Nobody even says “digital camera” anymore. If you say “camera,” everyone knows that it’s a digital one. Get used to it: Film is dead. You’ll have a hard time even finding film to buy these days—or places to develop it.
But that’s a good thing, really. The quality of today’s digital cameras is incredible. You never pay for film or processing, so you’re far freer to experiment, to shoot many variations of the same shot. You become a better photographer faster.
You also get to see each photo immediately after taking it—in fact, using the screen on the back of the camera, you can see the shot before you take it.
And the best feature of all: Once you’re digital, people can actually look at your photos. They don’t end up in some box in the attic; they wind up shared by e-mail, displayed on phones, posted on Facebook, or presented on your TV.
All you have to do is learn how to use the damn thing.
The end of shutter lag
You know the syndrome. You’re trying to photograph something that happens fast: a batter swinging, a dog jumping, your kid smiling, a diver diving.
But once you’ve pressed the button, there’s a delay before the camera fires—and in that time, you miss the shot. You get something like the top illustration shown at left.
That waiting time—about a half a second—is called shutter lag. That’s the interval during which the camera calculates focus and exposure. Fortunately, you can eliminate shutter lag by prefocusing.
To prefocus, aim the camera at the subject (if the subject hasn’t arrived yet, aim at something that’s the same distance from you). Half-press the shutter button. Keep your finger down. You’ll hear the camera beep, meaning “I’ve got it!”
Now when you fully press, you’ll get the shot instantly. The diver will be in the air! No shutter lag.
When not to the use the flash
Want to know when you should turn off the flash? Whenever possible.
At a play, a concert, or a sporting event, you should turn it off because it’s useless. Your flash has a range of about eight feet; beyond that, it does nothing but make you look silly.
In any other situation, you should turn it off because flash photos look terrible. The light from your flash is white, harsh, and unnatural. It bleaches people’s skin tone. And it turns the background into a black cave. Trouble is, if left to Automatic, most cameras tend to be flash-happy, firing in way too many situations.
So: Whenever you can turn off the flash, do. Unless it’s very dark, you can still get a good, sharp shot if your camera has a big sensor inside (here) or if you’ve stabilized it, as described on the following page.
To force the flash off, press the lightning-bolt button. It’s usually at the three o’clock position on the control dial on the back of the camera. And it displays a choice of flash settings on the screen. You want the one that says Flash Off (or the slash-circle symbol). Now the flash won’t fire, no matter what.
Never take another shadowy portrait
Actually, there is one time when you should turn on the flash, and it might sound crazy: When you’re taking pictures of people on a bright, sunny day.
Here’s the problem: The camera “reads” the scene and concludes that there’s tons of sunlight. But it’s not smart enough to recognize that the face you’re photographing is in shadow. You wind up with a dark, silhouetted face.
The solution is to force the flash on—a common photographer’s trick. This “fill flash” technique provides just enough light to brighten your subject’s face. It eliminates the silhouette effect. Better yet, it provides flattering front light. It softens smile lines and wrinkles and puts a nice twinkle in the subject’s eyes.
To force the flash, press the lightning-bolt button. This time, choose the simple lightning-bolt icon, as shown here; it may be labeled Force Flash or Flash On.
Bright sunlight: Don’t fall for it!
At every graduation, wedding, and playdate on earth, you can find some amateur photographer wielding a camera and saying, “Hey, come over here in the sun so we have some light!”
If there’s a professional photographer nearby, there’s probably some forehead-slapping going on, too.
Direct sunlight doesn’t make good portraits. It makes terrible portraits. It creates deep, unattractive shadows, cast by noses and eye sockets. It emphasizes wrinkles. And it makes your subject squint (below left).
Pros prefer open shade—go under a tree on a sunny day—or overcast skies. If you must shoot in sunlight, turn on the flash, too, as described above, and stand the subject with her back to the sun. The result is far more flattering (above right).
The only camera feature that matters
How would you feel if a salesman pressured you into buying a certain car by saying “I’m telling you, the user manual is printed on much sturdier paper than the other cars’!”?
Or if a real estate broker kept telling you to buy this one house “because it’s at a great elevation for ham-radio reception”?
You’d say, “Who cares!? That’s irrelevant!” Right?
Well, that should be your reaction whenever you read how many megapixels a camera has. All that tells you is how many millions of tiny colored dots make up one of the camera’s photos. It tells you nothing at all about whether that photo is any good. It’s a cheap marketing ploy that’s designed to make you think one camera’s photos will look better than another’s, and it’s a lie.
There is an important statistic that really matters: the sensor size, as in how big the digital “film” is. The bigger the sensor, the more light the camera can absorb—the better the colors, the sharper the image, the less blur in low light.
Just to make your life miserable, the camera companies don’t advertise this measurement. It’s not on the box. You have to go online to research it.
Even then, you have to do some math and some converting to see what you’re dealing with. Small cameras’ sensors are written as ratio fractions, like 1⁄2.3 of an inch. SLR camera sensors are measured in millimeters, like 16 mm x 22 mm. If you’re smart, you’ll use a site like sensor-size.com to do the conversion for you.
But you get the point: Bigger sensors are better!
The tripod in every room of your life
In low light, you run the risk of blurry photos. That’s just the way it is.
It’s because the shutter has to stay open long enough to soak up enough light—and while it’s open, anything that moves becomes blurry. Including the camera: If the camera moves even slightly, the whole picture comes out blurry.
The trick, therefore, is to stabilize the camera. You’re usually told to use a tripod. But for the average person on a trip, at a school function, or just bopping through life, carrying around a tripod is a silly suggestion.
