Hobby Photography Tips - Resource for Learning Photographers

Every digital camera owner will at some point meet the red eye problem. It is when the light from your camera flash bounces off the eye of man or woman your shooting. That is one of the number one things that can ruin your otherwise perfect picture. I bet you feel that it is annoying, and won’t encourage you as a hobby photographer to take lots of pictures of people. The technical reason for this happening is that the person you are shooting has his or her eyes wide open, which will lead to reflection of light from the pupil and back at the camera. People will end up having red eyes, where animal are more likely to get green eyes.

Now many digital cameras will have some sort of red-eye reduction function. There is then probably an option to turn this feature on or off. Today’s tip consists of making sure that you have it on at all times, only when you are in a situation where you will have direct sunlight should you turn it off. If you’re wondering about just how the red eye function works, then let’s just break it down to the basics. It works by quickly flashing a very little burst of light right at the person you are taking a picture of, right before the moment where the actual picture is taken. This short burst of light will make your subject’s pupil to close, which will make it less likely that the flash on your camera will reflect off the retina or pupil. Of course then the chance for you ending up with a red-eye photo is greatly reduced.

It is very common to think that the solution to this problem is found in photo editing software programs. This is just partly true, because there are many programs out there that will not make the eyes of your subjects appear normal. These programs use filters that most likely won’t do you much good for pictures of pets with green eyes. A recommend program though is Photoshop, which has come a long way when it comes to fixing red eyes. The best trick to avoid red or green eyes in your photos is by do a good job to begin with.

Some other good tips to avoid it, is to think about how you are pointing your camera at your subject. Try to avoid pointing your digital camera directly at the eyes, instead try to bounce some of the flash on the nearby wall, or other objects close-by, reducing the chance of red-eye on your subject.

The final red eye removal solution is this: If you have a version of Photoshop, you can just follow the tutorial here:
Red Eye Removal in Photoshop
If you don’t have Photoshop (which is a little expensive piece of software), here is two free programs that will do the same.
Red Eye Reduction with Gimp
Finally I found this little software that I also can recommend called “Better JPEG”.
Made particularly for this kind of problem. Hope you have learned something here now; have fun turning your darlings from demons to angels.

-Hobby Photography Tips

Everyone owning a digital camera surely isn’t sure what some of the functions means. It will help to learn some of the most common terms that are frequently used on digital cameras. Below we have listed some of these terms and some explanations for them.

Automatic mode – Is a setting that will automatically adjust the focus, exposure, and white-balance.

Burst mode or the continuous capture mode – Best described as a function that will quickly take a series of pictures after each other, in a timed interval, just after one press of the shutter button.

Compression – This is the process of compacting the digital data, by deleting selected information in order to reduce the file sizes.

Digital Zoom – Basically means cropping and magnifying the center part of a picture.
JPEG – Probably the most used image compression mode in digital cameras, but also the most used format to upload to the internet.

LCD – LCD stands for “Liquid-Crystal Display”, and is the little screen on the digital camera that is used for viewing the images.

Lens – The most important part of a digital camera. The lens is usually a circular and transparent glass in front of the camera that actually collects the light, focuses it on a sensor, and stores it in the memory.

Megabyte (MB) – The size of the memory capacity that the camera is capable of storing.

Pixels – Tiny dots of color that every image made by a digital camera consists of. Pixels also usually refer to the digital resolution. It should be said that one million pixels adds up to one mega-pixel.

RGB – Stands for Red, Green, Blue, and are the colors used on computers to create every other colors.

Resolution – The resolution of a camera tells you the number of pixels that are used to create the image. It is always good to have a high resolution camera, because then you will get more detail into every image taken. If you have a very high resolution then you also can print larger pictures without it looking awful.

Storage card – You cant take pictures without a storage card. This is the removable unit that holds your images taken by the camera. Commonly called a digital camera memory card.

Viewfinder – When composing the scene you want, the viewfinder is the optical window you would look through.

White Balance – If you have trouble taking a good picture because of light issues, white balancing will adjust the camera to compensate for the type of light you are having in your scene.

Today some of the least expensive digital cameras have only automatic focus, meaning the camera does all the work on bringing your subject or object into the best possible focus. There are usually three different types of focus modes when it comes to digital cameras, and they are: manual, single auto focus, and continuous auto focus. This post will address these three.

Let’s start with manual focus. It is when the camera stays out of the focus equation and you, the photographer, will make all the important decisions regarding this. If you are one of those who would like complete control on the finished product, this will be your best focus option. This setting is located in different places in different cameras, so please take a look in the manual that came with you camera. In the single auto focus mode, the camera will automatically focus when you start pressing the shutter button. It will begin either when you press the shutter button all the way down or half way down to shoot a photo. It is arguable best to only go half-way down, so that your camera gets the chance to lock the focus. Probably the best situation use this focus mode is when shooting static objects.

The third and final focus mode is of course the continuous auto focus mode. It is were the camera will continuously focus on the subjects in the photo. The good thing about this is that the camera will continuously correct the focus on your subjects when the distance from the camera changes. If you now think that this mode is best to use on moving objects, you are of course right. If you are watching for instance a race of some sort, or even airplanes during an air show. Then this mode is the way to go. You would then start pressing the shutter button half-way down, and then start moving the camera, and try to follow the object you are trying to take a picture of, while the camera will continuously keep your selected object in focus.

Like any other camera function, there are pros and cons to each function. Really the best way of learning about these three focus modes are to experiment with them, now that you understand what they were designed for.