photography by Josh Root and Hannah Thiem
Do you flip through your photo albums and/or online gallery and sigh at the fact that all your photos look the same? The vacations all might blend together into an array of similar photos. It’s easy to fall into a rut of taking the same types of travel pictures, especially when our point-and-shoot cameras seem to do all the hard work of shooting. That’s the fun of it though. Rather than photographing the same old pictures from summers past, try out some of these improvement techniques from our top 10 tips for using your digital point-and-shoot this travel season.
Make the bold move to switch the camera dial from “Auto” to “Manual.” More point-and-shoot digital cameras these days come with built-in manual modes, depending on price and manufacturer. Some point-and-shoots cameras include manual features in which users can control aperture and shutter speed, features that were once only limited to higher-priced SLRs for advanced users. That isn’t the case anymore. Some point-and-shoots now carry manual functions that give users the benefit to control shooting capabilities in varied lighting and speed situations. Users can access aperture and shutter speed usually through menu settings and then via a zoom button. Although not all compact cameras have aperture and shutter speed controls, the majority of point-and-shoots include controls for ISO speed (usually 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, and sometimes 3200), flash (On, Off, Auto, Red-eye Reduction), and sometimes exposure stops (+/- 2).
Experiment with the manual modes by first playing with the menu items. Change your menu settings by pressing the zoom toggle or main four-way controller, depending on the layout for your camera. If you have more time before the trip, remove the plastic wrap from the manual guide for some light reading about your camera’s full feature set, usually listed in the index. If you’ve lost the manual, access the manufacturer website for the online version to your camera’s guide.
Point-and-shoots tend to employ a flash-on setting as the default mode. For travel photography though, most situations will call for little flash compensation since most vacationers spend their time outdoors that is already well lit. Those with a traveler’s heart, though, should shut off the automatic flash or suppress the pop-up in situations with plenty of light. To turn off the flash, hit the multi-controller button marked with a lighting bolt icon, which is oftentimes the preferred method that point-and-shoots identify the flash setting. Change the “Flash On” setting to “Flash Off.” Use natural lighting shining through a window during the daytime in lieu of the flash.
You can also turn off the flash for nighttime shooting. To compensate for the lack of light and flash, the camera will boost ISO or slow down the shutter speed, usually automatically, unless overridden in manual mode by the user. You might want to also use a mini travel tripod or simply set the camera to an automatic timer that is included on almost every camera for the increased time it takes to capture the night picture. Turning off the flash captures the ambient light for more natural-looking pictures.
Some situations do call for the extra help of a flash such as the standard indoors settings or even outdoors in bright sun or shady days. For those outdoors situations, users should consider turning down flash to fill in for overcast or shady conditions. Not all point-and-shoots offer this adjustable feature to increase and decrease flash increments, but if your cameras does, use it. It can help properly expose your outdoor photos for even lighting.
Do a practice run on your zoom by photographing objects like flower buds and engagement rings. Sometimes, you might notice that your point-and-shoot sets off a ”!” alert that indicates the image might be blurry. Instead of putting the lens too close to the subject, move back and then zoom in using the lens.
This technique is also particularly useful for portraiture. Pulling back away from the subject allows the person to feel more relaxed for more natural smiles, but also provides less foreshortening of noses or foreheads for more realistic and prettier faces.
One of the easiest ways to vary your shooting involves some exercise. Photograph from below or shoot from above. Try getting down on the ground to spruce up landscape photography that can make small churches look like cathedrals. You can kneel or simply crouch similar to the way baseman empires do. Point your camera upwards to make things in the foreground appear much bigger than they really are. Look for things like street signs with the city behind it or flowers in the foreground with the grassy knoll in the background.
Also consider shooting overhead for a bird’s eye view. Climb to the second level of a shopping mall or other multi-floor venues, and shoot down below. Zoom out, and keep your camera parallel to the ground. This will get the tops of people’s heads, which is interesting for big crowds or people in formal wear. This is particularly effective for wide shots in banquet halls for weddings or rockers at concerts. Get the muscles moving for new perspective shooting.
Tripods are helpful for nighttime and landscape photography. Bolt the point-and-shoot to the camera socket. Be careful to twist just enough for stability, but not too tight, particularly if the socket is made from plastic, which can peel if worn away from over usage.
