How to take great pictures with a point and shoot, chapter 1

All pictures in the post, except this one of course, were taken with this well lived Nikon S8100

Yes it is possible to take great pictures with a point and shoot and I will show you how to in this series. You have decided to take your photography seriously but all you have right now is a point and shoot and no budget for a DSLR? No problem, shooting the crap out of a point and shoot will make you  a better photographer anyway.

Point and shoot cameras are often under estimated but they can pull off some great work when used properly. A brand new one will set you back $150 or you can go with a used one for even less. 3.2 mp and up is fine for 8X10 and try to stick with Canon or Nikon. You can also use whatever you have at hand right now but this article is not about phone "cameras".

To prove my point, I'll be using my very worn Nikon S8100 in this article. I've had this camera for 3 years now and even though it's beaten up with dust behind the lens, it still pumps out some great pictures. It's always in my camera bag and I use a lot for street photography, the point and shoot's best use in my opinion.

This chapter will concentrate on what you need to have and to know, so let's get started:

1- Get a tripod. The only piece of gear you absolutely need to have. Don't need to get a big or expensive one. Remember, you have a small and light camera, basically anything will do.

2- Put it in "P" mode. Program mode is found on most cameras of this type and it will be the setting used throughout this series. Forget the pre-set scenes modes, you won't learn anything.

3- Find the flash control and turn it off. A flash is no good beyond 10 feet and we won't be using it for now anyway.

4- Find the white balance setting, put it on AWB or Auto mode. We'll play with that a lot later.

5- Find the timer and figure out how to make it work.

6-  Find the exposure control. Usually represented by a + and - sign side by side, play with it so you are sure it moves.

7-  Find the ISO setting control. ISO can go from 80 to 1600 or more depending on the camera, make sure it works.


Now that you have all this figured out, let me explain to you the basics of photography. Light is basically captured by a sensor in the camera and the amount of light that hits it determines in great part what your image will look like. 3 factors come in to play and this is the only hard part of photography you need to wrap your brain around, shutter speed, aperture and ISO.

Shutter speed: the speed at which the shutter opens and closes to let the light in. Fast shutter speed = you can freeze movement, slow shutter speed = blurry movement.

Aperture: Like the iris in your eyes, how big the opening is in the lens. The bigger the opening the more light comes in. However, the part of the picture that will be in focus is limited in distance. The smaller the opening, the more things you have in focus but you need a lot of light to do that.

ISO: The sensitivity to light of your sensor. The higher the number, the more sensitive is is to light. However, a higher ISO leaves more "noise" or grain in your image.

The combination of these 3 elements will determine the outcome of your image and this is the basic knowledge of all photography digital or from 150 years ago.

Thankfully, your point and shoot takes care of the first 2 for you, which leaves us with the ISO to figure out and the exposure setting to do some fine tuning with.

Here are some examples of ideal ISO settings:
Bright sunny day, lots of available light: 100 ISO
Sunny day but subject in the shadows, less light: 200 ISO
Cloudy rainy day or evening, light is present but not as intense: 400 ISO
Late evening ambient light with no sun: 800 ISO
City streets at night: 1600 ISO

Now go outside and shoot some pics and play with the ISO setting. Also, use the exposure setting and go from + to - to see the difference. This setting is very practical on very sunny days when the camera has a tendency to overexpose, making your images too bright. Bring it down to -0.7 and see what happens.

That's it for now, the next chapter will be about composition.

Remember, it's not the camera that makes the photographer, the same as a pen and paper doesn't make a writer.

Gerry :)

Canon G12 remote shutter trigger for under $10

The canon G12 comes with a timer but sometimes this doesn't come in handy. The other day I was trying to make a self portrait with an off camera flash when I realized that the flash didn't work with the timer. A remote would have been great just there. A remote is also useful when you want your hands off the camera but want to be able to shoot at will unlike with the timer.

Not being one who likes to spend money for nothing, read cheap, I looked into a few instructables and found out that making a remote was pretty straight forward. So I went shopping at the electronics store.

I came out with a cellular phone headset and a small project box. I already had switches from a previous project. All I had to do was to cut the headset off, strip the wires, make some holes in the box for the switches and solder everything together. The only hard part is figuring out which wire is which. Simply strip them, plug the jack in the camera and start connecting them one by one to see what the camera does. One will activate the focus, one will activate the shutter with the other wire (or wires) being the ground. I put the switch on top for setting the focus and the red momentary switch triggers the shutter.

That's it that's all and for less than $10.

Until next time.

Gerry :)

The one thing you should know for making great pictures.

The one thing you should know for making pictures doesn't cost a dime. Everything rest in the composition of the image. Everything else is butter over that simple principle. All the expensive gear and doodads in the world can't help you a bit if you don't know how to compose a great picture.

