Take photos outside, not inside, whenever possible.

How to get good pictures from a simple digital camera

Jan. 9, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   My digital camera has no pretensions toward high tech. Then why are some of my photos so good?
   A reader asked me that a few months ago. He owned the same model camera I did. He sent a sample photo. It was terrible. He saw some examples of my photos on the Web. They looked great.
   What's my secret?
   I'll tell you. In fact, I have five secrets, not just one, and I'll tell you all of them.
   Digital cameras don't use film. They have hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of light-sensitive pickup elements where the film would be. These separate pickup elements create the image you see, pixel by pixel -- picture element by picture element, in other words.
   This is great in some big ways. You don't need film (and so you save on all the costs of developing negatives), you can erase pictures and take them again, and you can edit digital pictures on your computer. But it's not so great in other ways. Most digital cameras are ridiculously poor in one major area -- the amount of detail in a picture -- when you compare them to film cameras.
   That $15 disposable film camera you saw at the grocery store has a measurable resolution -- the amount of picture detail -- of about 6,000 by 4,000 pixels. My digital still camera has a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. That's MUCH less, and only a little greater than the resolution of your TV. It's totally dumb, right? Who would take such a low-resolution camera down to the Amazon River and take 700 pictures with it?
   But that's just what I did, and some of the photos of that Amazon trip are breathtaking. You can see a fresh sample of one of my digital photos (not from the Amazon trip) on this page, above, and you'll be able to enjoy a photo essay on that Amazon journey soon. (It will be linked to my site, so check my main page now and then.)
   How did I take such good photos with such a basic camera?
   Here are my secrets, in order of importance. You'll probably agree that most of them are just plain common sense.
   1. Avoid badly lit scenes. Modern film handles dimly lit areas well, but the sensors in digital cameras don't. They go ballistic. Here's why: The pixels (picture elements) in a dim scene (or in the dim part of an otherwise brightly lit scene) have to strain to pick up dim light, and when they do that they do a terrible job. Unless you are striving for an effect, always take pictures in the best possible light.
   2. Take photos outside, not inside, whenever possible. Turn off the flashbulb if possible. Yes, you can find brightly lit scenes indoors, and no doubt there are daylight outdoor scenes that could use some extra light from the flashbulb, but don't do it. In most cases, you need a lot of natural light to take good digital pictures.
   3. Get close. If you think you're too close to your subject, get a little closer. Make the image of your subject fill the entire frame. If your camera focuses itself to a very close distance, try out a few pictures taken only inches away from someone's face, then back off a bit and try again. If your camera doesn't have a focus adjustment, shoot a sign at varying distances and look at the images to determine what distance is too close for good focus.
   4. Frame each picture before you press the button. Create the best possible composition before taking the picture. Low-resolution images won't forgive you when you you start cropping out things you should have left out of the picture to start with. Cropping is easy to do with modern software, but you end up with less resolution than you had before unless you don't mind a smaller image size.
   5. Hold the camera steady. Isn't that what your Aunt Martha told you to do anyway back when you were 8 years old? It's amazing what you can do with a sharp low-resolution image. It's just as amazing how many pictures end up blurry. Hold the camera with two hands. Hold your elbows in, against your sides.
   6. Choose an interesting angle. This is even more important in digital photography than it is in film photography, because any picture of ordinary technical quality can look stunning if it was taken from an angle (or viewpoint) that gives the picture a fresh, new look. Hold the camera at the same level as your subjects (shoot UP at children and not down) and turn it sideways for vertical shots.
   7. Take pictures often. As a writer, I know that the best way to improve my writing is to write more. As a photographer who started taking pictures when I was 11 years old, I know that taking more pictures is the best way to improve my skills. You'll find this true for you, too.
   Finally, be sure to save all your pictures, even the ones that don't seem very good. You can improve just about any picture with inexpensive software -- Windows users who don't have the latest version of ACDSee need to get it right away, from www.acdsee.com -- and storage is cheap. A good picture is worth more than a thousand of these columns, so go out and snap away.