During nights, turn off the flash for some long exposures. The tripod will steady the camera. Try shooting cars zooming by on a busy city street. The long exposure will make the cars look like streaks and the light posts like starbursts.
You can consider using the tripod for landscape shots. Rotate the camera horizontally using the tripod. Take a series of photos at the same level for a 180-degree, panoramic view. If you choose to, you can use this series of photos for a post-processing stitching to create one long, wide photo.
To get a little more creative, try framing your subjects off center. Try depressing the shutter halfway to focus. Recompose the photo off-center, and take the shot. This should keep the focus on the subject, even if it is not at the center of frame, adding a dynamic element particularly to your portraiture photography. This should work with most point-and-shoots, but some cameras will default to the center as the point of focus. In that case, change the AF setting to “Spot” or “Tracking AF” via the menu system.
Look for interesting points in a landscape or street scene with a flash of red to make subjects stand out from their surroundings. Ask your portrait subject to wear a red scarf or hat or switch shirts to a red color. Just as in car colors, people are more likely to be drawn to red.
If you are using the manual mode on your p&s, make sure you have the settings correct for the environment you are in (i.e. ISO set to 100 for broad daylight, or 800 for nighttime, aperture and shutter speed appropriate for action or still shots). If you are suddenly inspired to take a photo, or something interesting happens, be ready to capture that moment instantaneously without fumbling to change the settings.
Also, it may seem obvious, but all users should remember that battery life during vacation is the key to successful travel shooting. Charge your batteries the night before your hike for the full amount of required time that your manual dictates. Most chargers have a blinking light that signals when the charge is complete. Remember that overcharging your battery can also lead to damage to your battery. Read the fine print on your camera’s battery charge times, as spelled out in your manual specifications.
There’s no better way to improve your travel photography than sharing your photos with other photographers through a network. Try submitting your favorites to Photo.net’s Photo Critique Forum or even informal person-to-person feedback. You’ll find that other photographers—novice users and professionals—have plenty of travel tips to offer.
Travel time is playtime and what better time to experiment with your point-and-shoot than on your vacation? Remember that a new environment means a new kind of shooting. Practice these tips prior to the trip, and then use them for live event. You might be surprised at how easy some of the techniques are. It merely requires you getting to know your point-and-shoot better to take advantage of its full feature set of manual modes and customizable settings. Beyond the camera itself, remember to mix it up a bit with varied angles. In addition to thinking about what kind of shoes to pack, consider the places of travel when deciding on what camera equipment to bring (camera bag, extra batteries, and memory card reader). A little planning can go a long way when it comes to travel photography. Using these tips can help capture you to fully capture your travels.
The Smiths were unable to conceive children and decided to use a surrogate father to start their family. On the day the proxy father was to arrive, Mr. Smith kissed his wife goodbye and said, "Well, I'm off now. The man should be here soon."
Half an hour later, just by chance, a door-to-door baby photographer happened to ring the doorbell, hoping to make a sale.
"Good morning, Ma'am", he said, "I've come to..."
"Oh, no need to explain," Mrs. Smith cut in, embarrassed, "I've been expecting you."
"Have you really?" said the photographer. "Well, that's good. Did you know babies are my specialty?"
"Well that's what my husband and I had hoped. Please come in and have a seat "
After a moment she asked, blushing, "Well, where do we start?"
"Leave everything to me. I usually try two in the bathtub, one on the couch, and perhaps a couple on the bed. And sometimes the living room floor is fun. You can really spread out there."
"Bathtub, living room floor? No wonder it didn't work out for Harry and me!"
"Well, Ma'am, none of us can guarantee a good one every time. But if we try several different positions and I shoot from six or seven angles, I'm sure you'll be pleased with the results."
"My, that's a lot!" gasped Mrs. Smith.
"Ma'am, in my line of work a man has to take his time. I'd love to be in and out in five minutes, but I'm sure you'd be disappointed with that."
"Don't I know it," said Mrs. Smith quietly.
The photographer opened his briefcase and pulled out a portfolio of his baby pictures. "This was done on the top of a bus," he said.
"Oh my God!" Mrs. Smith exclaimed, grasping at her throat.
"And these twins turned out exceptionally well - when you consider her mother was so difficult to work with."
"She was difficult?" asked Mrs. Smith.
"Yes, I'm afraid so. I finally had to take her to the park to get the job done right. People were crowding around four and five deep to get a good look."
