Digital Camera Tips

the podcast. My name is Chris Poulett. I'm an editor here at how stuff Works dot com, and as usual, I have sitting right here next to me, senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, except today you're gonna have to picture this in your head because we're talking about pictures again. We just did this with the megapixels. I was even going to say, can you picture that? And I realized, wait, no, I already did that. So someday your prince will come nice.

I get it. Prince p R I N T. S. C. Pallette. There did a puny. Let's listen for him to do another one. He's got two down. No, no no, no, no no, no, I'm stopping here because we have to get into our digital camera tricks and tips. Yes, So when we when we did the Megapixel podcast, we actually had several people right in and thank us for it. They were people who were who were shopping for digital cameras and they

were happy to hear that. You know, megapixels are not necessarily the end all be all when it comes to shopping for a camera. I mean, it's an important consideration, but not the only one. And uh so we thought we'd we'd share some information about ways to use your digital camera effectively and get the best out of it. And so away we go. You want me to start,

go right ahead, Okay. So one of the the big issues with taking pictures with any kind of camera really, but digital cameras in particular, are it's you know, you'll you'll see like pictures will come out a little blurry or it just doesn't it looks a little off. Um, it's because you really need to steady yourself before you take a picture. I mean this is just very basic stuff.

Uh taking a picture with one hand, Um, that's probably gonna give you the worst picture possible for that particular snapshot. I mean, you might get lucky and be have you know, nerves of steel, but really you should use both hands. Uh. If you can prop yourself against something to hold yourself steady, that might be even better. And of course the best choice of all is to use something like a tripod. Or have you seen the gorilla pods? The gorilla pods? Yeah,

gorilla pods. Okay, this is this is something that I think is uber cool. Gorilla pods are special tripods. They have articulated legs. Each leg is a series of ball joints, really, and you can use it to set your camera on uneven surfaces to create an even plane when you're taking pictures, and you can even wrap them around objects like say a lamp post, So you wrap the little legs of the tripod around the lamp post and you can hold the the camera up higher than you would be able

to stand. And of course the best part is if you use the timer on your camera, you can be in your own pictures. So you've got you've effectively turned the world into your own photographer. Um, you can use this little gorilla pod to hold up your camera wherever you like, pretty much as long as there's a surface or or verticals structure that you can attach it to

you can use it. And they have different models for different kinds of cameras, everything from your basic little compact point and shoot to uh to a full sized professional camera uh neat things. Um, so that's a there's a tip for you. Make sure you you keep your camera nice and steady and if if possible, use whatever is at your disposal in the area, and that way you can you can get a much sharper picture. Yeah. Speaking as a former newspaper reported a small paper, UM, you know,

we had to we had to do a little of everything. Um, you know, writing, editing, uh, paste up, layout, photography. Um, I could tell you that. Um, you know, if you don't happen have a tripod handy, especially in events where people are doing a lot of moving around or you need to pick up and move quickly, um, say for example sports. Um, you can always use yourself, you know, if you can get yourself in a steady position or

lean against something and steady your arm. Um, just having a poll or something to to kind of lean up against and and take some of the uh you know, humanity out of it. Yeah, exactly that that'll go a long way. And uh, you know another thing that I was thinking about, you know, just that you you know, suggest about blurry pictures. Um, light has a lot to

do with it. Yes, you're gonna have to keep in mind if you're using especially you know, using a digital camera, that the less light you have, the more likely, uh it's going to have a problem focusing. So, um, it's gonna try and compensate for the light, the lack of light in the room. And when it does that, it's

gonna leave the shutter open a little bit longer. And if you're moving, you're gonna blur the picture, so try to That's gonna be especially important to try to keep steady when you're in a low light situation because of that of that problem. Yeah, you can actually adjust the shutter speed on many cameras, so you could theoretically make the shutter move faster, but in a low light environment that may mean the camera cannot get enough light for

that picture to come out very well. But uh, there are ways to fix that in post, as we like to say. So, uh So, really when it comes to lighting and and if if you've become familiar with some photo editing software, you might be able to compensate for dim lighting a little better than you could for say,

a blurry picture. So if you have to choose between the two, I would go with UH making the shutter speed a little faster UH and dealing with the dim condition rather than UM than having to try and compensate for a blurry picture. But here's the nice thing about digital cameras. You can see what the picture looks like immediately after you take it, and it's in a digital format. You don't have to keep it. You can delete it right then and there, and you can keep on taking pictures.