So here's the basic guideline that has been used for hundreds, yes hundreds, of years since Leonardo Da Vinci to compose superb looking images: The rule of thirds.

The rule of thirds is simple, all your images should be divided along a grid of three vertical and horizontal sections. So if we take something simple like a sunset on a beach, you should have one third beach and two thirds sky, or vice versa. This will make a balanced image. This applies to anything else you shoot.

Every image you want to compose should be divided along these lines. Should, not have to. This rule like all others is meant to be broken at some point.

Now that's all fine and dandy but the real important part is the point of focus. That's what you want the viewer to look at first when going over the image. In the case of the sunset mentioned before, the sun would be the point of focus. But where to put it? Here's the kicker, the point of focus should be at or near one of the intersections of those lines that make up the grid.

Points of focus should be at one of those intersections

Here's how I do it in the real world. I have a grid on my view screen that divides it in 9 equal sections, 3 lines vertical, 3 lines horizontal. I find the subject that I want as my point of focus, half press the shutter to get it in focus and then place it at one of the intersection of the grid where I think it looks good and that most of the image is equally divided in three sections. I shoot and I'm done.

The point of focus here is her eye. The horizontal is divided with hair, face and chest. The vertical is background, front in light of the subject and the darker back of the subject.

Take a look at great paintings, TV, films and commercial ads and you'll see that the rule of thirds is applied everywhere. For some unkown reason, the human eye is attracted by that set up.

This one was taken on the fly. My point of focus was the Fireman on the right. I focused the subject and then composed the image. Horizontal sections are top of truck, people and car/stretcher. Vertical is truck/car, smashed front/firemen and front of truck/stretcher.

Have fun taking pictures.

Gerry :)

Taking better pictures to sell small stuff on Ebay.

One of my older efforts

One thing that I can't understand is how some sellers actually manage to sell their stuff on Ebay with horrible pictures. You want to have a nice picture to make people fall in love with your item. I always had the first picture to be the "beauty shot" and the others were of a more descriptive nature.

It's quite simple to do, it's all a question of lighting, placement, the right setting on your camera and a decent background.

The first step is to find the macro setting on your camera and learn how to use it. Lost your manual? It's online somewhere a Google search away, find it and read it. While you are there look up the brightness setting as well. Sometimes it's hard to get just the right lighting and this feature allows you to fine tune it.

Now that we have the camera all figured out, lets look at lighting. Lighting should come from the side and bounced off the other side by something white. Make sure that your light source is diffused with a piece of paper in front of it. Raw light, from a light bulb let's say, will leave ugly white spots. The best thing is a light diffusing box like I have here. They are simple to make with cardboard, tracing paper and scotch tape.

Here you see the light diffused by the tracing paper of the box, a piece of white cardboard on the left to bounce the light back. The subject is on a piece of black velvet paper. It looks like crap but it works.  :)

Next thing is a good background. Find something with no pattern to deter attention from your piece with a contrasting color. Lay it so that it goes from the "floor" and then bends over the back "wall" so as to show no crease at the bottom.

Looks good but it's two dimensional missing depth.

Lastly it is important on how you show off your piece. We tend to take pictures of an object so to show the more details. What happens then is that the piece is flat and becomes more of a 2D image with no depth. A 3/4 view is a lot better even if you lose a bit of the detail of the piece. Use your placement to show off the most important part, the one that will hook the viewer. Don't be shy and fill the image with as much of your subject as you can. You can always take other shots to show more details but those should be secondary shots, not your main one.

Better

Hope this helped.

Thanks for watching.

Gerry :)

Easy way to scan old slides

Me at the Granby Zoo in 1975

Old slides are great because most of the time they've been in a protected state for many years and they are for the most part in pristine condition.

My Grand Father and his boat Lake Champlain Vermont 1974

I recently came across a bunch of them that have been sitting in a closet for almost 30 years and since no prints existed of those images, I felt it was important to scan them into digital format.

1975 Mack Firetruck, the detail is just amazing

Now some scanners are equiped to do such things but wouldn't you know it mine is not. So I had to find an easy way to scan those slides.

Turns out I had all the necessary material at hand. I took a toilet paper roll, 2 businness cards and some masking tape to cut and assemble myslef a slide holder. I then used my digital camera in macro mode with the contraption attached to the lens, pointed it at a uniform light source and bingo, digital image of the slide. Make sure you set the camera at maximum image quality, you'll be dumping a lot of the captured image when cropping.

It doesn't look pretty but it works

After that it was just a question of cropping the image in GIMP, you can do it with any image editing program and I was done.

This is what you get with the camera and the contraption attached to it.

Some of the images are very cool and some have been out of sight and out of mind for a very long time. So go dig'em out of the closet and start reviving your past.

Same image after cropping and tweaking in an image editor.

Thanks for watching.

Gerry :)