Your first thought should be finding a big stationary object that you can use to prop the camera (or your arms): a door frame, a tree, a wall, a car, a piece of furniture.
But there’s also a tripod in just about every room in every house in the world. The threads at the top of a typical lamp—where the lampshade screws on—precisely fit the tripod mount underneath your camera. Remove the lampshade, screw the camera on, and presto: You’ve got a rock-steady indoor tripod. Yours free!
Make a tripod for your pocket
In their never-ending efforts to avoid having to carry a big, heavy, sharp-edged tripod around, the world’s photographers have come up with another makeshift contraption that really works: the string tripod.
At the hardware store, pick up a quarter-inch steel eyehook. Screw it into the tripod jack on the bottom of your camera. Tie a five-foot piece of string or nylon cord to it.
Then tie a weight, like a washer, to the bottom of the string.
The whole thing costs about a dollar and collapses down into something you can fit into your pocket. When you need stability, you drop the string down, stand on the far end, tug upward on the camera to keep the cord taut, and—boom. Instant steadiness!
When sharpness counts, use the self-timer
Your camera has a self-timer feature—you know, where it counts down from ten and then takes the shot automatically. You probably think of the self-timer as a feature for group photos. (You turn it on by pressing the little clock button.)
But the self-timer has another huge advantage: It lets you fire the shutter without touching the camera. In low light and at slow shutter speeds, even the act of pushing the shutter button is enough to jiggle the camera—and that guarantees you’ll get a blurry shot.
So put the camera somewhere steady—on a table, on a car, on a tripod, on a table lamp—and let the self-timer take the picture, even if you’re not in it.
You can recover photos you’ve already deleted
The world’s camera makers know that to err is human. They’ve made it pretty hard to delete photos accidentally. You always have to confirm the deletion of a photo, sometimes more than once.
And yet every year, thousands of people still manage to delete pictures by accident that they wish they could get back.
Fortunately, your chances of retrieving deleted photos are pretty good—if you realize your mistake before you use the camera much more.
Your camera stores pictures on a memory card. Surprisingly enough, deleting photos doesn’t actually delete the data from your memory card; it only marks the space they were occupying as now “available” for new files. (The same is true on your computer, as described here.)
So if you’ve deleted some pictures from your camera’s card, and you haven’t taken many more pictures with it, get thee to the Internet. Your mission is to download a Mac or Windows program that can recover those deleted files from the card.
There are dozens of such programs. For Windows, you might try the one called Pandora Recovery (free) or Recuva (free or $25 if you want help over the phone). For the Mac, Softtote Data Recovery Free is indeed free—and worth trying first. If it doesn’t seem to find your lost files, try CardRescue or Card Data Recovery. (You can run the free trial version of these apps to see how they do at finding your deleted files. For a version that can actually recover the deleted files, though, each app is $40.)
How to photograph streaking headlights and milky streams
You’ve seen this shot in a million magazines and ads: bands of colorful light streaking across a photo, formed by the headlights of passing cars. The trick is a slow shutter speed—keeping your camera’s shutter open long enough for the cars to make some movement across the scene.
That may not be possible with a pocket cam. You really need a camera with shutter-priority mode—an SLR or an advanced pocket camera. In this mode, you can tell the camera how long to keep the shutter open—for example, a few seconds for car-taillight photos.
Stabilize your camera—tripod, wall, something. Set the shutter for four seconds. Use self-timer mode, so your finger doesn’t jiggle the camera.
When you see cars coming, trip the shutter. Examine the results. If the streaks aren’t long enough, add a couple of seconds to the shutter setting; if they’re too long, subtract a second or two. Then publish the best ones as calendar photos.
The zoom you didn’t know you had
In general, the greater the zoom power of your camera lens, the bigger the lens has to be. That’s why those sports photographers sometimes use huge lenses that look like telescopes.
But as it turns out, you actually have more zoom than you think, thanks to a little thing called cropping. (This is something you do on your computer later—not on the camera.)
The modern camera takes pictures of very high resolution—that is, a lot of pixels make up the image. So many, in fact, that you can afford to shave away a lot of them and still have enough detail for a good shot.
In effect, you can zoom in by cropping into the photo on your computer (using iPhoto, Picasa, Photoshop, or whichever photo-editing program you like). Or even on your phone. It works amazingly well.
Focus and exposure lock on your phone
Like any other camera, a smartphone makes its focusing and exposure calculations before it takes the picture. That’s probably a good time to do it.
But what are you supposed to do when you’re trying to photograph something that moves quickly? A track-and-field hurdle jumper? A diving-board diver? A car race? Anyone under the age of ten?
If you waited for your phone to calculate the focus and exposure at the point you tap the shutter button, you’d miss the shot.
Handily enough, your smartphone offers a feature that’s usually found only on professional cameras: Auto-Exposure Lock and Autofocus Lock. This feature tells the camera to calculate its focus and exposure now, before the moment of truth, and lock it in. When you finally snap the shot, there won’t be any delay.
To use it, point the phone at something that’s the same distance from you, and has the same lighting, as the subject. For example, focus at the end of the diving board before anyone’s on it.
Now:
• iPhone: Hold down your finger on that spot on the phone screen until you see the yellow square blink twice. When you lift your finger, the phrase “AE/AF Lock” appears. You’ve now locked in exposure and autofocus. (Tap again to unlock it.) You can now snap photos, rapid-fire, without ever having to wait while your iPhone rethinks the focus and exposure.
• Android: Hold down your finger on the on-screen shutter button; it beeps, meaning that you’ve locked in focus and exposure. When you lift your finger, you’ll have snapped the picture.