So here's another tip for you. Try out your cameras settings. Now I'm really guilty of this. I tend to use three or four settings a lot because I happen to know they worked pretty well, but I don't necessarily try

all of them. And I remember I was using my digital camera UM at an event and I had accidentally changed the settings because it used a little wheel to set the settings, you know, and I accidentally thumbed when I opened it up, I thumbed the wheel to a different position, and my pictures came out very very well, and I was like, wow, I'm I've gotten a lot better at taking photos and I was like, wait a minute,

this isn't on the setting. I oh, and I realized that the setting I was using was not necessarily the most effective one for the situation I was in. So my suggestion is test out your different settings and doing in a different and several different environments, so you know, just just play with it. Find out which settings seem to work in the best situations. So for things that where you're doing a lot of fast action and bright lights, you could clearly you could make the shutter speed much

shorter than um. And if it's in a damn situation, find out if it's better to keep a longer shutter speed or if it's better to just try and deal with the dim images in a photo editing program later on down the line. Yep, yep, that's true. Um. And you know, it's it's funny that that you would say that talking about different settings on your camera. I mean, um, that little book that they give you in the box with the camera, they will actually tell you what all

those buttons and gizmos do. You are kidding me. But and this isn't really a tipper trick, but this is just sort of a thing to think about. And I don't think a lot of us think about. I think we you know, haul our camera off to shoot something in our kids soccer game, or you know, to some some other event, family event, and we shoot pictures and then we just don't think about it. You know. That's one of those cool things about a digital camera. You

can shoot as much as you want. So why not take your camera out when there's nothing riding on it? You know, there's no there's nothing big going on, there's nothing to ruin if you go out and play around with your camera settings. And it's not like you have to go spend a lot of money on film developing. You know, it's a digital camera. You can delete everything if you want. You could buy an extra smart card

for a fairly low amount, curatively speaking. And then you even have a couple of smart cards that you can swap out and you know, fill up one and you're like, well, let's try it on. Let's try taking those same photos but on a different resolution setting. That's another good tip is if you are finding that that your camera capacity fills up far too quickly, it might be that you might have set the quality standards a little too high. It turns out like that. This goes back to the

megapixels discussion we had earlier. Uh, if you said it to the to the highest settings and start taking pictures, those individual pictures are going to be very large files. Uh, and won't necessarily make your picture look better either, unless you're taking something like a very wide photo and you want the ability to zoom in afterward to a specific point and you don't want the resolution to suffer because of that. If you're or if you want to print

a really large print. In either of those cases, than yeah, you probably want to use the highest resolution possible. But otherwise you probably don't need the highest resolution and you'll be able to take far more pictures that way because the file sizes will be much smaller. That's true. And you know, I was thinking, and I was actually reading on a post by Rick Mishleski of MacLife. I hope I got his name right. Um, he did at an essay on maclif dot com about sports photography because he

was shooting pictures of his daughter's rugby game. Apparently she played for Stanford, and um, he was talking about shooting practice photos. But um, what he said was you need to uh, and this is this is again sort of not a camera trick, but it kind of is. Um, he said. One thing that to do is, if you're gonna shoot something like sports photography, watch the people, like find out who the players to watch are. If you

know number fourteen is the playmaker. Will get yourself in a situation where you're gonna be able to get a clear shot at this particular person and um kind of watch for a few minutes to see what he or she's gonna do. Because um, if you get an idea from body language that something bigs about to happen, that they're going to make a break for the ball or something like that, you can set yourself up to get a great shot. And the better you can focus on

their face even more so than the action involved. You might get a really fantastic sports photo that you might not have gotten. But um. On the other hand, it also helps to have the right equipment because some cameras aren't set up to do sports photography. You need, you know, the the ability to um to shoot a lot of photos quickly. UM, sort of like the cannon or no, not cannon, the Cassio camera that we saw at CS two thousand and eight. That shoots uh sixty frames per second.

It's usually called burst photography exactly. Um something that will shoot that and and it will even um shoot photos before you if you hold down the you know, sort of half pressed the shutter button, it will actually start shooting photos before. So it's sort of like a TVO. You can sort of back up and look at some of the photos before. So if you happen to be just a fraction of a second off and go, oh, I messed a shot, you can back up and look a seat, maybe you actually did get it scares me.

It's a camera that knows you want to take a picture. Yeah. Yeah, But the thing about that is is that's not you. That's really the camera itself. It's not a trick that you can learn to do. That trick is getting the right spending the money for it. And that was a at the time of release. And I think they've come out with a camera that supplants that even it was a thousand dollars worth of camera and a lot of

us can't afford that. Yeah, there's a six hundred dollar Cassio now that takes I think forty a second, so it's a little slower, but it's also significantly cheaper. Um. But yeah, yeah. The wonderful thing about that is, of course you can flip through all those different photos and and you know there you might think, wow, did I catch that one moment? And there's a good chance you did. If it's taking that many a second infect you may find like five or six pictures that you really have

trouble deciding on between the group of them. Um. I've got a similar, very very basic tip she kind of touched on there, which is that if you are preparing to take a photo and you know that something is about to happen, and you know, this happened to me a lot before I realized there was a very simple solution where I would take a photo of something, but I would get the moment me lee after the moment I wanted to catch, hold down the button halfway. That

