The Best Digital SLR For You

How to Hide Blemishes

My wife is a devoted reader of People magazine, and lately I've taken to browsing through the issues to see how the photographers choose to light their subjects.

I've been prompted to do a lot of this photo analysis due in large part to the web site Strobist, which is entirely devoted to taking exceptional photos with small, low-cost, off-camera flash units.

Part of the Strobist approach involves de-constructing how other photographers have lit a subject.

There's a method to it:

1. Find a photo that you're really taken with
2. Inspect it closely to figure out how the subject is lit
3. Give it a try on your own and try to replicate the look

That covers the backstory - now let's get back to People magazine.

They recently released their issue of the "Top 100 Most Beautiful People" and it was a bonanza for me, chock-full of celebrities lit with the most flattering light you could possibly imagine. I've spent more time than I care to admit reverse-engineering the lighting in many of the shots.

One of the big features of the issue was celebrities photographed without makeup or retouching of any kind - as natural as you or me.

What was interesting was that many of them - Jessica Alba in particular - don't look terribly different in these so-called "natural" shots as they do when they've been makeup'd and photoshopped to the Nth degree.

Mystery solved - Popular Photography posted an article about some of the photographic "tricks" that were used to hide blemishes and still make the actresses look quasi-airbrushed.

The point? Even if you're not photographing a starlet who's got a retinue of makeup artists following her around, you can leverage some of the techniques they discuss if you're working with a subject who is self-conscious about his or her looks.

Of course, you can also airbrush the digital image in Photoshop to your heart's content, but that's material for a different post.

Happy Friday!

How to pose for family portraits

The second digital SLR photography tip for today is designed to help you improve all of those static and uninteresting shots of your family members.

Posing technique is not all that hard - what's tough is getting people to follow your directions!

The good news is that there are a few simple low-impact posing guidelines that you can follow that will make your family members look more comfortable in their surroundings and not quite so much like a pack of deer in the headlights.

Once you get the hang of these few simple posing tricks, you'll be able to quickly tell family members how to position themselves, and you should see a dramatic improvement in the group shots you take during the next big family event.

So get started! Find out how to pose for family portraits.

When to change JPG quality settings

When you shell out almost $1,000 for a new digital SLR camera, setting it to capture low-quality photos may not immediately strike you as a great idea.

After all, you spent that money so that you could capture brilliant high-resolution images right?

While this may be true, let's face some facts here:

• High resolution (i.e. 10 megapixel) photos are best used for VERY large prints
• High resolution photos take up a LOT of space on memory cards and hard drives
• High resolution photos require more powerful computers to view and edit
• Not every photo you take is going to be worthy of a 20x30 inch blowup

This last point is the key to help you decide when to set your JPG quality settings to the max, and when to knock them down a bit so that you get more mileage out of your memory cards.

Find out more about when to change JPG quality settings.

When to Over-Expose

There comes a time in every digital photographer's life when the camera - complex technical tool that it is - totally botches an exposure reading.

This makes a lot of sense, really. Your digital SLR camera is designed to capture photos withing a HUGE range of lighting conditions.

Since this is the case, it tends to generalize the exposure settings. When you're faced with a scene that is either very bright or very dim, the camera has a rough time - it's expecting everything to be EVENLY lit.

Please don't think that if you leave your camera in AUTO mode all the time that it's going to be messing up exposures left and right - that's certainly not the case.

But there are a FEW discreet lighting conditions where taking manual control of your camera and intentionally over-exposing the image will prevent you from having to adjust the exposure later with an image-editing program.

When to Over-Expose

Photos in the Dark Without Flash

If you've spent a lot of time reading the Digital SLR Guide, you've probably heard me running on about the benefits of setting the ISO on your digital SLR camera.

I think it is one of the most versatile features of a digital SLR camera, and often goes un-used since most people don't have the slightest idea what ISO might be good for.

If I can't convince you that ISO is a great tool then maybe this eloquent article can: How to shed light on dark photos

Better Child Photos Through Bribery

As an occasional child portrait photographer, I have been faced with the challenge that any parent is well aware of.

Children have a tough time sitting still and smiling in front of a camera.

They want to look at the floor, the ceiling and just about anything besides the person trying to take the photo.

So how do you get a child to pose for a photo and look happy about it?

Bribery, pure and simple.

Just get the child to hide a piece of candy from the camera with the promise that they will get to consume it as soon as the photos are done.

The anticipation of the sugar high will keep them riveted as long as you need to get some great shots.

You can read more about It's the Candy at The Online Photographer.

A Lesson In Exposure

I recently answered a question for a reader of the Digital SLR Guide about histograms and what they're used for.

Briefly, a histogram is a graph (of sorts) that is available on all digital SLR cameras. The histogram shows you whether or not your photo is properly exposed.

If it looks like a bell curve, then you've got a good photo. If the graph is high on the left it means the photo is under-exposed and if it's high on the right it means the photo is over-exposed.

You can read more about histograms in this article at DigicamGuides.

But that's not the entire story, as I found out this weekend.

I was shooting a lot of holiday photos with the camera that I use the most, the Canon EOS 20D. To make sure that I was getting proper exposures even as the light was changing, I kept checking the histogram to make sure my photos were correctly exposed.

The histogram looked great. The photos did not.

Unfortunately, another camera setting was boosting the contrast of every photo that I took. So even though the photos were properly exposed (as far as the camera could tell) anything lit by direct sunlight turned out pure white.

At least half of the images were ruined by this enhanced contrast.

So what's the moral of this holiday tale of botched photography?

Before you take really important photos with your new digital SLR camera, take a whole bunch of ones you won't care about losing.

If you see something funny in the photos like colors that are too bright or highlights that are washed out, adjust the camera accordingly.

You can tweak the setting on all digital SLR cameras so that they produce images that look exactly the way that you want them to.

Once you've made the adjustments and have the camera working well with a chair in the backyard (for example) then you won't have to worry about the camera settings when you're taking a photo that really matters.

The Orphan Child Called ISO

ISO is one of the least used features on modern digital SLR cameras.

It's not surprising why: not a lot of people can rattle off what ISO means or how changing it around all the time can improve your photos.

Well, I'm here to see if I can shed some light on the subject.

There are three huge benefits of changing your ISO setting on your digital SLR camera:

1. You can take clear hand-held photos without a tripod
2. You can create a mood by adding noise to your photos
3. You can leverage some of the super-fast shutter speeds (like 1/8000)

For more information about all of this, I point you to my full article on The Orphan Child Called ISO.