I see a lot of pictures on Facebook and Twitter of people’s families. Lots of the time, these pictures are taken outside, generally without flash. Because the primary light source is so bright, the people in the photos tend to be on the darker side. This problem can be easily fixed by using a flash. Generally, even the pop-up flash on many point and shoot cameras is more than sufficient. In order to get the flash to fire, you will most like have to force the flash to fire. This capability is available on most cameras today. Check out your camera manual or check online.

Once you turn on that flash, the people will be much brighter, but you many loss some of the atmosphere because the flash will overwhelm other sources of light. This can be addressed by adjusting the power output of the flash. This can be done using something available on most cameras called flash compensation. Again, check your manual or online for your particular camera. This capability enables you to increase or decrease the amount of light produced by the flash. Experiment with the flash compensation until you achieve the desired balance between ambient light and flash.

If you have not already, I recommend that you turn on the red eye features of most cameras to avoid this problem created by on camera flash.

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There has never been a better time to buy a new camera. You can get more for your money than ever before. Cameras with 10 mega pixels and higher are common with many advanced features.

Can’t decide if you should buy a point and shot or a SLR? If you can’t decided, a point and shot would probably be fine for you now. SLRs are more expensive and can be more complicated to operate, but give you many more capabilities to be creative. If your objective is to take pictures of family and friends and to take with you on your next vacation, a point and shot will do just fine.

So what features are the most important? The number of mega pixels is probably the most important. The higher the number the more detail captured when you take a picture. This also given you more capability to crop the picture later and still leave enough pixels to produce a quality print or image on-line. However, the higher the mega pixels, the more storage space that you will need on your memory card, so you might want to buy a memory card with a little extra capacity.

Image stabilization is another important feature. Many pictures are not as sharp as you would like because you moved, ever so slightly, as you took the picture. Using a tripod will fix the problem, but who wants something else to carry around. An image stabilization system will help significantly. Don’t ask me how they work, I have no idea.

A zoom capability is also important. A 4X or higher allows you to take close-up pictures of something far away. This is particularly helpful at zoos and any other place where you can’t get or don’t want to get to close to your subject. However, do remember that optical zoom is the only kind of zoom that you want to use. A digital zoom is actually cropping your image in camera and reduces the number of pixels actually captured.

There are many good cameras out there. I lean toward canon, but sony, nikon, and panasonic lumix are also good choices.

There are advantages to buying your camera at a retail store; you can hold the camera and check out its feature before your buy. Good places to look and maybe buy include: Best Buy, Cosco, and Wal*Mart. However don’t expect the sales person to know anything. So do your home work first. Finally, if they don’t have exactly what you want, don’t be talked into buying something different and don’t let them order anything for you.

There are a number of places to buy camera equipment online. However, buyer beware. There are many places that will try to sell you things that you don’t want and don’t need. Read reviews before you buy. There are a few that I highly recommend: B&H Photo-video(fabulous place, they have everything and customer service is great), Adorama, and Calumet.

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Raw format was introduced by the camera manufactures several years initial in the high-end digital cameras. It is a format, currently proprietary to each camera manufacture, used to store the unprocessed and uncompressed data captured by the digital sensor in a digital camera. The majority of point and shot camera stored the images, by default, in a JPEG format. This JPEG format is compressed so it takes up less space on the storage media, compact flash, for example. And various camera settings for white balance, contrast, saturation, and sharpness have already been applied to the JPEG image. None of these settings are applied to the raw format. Professional photographers started using the raw format in big numbers about five years ago due to the increase in control that raw offered to them post capture. For example, depending on who you talk to, it is possible to recover under-exposed images by up to two stops and over-exposed by one stop. This is also impossible to do using the JPEG format. Plus it is very difficult to correct color balance issues in the JPEG format.

Nowadays, the raw format is working its way into more and more point and shot cameras as the number of mega-pixels pushed ten and higher. Plus the fact that products like Lightroom and Aperture are making the process of editing and converting the raw images easier and easier and with more and more capabilities. The result is that the raw format is moving into the main stream for the masses.