will prepare your camera. It'll lock focus, so it'll find the It'll essentially it it focuses on the central figure that's in the frame. Um, it'll lock the focus and prepare for a photo. So when that moment happens, all you have to do is press it down the rest of the way and it'll take the picture. Um, this will save you the heartache of Wow, I got the back of my daughter's leg in the frame while she

ran by because I was preparing a second too late. Uh. And in a similar vein, let's say that you want to take a picture and you don't want to do the normal like let's have the person standing in the middle of the frame of the photo. You want something a little cooler. You want them to be off to the side of the frame, and you want to have a little bit of the background in there. But every time you try and take the photo, you're getting the background in focus, not the not the person, not the

person you want to capture. Uh. My suggestion then is first frame the picture as if that person is in the center half and press that button halfway down. That'll lock the focus. Then you can adjust your position so that you are pointing in the You've got the picture frame the way you really want it, and the focus will stay the same. You can press the button the rest of the way down. You got your picture. There

you go. I actually have a two that sort of relate to, uh, to the things that you touched on just then. Um. One was I was reading some of David Pogue of the New York Times. He had a post where he talked about some different things that you can do to improve your photography. And I have a a C S two thousand eight. Again, I had my little Olympus two point one megapixel, which shoots pretty good photos really, but um, there's a problem. You know, it's a it's an older point and shoot, and I kept

having trouble getting the moment like I would. I would set up and I got where I wanted to go, and I pushed the button and nothing would happen. That's called shutter lag. And pressing half pressing the button down and and having the camera focus also produces the shutter lag time because the camera is ready to take a picture.

So when you completely press the button down the rest of the way, it should go ahead and take the picture without that that extra shutter lag because there the camera is not trying to figure out what's going on. But um, I read a National geographic and uh, you know they're reasonably decent with therefore talking. They know a

thing or two about taking pictures, maybe even three. Um, they were suggesting that when you're composing your picture, you should imagine that the screen is divided up into nine segments basically like a tic tac toe board, and um, you want to center your subject at the intersection of the lines. Basically it's called the rule of thirds, and you're trying to get them in that position, uh, to basically help you compose the picture better and get more

of a better composition. Um, you know, and hopefully you won't cut off the top of their head or something. Well, that's that's actually really important because uh, you know, all the tips and tricks are not going to help you if you don't. If you don't you develop your own skill as a photographer. Um, you might get some practice, right, you might get some nice pictures, but you're not you know, you're not gonna maximize your your use of that camera

without a little work on your part. Um, I've got another basic tip that I learned about while researching this I had. It's something I did not know. If you want to take a portrait photo of someone, and the thing I read was that the best the best way to take a portrait photo is let's say you have a camera that has three to five times zooming capability.

The suggestion was to zoom all the way in like as as tight as possible and then hold the camera vertically so you get the vertical portrait picture and then move towards your subject until your subject fills the frame the way you want, and then take the photo that way, so to actually zoom in all the way. Now, if you have a camera has a more powerful zoom, like an eight to ten times, you would only zoom in about halfway for that. But that this will help you

get a better photo of your subject. And I didn't know that, um. Another good one that I didn't know is that if you're taking a picture outside, you may want to still turn your flash on. It can help the flash from your camera and the the ambient light your camera can can take all of that into consideration.

It's called fill in flash, UM, And this will help you if you want to take a picture of a subject that perhaps the lighting sources to the side or maybe slightly behind that person or object, the flash can help fill that in. However, you have to keep in mind camera flash has a very limited range. Uh, anything beyond about ten feet is not going to be effective,

so you want to keep that fairly close. So you mean, if you if you took your little point and shoot with the little any bity flash and you go to say, oh, I don't know, be Alympics and you're in the nosebleed section and you have the flash turned on. You're trying to get something that's going on down in the field. The flash might not illuminate that. Yeah, I was actually

thinking of WrestleMania. If you're at WrestleMania and you are in the nosebleed section and you want to get a picture of the Undertaker as he delivers a tombstone pile driver to John Cena thug Life, then it's that flash is probably not gonna help. Despite the fact that every time I watch WrestleMania, I'll I see our flashes in the background, people cut it out. Actually it's kind of cool looking for those of us watching at home, but for those of us who actually have attended the event,

it's just really annoying. Okay, all right, you seem to have a personal investment in this and really happened to enjoy the art of the squared circle. All right, okay, okay, um, so oh I had another one about an outdoor shot. Okay, polarizing filters. Oh yeah, So let's say that you want to take a shot of a a scene that's really really bright, there's maybe some glare, uh like I was. I took a cruise up in Alaska several years ago

