Essentially, the best advice to make you a better photographer is "practise and experiment", but here are my top 10 tips for improving your images.
1. Change your perspective - I've written a blog on this in more detail, but basically its all about shooting from directly above, or getting down on your tummy. Make those shots more interesting than shooting at eye level.
2. Rule of thirds - There should be a setting on your camera or phone that allows you to see a grid on your screen when composing your shot. The "rule of thumb is to have your major points of interest on the third lines to create a more pleasing image. For instance; the horizon on the top third line, or a persons face to the side of your frame - not dead centre. I'll go into this in greater detail next week so stay tuned!
3. Golden hours - The most gorgeous light for portraits is around sunset and sunrise. The light is soft and has an amazing warm glow. By shooting at midday, you risk having harsh black shadows under the eyes and nose, as well as distracting highlights on foreheads.
4. White balance - Another way to alter the glow and warm tones in your images is to adjust your "white balance" This is a dial usually found with a sun, cloud, shade, or fluoro light. Experiment with taking the same shot on each of these settings and you'll get what I mean. More about white balance can be found here - http://camillaskye.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/tip-of-week.html
5. Adjust your exposure compensation - Your camera automatically sets your exposure to make sure the image includes all light parts and dark parts. However, this may make an image overly exposed or underexposed depending if you're shooting directly at the sun or at night time or in the snow etc etc. So use your little dial to wind it forwards and backwards to see the difference a couple of clicks will make.
6. Limb chopping - Be aware of how you compose your images and avoid chopping people off at the knees, chopping off feet and hands etc. Here's a diagram to give some guidance. Gren lines are ok whereas red lines may make your portrait look awkward. And some more info http://camillaskye.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/photography-tip-of-week.html
7. Lock focus and re-compose your image - this can be a little tricky but very effective if you can master it. The idea is to centre the part of the image you want in focus and press the shutter halfway to lock focus, then recompose your image so that focus point is off centre and fully click to make the exposure. Your image will be more interesting however you need to be conscious of not moving forwards or backwards when recomposing as then your focus point will be out of focus!
8. Print, print, print! Self explanatory really but we all need a reminder...I email photos taken on my phone to my PC and then save them in a special folder to print at the end of each year. There are awesome apps available to print striaght from your phone too. Check out "Instaprint", "Picture Postie" and "My Little Photobook" to name a few.
9. Backup- Don't mean to be a negative nancy but your camera or phone could go on the blink at any time, cold get broekn or worse, stolen. Make sure your constantly save those special images to a hard drive or a cloud device to avoid devastation.
10. Read your manual and use manual mode. This will improve your photographic skills ten-fold! You will have so many "aha! moments by flicking through the manual, I guarantee it! And most of all - have fun. X
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