"Four and five deep?" said Mrs. Smith, her eyes wide with amazement.
"Yes", the photographer replied. "And for more than three hours, too. The mother was constantly squealing and yelling - I could hardly concentrate, and when darkness approached I had to rush my shots. Finally, when the squirrels began nibbling on my equipment, I just had to pack it all in."
Mrs. Smith leaned forward. "Do you mean they actually chewed on your, um... equipment?"
"It's true, Ma'am, yes. Well, if you're ready, I'll set-up my tripod and we can get to work right away."
"Tripod?"
"Oh yes, Ma'am. I need to use a tripod to rest my Canon on. It's much too heavy to be held in the hand very long."
With that, Mrs. Smith fainted.
နာမည္ေက်ာ္ မင္းသားမင္းသမီးေတြ Red Carpet ေပၚမွာရို္ကတဲ႔ပံုေတြမွာ အျမဲထမ္းၾကည္႔လိုက္ရင္ လွပျပီး သြယ္သြယ္လွ်လွ်ေလးျဖစ္ေနတတ္ပါတယ္။
သည္လိုဆို ဘယ္လိုမ်ား ပိန္ေအာင္ Photo အရိုက္ခံၾကမလဲ။ အနည္းဆံုး အျမင္မွာ ၁၀ေပါင္ ေလာက္က်သြားတယ္ ထင္ေအာင္ ရိုက္လို႔ ရပါတယ္ လို႔ဖတ္ဖူး ပါတယ္။ ဒါဆိုလွ်ိဳ၀ွက္ခ်က္က ဘာမ်ားလဲ ?? Pose ပါပဲ။သည္လို ထင္ျမင္ေအာင္ ကိုယ္လံုးေပၚမွန္ေရွ႔မွာ ေအာက္ကအခ်က္ (၅) ခ်က္ အတိုင္း သတိထားျပီးလုပ္ၾကည္႔ရင္ ထူးျခားေၾကာင္းေတြ႔ရပါလိမ္႔မယ္။
- ကင္မရာခ်ိန္ထားတဲ႔ဘက္ကို ၾကည္႔တဲ႔အခါ ကိုယ္လံုးကိုလွည္႔ရာမွာ ေျခေထာက္ကိုသတိထားရပါမယ္။ ေျခေထာက္ႏွစ္ဖက္ဟာ အေ၇ွ႔ အေနာက္မ်ဥ္းျပိဳင္ ကင္မရာဘက္ကိုဦးတည္ေနရမွာျဖစ္တဲ႔အျပင္၊ ေျခႏွစ္ေခ်ာင္း ဆံုရာမွာရွိတဲ႔ေနာက္ဘက္ ေျခေထာက္အေပၚကို ကိုယ္လံုးရဲ႔အေလးခ်ိန္ကိုအားျပဳထားေပးပါ။ ခါးကိုလဲ ၃၅ ဒီဂရီေလာက္ Twist ေလးလုပ္ထားေပးဖို႔လိုပါလိမ္႔မယ္။
- ဦးေခါင္းကို ကင္မရာအေရွ႔ဘက္ကိုအနည္းငယ္ေမာ႔ျပီး ဆန္႔ထုတ္ဖို႔လိုပါတယ္။မသိမသာေလး ဆိုယံုသာ ေမာ႔ရမွာပါ ဘာျဖစ္လို႔လဲဆိုေတာ႔ ေခါင္းဟာ အေနအထားမွားသြားမယ္ဆိုခဲ႔ရင္ ေမးစိ ႏွစ္ထပ္ေပၚေနတာေပၚသြားပါလိမ္႔မယ္။ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ ေမးစိေနရာက အဆီပိုေတြျမင္သြား ပါလိမ္႔မယ္ ဒါေၾကာင္႔ အသာေလးေမာေငါ႔ ၾကည္႔လိုက္ပါ။