and there was this gorgeous glacier. I wanted to take a picture, but it was a cloudless day, and the problem was that the ocean, water, the glacier, and the sky were almost all the same color. It was this very, very very whitish bluish color, and it was really hard to tell where the ocean ended, the sky began, and where the glacier was at all um A polarizing filter can help take that down a little bit, so you get a little better definition. But let's say that you

have a regular little point and shoot camera. You know you don't have the polarizing filter. What do you do then, Well, if you happen to have a nice pair of sunglasses, this can actually work. You can hold the sunglasses in front of the lens of your camera and take a photo there and it will act as a polarizing lens. You do want to make sure that you don't have any of the edges of the sunglasses in the frame

when you take the picture, but it does work. It's not as good as a professional filter, not by a long shot, but it can work in a pinch. You know, professional filters aren't really all that expensive. And that's something else that you can do to uh, you know, fool around with and and start seeing how what kind of

effects you can have with your photos. Um. Another nice effect that a polarizing filter has that has nothing to do with any of that is if you happen to keep one on your camera and something scratches the filter, you can replace the filter, but you may not be able to replace the lens. Or if you if you have a camera where you can replace the lens, it's gonna cost you more than a filter would. Yeah. Yeah, so it's um, you know, it's just something to consider. Um.

I have a lot more tips. We're sort of running out of time. I have a couple of weird ones that I wanted to touch on. All right, let's hit the weird ones. Okay. One of the other things that David Poke said, and I find this a little strange, he said that a lampshade socket could make a good tripod mount Uh. He said, it happens to be the exact size of a of the section that you wouldn't I guess attached to the top of the tripod um, which I'm admittedly having a little bit of difficulty visualizing.

I also think it might be a good idea to unplug the light. I was just about to say that, Um, but I don't, you know, I kind of don't deny it. I mean, if your camera's not heavy enough and it fits, and it's unplugged and you don't electrocute yourself or anyone else or destroy your camera, it seems like it might, you know, do in a pinch. I wouldn't write I

don't know. I'd have trouble recommending that, but I did read it, and you know, David Poke suggested it, so um, you should know a thing or two, the other the other weird thing, and um, you know, I don't. I read a lot of tech blogs, but I read a lot of other blogs, and one of the others the Candy Dish blog, because I'd like checking out the new

sugary stuff. Oddly, Carl from the Candy Dish blog had a link today on the day that I were recording this, to a flicker set where somebody had actually used gunny bears. It's stuck gummy bears to their flash and it they shot, the flash goes through you know, the the gummy bear distorts the light and makes It's sort of like using gels. They're different colored, like a green or red gel, and just a very odd and low cost yet sticky solution. Yep, and one wonders if fruit roll ups would work just

as well. I I don't know. You know, they can be a little harder to manage. I'm guessing depending on the size of the flash. I was just thinking, like a fruit roll up you could cut to the right side. That's true. That's true, you know, will be thinner than a gummy bear. We might need to do some research and get back to you on if nothing else that will help, I know, And I could use one of those right now. So so you're you're all tipped out. Yeah those are my my weird tips. Yeah, excellent. Well,

well you hope that you found these tips helpful. Um, I guess that just brings us to Listener made serious the dude. Okay, so today's listener mail comes from Jose and Jose has to say, Chris and Jonathan, I love your podcast and have heard all of them. There are a lot of myths when it comes to cables, and I'm glad that for the most part, you did a

lot to dispel those myths. The fact that you brought up James Randy, which is one of my favorite people, was cool too, And I happen to like Randy as well, so that was that was a no brainer. But he goes on to say, one thing that you need to consider about audio and video paraphernalia is that you set your setup is only as good as your weakest link.

Strictly from a sound quality standpoint, it doesn't do you any good if to buy a cable aside from the one that comes with your stereo, because if you open up your shiny new speaker, avoiding the warranty, in most cases, you'll notice that the cable between the connection terminal and the actual speaker is the same chief cable that came with the stereo. Even if you bought a one thousand dollar cable, your weakest link is still in the speaker and it cancels out any advantage of better cable could

have offered. Keep up the great work, guys, Jose. Thanks a lot, Jose. That's a really good point. Just like any system, it's only as strong as its weakest link. Now, if it happens to be really well made speakers and that link is fine, then sure your cable may end up being your weakest link. Or if it's something about the connectors themselves, that could be it. But you make a very good point. Uh, there's some things that are

beyond your control. And no matter how expensive a cable you buy, it's not gonna make it sound any better. That's kind of sorry to think about, you know, trying to imagine that you'd spent all this money on fancy equipment and the the people who made the fancy equipment skimped on the inside. Yes, so I will be handing

out pitch pitchforks and torches after the show. Excellent, And if you have anything you want to say to us, any comments or suggestions or questions or or even corrections, you can feel free to write us at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. And remember we have a blog up now. It's called tech stuff and you can find that right off the homepage of how stuff works dot com. And we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.

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