Top 3 Photography Tips for Absolute Beginners

If you have a DLSR, a point and shoot, or a camera on your smartphone.  Read and master these three tips.

I should stress, these are only for an absolute beginner; if you class yourself as an amateur photographer, you’ll probably laugh.

The Rule of Thirds

This really ought to be taught in school, wait, did I just copy that?  It’s so ridiculously easy to learn. Essentially, photos will look better if your subject isn’t centered. I know, that may sound totally counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

Every digital camera – even your iPhone – comes with a grid option, which overlays two vertical and two horizontal lines on the picture, splitting the image into 9 sections. Enable it now, and look around. Place items of visual interest onto these lines or at the intersections for a better composition. For example – if there’s a horizon in your shot, don’t place it dead in the center – align it along either the top third or bottom third line, depending on whether you want to place focus onto the sky or the ground/sea. If there’s a foreground subject – a person, or a tree – place them against either the left or right third lines.

This photo from Wikipedia (from user Moondigger) demonstrates the rule effectively.

On a related note: leading lines encourage a viewer to naturally move “through” your photograph, so including them can stimulate interest. Specifically, this might include a road, a river, or perhaps a short pathway leading out to your subject, or beyond.

Change your elevation or viewpoint

Logic dictates that you should take a photograph from eye-level right? Nope. Boring. Move the camera either up or down for a more interesting shot; obviously, this makes seeing the viewfinder somewhat more difficult, which is why a rotatable LCD screen can be a wonderful thing – you can hold the camera high above your head or on the ground, and still see what’s going on. This is especially important when photographing kids or animals.

Always take photos in full resolution and full quality

With memory cards so cheap nowadays, there’s absolutely no excuse for dropping the quality down on the camera side – if you need to optimize the image for sharing or sending over email, do this on the computer using any standard photo management app. Why take anything less than the best? The only excusable reason for doing this is to speed up the file saving process if you need to shoot continuously. For most of us, it’s simply a waste.

Now read the full article at MakeUseOf