- ေနာက္တစ္ခ်က္က လက္ပါ။ ပံုအရိုက္ခံတဲ႔ေနရာမွာ ကိုယ္လံုးနဲ႔ လက္ေမာင္းကိုအတင္းမကပ္ထားသင္႔ပါဘူး။နည္းနည္းေလးျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ခြာျပီး အရမ္းၾကီးမေကြးလိုက္ပါနဲ႔ ၊ အရမ္းၾကီးေကြးမိခဲ႔လို႔ရွိရင္ လက္ေမာင္မွာရွိေနတဲ႔ အဆီေတြက စုေပးသလိုျဖစ္ျပီး၊ အစ္ထြက္လာႏိုင္ပါတယ္။ ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ရင္ လက္ကို တန္းလန္းၾကီးဆန္႔ထားတာထက္ နည္းနည္းေလးခြာျပီးေကြးၾကည္႔ပါ။ သိသာပါတယ္။
- အမ်ိဳးသမီးေတြရဲ႔ အခက္အခဲကေတာ႔ ပုခံုးသားေတြနဲ႔ ဗိုက္ပါပဲ။အမ်ားအားျဖင္႔ ပံုေတြမွာ ဗိုက္ကိုပိန္ခ်င္လို႔ အသက္ကိုရွိဳက္ေအာင္႔ထားတာ ေတြလုပ္တတ္ၾကပါတယ္။ မလုပ္ပါနဲ႔ ၊ဗိုက္သာပိန္သြားေပမယ္႔ ဒတ္ပံုထြက္လာလို႔ရုပ္ကိုၾကည္႔လုိက္ရင္တစ္ခုခုကို မတင္မက် မ်ိဳသိပ္ထား သလို ပံုေပါက္ေနမွာပါ။ဒါမွမဟုတ္ မသက္မသာ ပံုစံထြက္ေနပါလိမ္႔မယ္။ ဒါဆိုရင္.. ဘယ္လိုလုပ္မလဲ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို႔ ပထမဦးဆံုး ပုခံုးႏွစ္ဘက္ ကိုေနာက္ဘက္ကို နည္းနည္းလွန္လိုက္မယ္ သေဘာက ရင္ကိုနည္းနည္းဖြင္႔လိုက္သလိုေပါ႔။ ရင္ဘတ္ပိုင္းကို ကင္မရာတည္႔တည္႔အရိုက္ခံပါ။ ဒါဆို ဗိုက္ပူေနတဲ႔ေနရာက်ဥ္းသြားတယ္လို႔ ကင္မရာမွာထင္ပါလိမ္႔မယ္။ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ ကိုယ္ကိုေဘးအနည္းငယ္ေစာင္းျပီး လက္ကိုင္အိတ္ စသည္တစ္ခုခုနဲ႔ ကြယ္ေပးထားလို႔ရပါတယ္။
- ေနာက္တစ္ခုက အျပံဳးပါပဲ။ Sports Illustrated swimsuit Cover Girl ေတြလို အျပံဳးမ်ိဳးေလးနဲ႔အရိုက္ခံခ်င္ပါသလား။ အေ၀းတစ္ေနရာ ကိုၾကည္႔ေနလိုက္ပါ ျပီေတာ႔ ကင္မရာခ်ိန္ထားရာဘက္ကိုလွည္႔လိုက္ပါ။ မ်က္လံုးအၾကည္႔က ကင္မရာခလုတ္ႏွိပ္ခါနီးအခ်ိန္မွာ လွစ္ခနဲ ၾကည္လိုက္ပါ။သည္အခ်ိန္မွာပဲ ျပံဳးပါ။တစ္ခ်ိန္လံုးျပံဳးျပထားစရာမလိုပါဘူး။ မရိုက္ခင္ၾကိဳျပံဳးထားတဲ႔အျပံဳးဟာ မလတ္ဆတ္ဘူး။အားမပါဘူး အသက္မ၀င္ဘူးလို႔ ေျပာၾကလို႔ပါ။သေဘာကေတာ႔ အျပံဳးကလတ္ဆက္ေနျပီး ေရခဲထိထားတဲ႔အျပံဳ(Frozen smile) မျဖစ္ေတာ႔ဘူးေပါ႔ေနာ္။
အခန္းတခါးပိတ္ မွန္ေရွ႔ နည္းနည္းက်င္႔လိုက္ရင္အဆင္ေျပသြားမွာပါ။
ဗိုက္ေခါက္ေ၇ွ႔မွာ ပိုက္ဆံအိတ္ကာတာ။ လက္ေမာင္းအက် ကို ပ၀ါေလးကာတာ၊ လွိ်ဳကိုင္ထားတာေတြကလဲ လူကိုတနည္းအားျဖင္႔ပိန္တယ္ လို႔ထင္ေယာင္ေအာင္ ျပဳလုပ္ေပးပါတယ္။
Rgds,
