramatic shot.
  
• "Aim for the Chest" - if you're taking a group shot of people at a party, then aim the center of the camera at someone's chest. That way, the heads appear in the upper third of the photo, and you've filled the photo with people rather than the ugly dark background of a room that your flash couldn't capture. I quickly delete photos off my digital camera where the photographer put our heads smack dab in the middle of the photo: you get the bottom half of the picture with people in it, and the top half of a background of who-knows-what.

Tip #2: Take lots of different shots. Where possible, take a lot of shots with different settings. You'll have a lot of crappy pictures, but your odds of getting that one "great" shot increases dramatically each time you press the shutter button. (To get the "great" shot of one of my friends water skiing above, I had to click the shutter about 35 times!) Try taking each shot with a different setting. Some things I do to vary my shots include:

• Changing my exposure compensation to -1 and +1 stops. In fact, if you know what you're doing, you can even vary the exposure to try to get that perfect shot where everything is lit up properly and the photographs are vibrant and compelling.
  
• Changing how much I'll zoom into the subject: I might take a bunch of shots capturing more of the background than the subject, and vice versa.
  
• Changing the aperture to vary how much I want to blur the background

Tip #3: Pick an interesting vantage point. Try shooting the photo from different points of view. Experiment around. Be creative. Some of my best shots are from the ground up (my party photo above) or when i'm lying prone on the floor (my puppy photo below).



Tip #5: Blur out the background. When used appropriately, nothing looks cooler than having a photograph where your subject is in focus and your background is slightly blurred. This draws attention to what you want your audience to look at and elimiates that confusing "busy" factor where you have way too much detail in your photograph of things that you don't care about. (Notice how in my photo above, your eyes are drawn to the puppy's face since the background is out-of-focus. This makes the image so much more exciting).

Here's where aperture comes into play: to blur out your background you need to use a large f-stop (e.g. f/2.8 if you have a fast lens). The larger the aperture (you'll need to read your camera's manual to learn how to change this setting), the more blurry the background. But beware--if you don't focus properly on your subject, your background will be sharp and your subject will be blurry! Caveat lector!

Want to learn some more? Check out some of my favorite tutorials (which I still find useful every once in a while):

• Phil Greenspun's very comprehensive photo.net tutorial
  
• Kodak's photo tips for beginners.