If you aren’t already using the raw format, I encourage you to give it a try. Do remember, in order to process the raw images, you will need to use the software provided by the camera manufacturer or use a raw converters such as lightroom or aperture.

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Many people put the camera in the closet on a cloudy day. Actually, cloudy days are a great time to take photos. The light is a lot softer. The clouds act like a giant diffuser in photographic terms. Shadows are almost gone and light is very even on subjects. It is great time to take pictures outside of your family and friends and of those beautiful gardens that we have this time of year.

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Many people try to use the zoom feature on their cell phone cameras and wonder why their pictures are so pix-elated. The problem is that cell phones use what is known as a digital zoom. These is a nice way to say that the camera is really cropping the image. In other words, a portion of the images is actually being discarded, leaving a much smaller image which is displayed on the phone or even worse when posted online or displayed on a computer screen. You’re best bet is to get as close as you can to the subject of your photograph without using the zoom feature.

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Cell phone cameras are everywhere these days. Unfortunately, I see a lot of pictures where the subject is out of focus because the person was to close to the subject for the camera to effectively focus. Every cell phone camera is different, so the best thing to do is experiment. I have the Droid Incredible and anything closer than about 6 inches doesn’t look sharp. You’ll be happier with your pictures if you stay just a few inches further away.

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Camera manufacturers design cameras to capture an image so that 18% of the picture will be neutral gray.  This is not by accident.  Statistically, a large percentage of pictures will contain 18% neutral gray and everything will look just perfect.  However, when you photograph a scene that is not 18 percent neutral gray, the picture will either be over exposed or under exposed.  There are two classic examples.  Objects in a night scene will not be as dark as they are in the actual scene.   And when taking a picture where there is a lot of snow, the snow will not appear to be white.

This is an example of a 18% neutral gray image, a mix of light and dark areas

This is an example of an image with a predominance of dark areas

This is an example of an image with a predominance of light areas

To some extent this problem can be corrected post capture in software programs such as Lightroom or Photoshop, but it is always your best plan to capture an picture as correctly as possible in camera.

Depending on if you shot in manual mode or one of several automated capture modes, the ability to correct the problem in camera is fairly simple.  In manual mode, you either over expose by one stop when taking a picture of snow or under expose by one stop when taking a  picture of a night scene.  For all of the automated capture modes, you simply adjust the expose compensation setting to be under exposed by one stop for a night scene and over exposed by one stop for a snow scene.

The great thing about digital photography is that you can take multiple pictures if you’re not sure how much you should over or under expose a particular picture.  When in doubt, take more pictures and pick the correct one later.

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Have you ever got a print back from the lab or a print shop only to find that the head of your eight year go has been cut off at the shoulders?  How does this happen?

The answer can be found in a better understanding of actual image size versus the actual size of the paper on which the image is being printed.  When you take a pictures with your camera, the image is captured with a specific aspect ratio.  In order words, so many pixels wide by so many pixels high.  Issues start to occur when the aspect ratio of the printed page is different from the aspect ratio of the image.  Please consider the following images.

Original image

Sized to 8×10

Sized to 4×6

The original image and the 4×6 have the same aspect ratio, however; the 8×10 is wider which leads to the white space to the left hand side of the image.  I have outlined the page size in red so that you can see the image size  in relationship to the page size.  These are not actual sizes, but you get the idea.

The problem can become even worse if you crop your image and do NOT maintain the aspect ratio of the original image.  For example if you crop the image to a 5×5 and then print on 4×6 paper, you will get white space on the top or bottom or both as I did here.

However, that is not the biggest problem.  The biggest problem is how most labs print images.  They try to cover the entire page even if the image size does not match the aspect ratio of the paper.  The result is that a portion of your image is actually cut off.  See the example below which really destroys the picture.

So what can you do?  Some labs will allow you to check the image aspect ratio to the print aspect ratio enabling you to adjust the image to print what you want to see.  However, short of that, your best defense is to save an origional image and then make a copy and crop for each size that you which to print.  This way you should get actually what you are expecting every time.

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