Brian Hughes' Border Crossings: Improve your family photos
In junior high, we took a family holiday to Washington, D.C., and nearby historic sites. In Virginia I was fascinated by the recreation of colonial Jamestown.
A torrential storm had damaged some of the buildings. Repairmen, dressed in period garb, using period tools and construction techniques, were repairing them.
While I was photographing the fascinating process with my 110 Pocket Instamatic, my mom said, “Come take a picture of your brother standing next to that cannon!”
Pshaw. I saw my little brother every day. Costumed workers using two-century-old building techniques wasn’t something quite as common.
Mom could waste her own film on Evan.
(Today with a digital camera, I would’ve snapped a shot of him just to make her happy).
Vacationers no longer need to ration film. A 1-GB memory card can store hundreds of high-resolution pictures.
Digital camera image quality improves, but travel-picture-taking techniques haven’t.
Try these pointers to improve the pix from your next vacation.
• A typical built-in flash will illuminate subjects, on average, no more than eight feet away from you. Shoot a flash photo of a stage performance and you’ll light up the backs of the heads in the three rows in front of you, distract the performers and disturb the audience. (You might also get ejected from the theater.)
Turn off the flash, steady the camera with your elbows on the arms of your seat, and shoot only when a bright scene floods the stage with light.
• For night shots, hold the camera firmly against something solid, such as a wall, lamppost, mailbox, tree trunk, etc., then squeeze the button gently.
• Don’t ration memory card space. Choose one of the highest image quality settings to assure crisp photos. Lower settings result in less detail, which is fine for e-mailing pictures to friends but results in mushy prints.
Memory cards are inexpensive: Stock up on two or three 1- or 2-GB cards rather than reducing photo resolution to cram more shots onto a card.
• Putting people into a picture of a landmark isn’t always necessary. Mom would have us trot up to the landmark while she’d back up to get the whole thing in the shot. We’d be lost somewhere in the photo.
If people must be in the photo, place them off-center and closer to the camera. (See photos.)
• Make people pix fun. Laugh, toss your hair, frame the shot so things in the background are growing out of your head. (At the Eiffel Tower and Washington Monument, it’s required. At the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it’s obligatory to pose in the foreground so it looks like you’re holding it up.)
Avoid staid, lifeless, statue-like poses that suggest no one’s enjoying the trip.
• A whole generation of picture-taking Americans was taught, for some odd reason, that peoples’ heads must be centered in the photo. Consequently, we have loads of family pictures in which there is lots of sky above subjects who have no feet. Ignore that rule.
• When taking shots out of tour bus windows, glare and reflections complete bad pictures begun by motion blur and poor framing. After the tour is over, go back to selected sites on your own to take decent photos.
If going back is not possible, hold the camera lens right up against the window to reduce glare and reflections.
• Try different angles and framing. Whenever possible, frame pictures of buildings with trees or plants to soften the stone, glass and steel.
• Only use your camera’s optical zoom. The digital “zoom” just lessens the resolution of the picture by diluting the number of pixels in the frame.
See examples of how these techniques can improve your photos on Page B6 of the Wednesday edition of the Crestview News Bulletin
