10 Top Photography Tips
Basic Photography Tip #1:
Read The Owner’s Manual
Although your camera’s manual may not suggest
this, the very first thing to do is to locate the battery and the re-charger.
Check your manual for how to properly charge your battery, and then immediately
start charging it!
Most owners manuals don't discuss rechargeable batteries, which are perfectly safe for just about all cameras and photographic accessories (always check your product's specs, to be sure).
Are rechargeable batteries right for everybody? No. Most people will benefit from them. However, if you take less than a 100 pictures per year, you're probably better off sticking with non-rechargeable batteries.
On
the other hand, if you take more than 100 pictures/year, you will find
that rechargeable batteries will easily pay for themselves in money and
convenience.
I've been using and reusing different types of batteries from all-battery.com for the last three years on a continual basis, and have found them reliable and extremely cost effective.
Back to the owner’s manual, which most people rarely open. Most of us want to immediately begin playing with our new camera and take some pictures. Unfortunately, most digital cameras won't allow this because the camera doesn’t have any power and generally requires its own battery to be charged up.
This
forces us to wait, so we might as well use this time to go over the basics
of how the camera operates (as well as the other photography tips noted
here). If your camera has an AC adapter, although impractical for taking
pictures on the go, you can at least get familiar with your camera while
its battery is charging.
As you go through the manual, make sure you understand where each control is and how to use it.
One huge advantage a digital camera has over its film equivalent is the ability to merrily take as many photographs as you want while learning how to use the camera. At the end of the process, you can simply delete the unwanted images without costing a cent.
Filed under "lesser known photography tips," the two items you will probably want to quickly purchase are more memory (digital "film") and at least one spare battery.
It pays to go through the entire manual, if only to familiarize yourself with where everything is. Until you are familiar with all the controls, you will be referring to the manual frequently. If you don’t know how to find anything, it’s going to get pretty frustrating very quickly.
Basic Photography Tip #2: Glossary - The Most Basic of Help
If you are new to photography, you will probably find some words that are unfamiliar. The "Glossary" or "Terms" page of your manual is full of photography tips in as much as it explains what things are.
Another good basic page is the one showing where everything is located on your camera. After all, it’s important to know what the shutter priority is, but it’s also critical to be able to find it!
For some more complicated cameras, it’s not uncommon for the manufacturer to include a short reference sheet including important camera details/features that you can carry with you. As an alternative, you may want to construct your own card with what you think are the most important details.
Basic Photography Tip #3: Know your controls
There is a big difference between knowing what
your camera controls do and being able to use them quickly and effectively.
This example will illustrate the point.
Let’s say you are watching a parade that contains several floats. On one of the floats is your child. When that float is close, you want to get some shots of your child on it. If your camera is set to auto-focus, and there are many objects on the float, your camera doesn’t know which object to focus on.
You know that you want to photograph your child, but to the camera, the large fire engine seems like a more logical point of focus. One quick solution is to switch from auto focus to manual focus and focus on your child to insure he/she is in perfect focus. But, if you have to refer to the manual to figure out how to do this, your child and the float will be out of view by the time you figure it out.
Your goal is to be at least familiar enough with your camera that you can quickly change settings and still capture the photograph. Even with static subjects like architecture or landscapes, you will sometimes have to work fast to catch a particular lighting effect. Time spent getting to know your camera, and what all of the buttons and menus do will pay dividends when you need it for that once-in-a-lifetime photograph.