Learn about the action mode, burst mode and other helpful camera settings for taking sports photos of your kids and family. HP has some tips for taking better sport photos using your point-and-shoot digital camera.

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Use the small scroll bar on the right of this embedded PDF file to watch the slide show of these awesome photos!

In typical indoor situations there will probably not be enough light to take a normal hand-held well-exposed photo. There are many indoor flash photo opportunities you may be faced with. You may want to cast light on a group of people for a portrait photo. You may want to throw light into a room for an architectural photo. Or you may just want to cast light on certain objects in a lighted room that appears too dark for an exposure.

If your camera’s auto-exposure settings say that the photo would require a shutter speed slower than 1/60 of a second then you probably shouldn’t hand-hold the camera or the photo would come out blurry. The reason it would come out blurry is because the shutter would be open long enough for any minor hand shake to distort the composition. The use of a tripod or faster film will probably be needed but many of us do not regularly carry a tripod. Most photographers simply use their flash bulb when they are inside.

In order to take effective indoor flash photos there are some techniques you should keep in mind. When using the flash do not point it directly at a mirror or glass that will create a lens flare or just ruin the photo. Stand close enough to your subjects so the flash is actually effective (four to ten feet). Try to make sure your main subjects are about the same distance away from the flash as each other or some that are closer to the flash will appear brighter than ones that are farther away.

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Before you are able to take the kind of pictures you want to learn to take, it is important to think about the equipment you would like to start out with.  Probably the most important decision you will have to make is what kind of camera to buy.  There are so many options and companies now that the whole process can seem quite overwhelming.

If you are planning to become a serious photographer you should probably buy an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera.  The term single lens reflex comes from the fact that the camera has a view of the subject through a single lens and that view is reflected to the viewfinder so the photographer can see exactly what is going to be in the picture.  The Digital SLR’s are getting so advanced that it’s very hard to chose a film camera over a digital.  The main advantages of an SLR camera over a point-and-shoot digital camera is the fact that you can change lenses and filters whenever you want to.  Although new point-and-shoot cameras have increasing optical zoom and similar capabilities.  Point-and-shoot cameras are also a great idea if you just want something simple and small that is convenient to carry wherever you go.

Lenses are what your camera uses to focus on the world.  All lenses are defined by their focal length and aperture.  The focal length tells you what the angle of view is and how far it magnifies.  The aperture is the amount of light that the camera is letting into the sensor.  Any lens lower than 50 mm focal length is considered wide-angle.  Any at 50 mm is considered normal.  And any lens above 50 mm is considered a telephoto.  But there are also zoom lenses that have a variable focal length.  With a zoom lens you can cover a wide range such as 28 mm to 105 mm or 80 mm to 210 mm.

Lenses can be very expensive and very cheap and it is usually the faster lenses or the ones with the wider apertures that are the highest priced.  The faster lenses are more appealing primarily because they can produce better pictures in dim light without a tripod.  But it is quite possible to find great lenses at low prices.  Probably the first lens you buy should be broad range zoom lens such as a 28 mm to 105 mm.  The slight drawback of zoom lenses is that they are slower and they don’t quite match the sharpness and contrast of a fixed focal length lens.

Another very important item that you should definitely acquire is a ultra-violet filter (UV filter).  It is a simple piece of glass that screws on to the end of your lens and protects it from scratches, dust, dirt, moisture and fingerprints while reducing unwanted ultra-violet light.

We would also strongly recommend that you buy a tripod of some kind which is vital when there is not enough light to handhold a picture.  Some of the best pictures you’ve seen at dusk, night, or just when its cloudy have almost certainly been taken using a tripod.  Tripods allow you to use your camera’s full range of shutter speed and aperture combinations which can sometimes creating amazing unexpected results.  You should pick a tripod that is plenty sturdy but also convenient enough to carry wherever you might want it.  You also might want it tall enough so you can look through your camera at eye level.

But when you buy a UV filter you might as well get a polarizer filter as well.  A polarizer filter is most commonly used for darkening the sky by cutting through atmospheric haze.  This affect can also dramatically improve the results of black and white photography.  Polarizer filters  are also good for removing reflections from glass or water.

Memory cards are extremely convenient with digital cameras but you need to make sure you have all the space on them that you want.  It is always a good feeling to know that you can take all the pictures that you want when you think you have a good opportunity.  Most SLR’s take Compact Flash memory cards, smaller cameras usually either take Secure Digital memory cards or Sony memory sticks.

It is convenient to have only one format of memory card if you have multiple cameras because then you can interchange them even between a big SLR and a small point and shoot camera.  The smaller cameras usually use secure digital cards and Sony memory sticks but some very nice ones use compact flash cards.  One thing you must always do is remember to format the card after you unload pictures and put it back into the camera or else you won’t have the full capacity of the card.

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Exposure is the amount of light collected by the sensor in your camera during a single picture.  If the shot is exposed too long the photograph will be washed out.  If the shot is exposed too short the photograph will appear too dark.  Almost all cameras today have light meters which measure the light in the given shot and set an ideal exposure automatically.  Most people  depend on the light meter which is fine, but if  you know how to control your exposures you can get some creative and sometimes better pictures.  (The photo on the left is with low shutter speed and narrow aperture (high f/stop).

The two primary controls your camera uses for exposure are shutter speed (the amount of time the sensor is exposed to light) and aperture (the size of the lens opening that lets light into the camera).  Shutter speeds are measured in seconds and more commonly fractions of a second. (1/2000 of a second is very fast and 8′ seconds is extremely slow).  Apertures are measured in something called f/stops (a very wide aperture is f/2.8 and a very small aperture is f/19).

You might wonder why there is not just a constant shutter speed or a constant aperture so that you would only have to worry about one control.  The reason is that even though they both control the amount of light getting to the sensor they also control other aspects of the picture.  Shutter speed for example can be used to freeze subjects in midair with a fast speed or it can be used to blur water with a slow speed.  Aperture controls the depth-of-field which is what is in focus in the picture.  Aperture can be used to draw attention to one subject (like the flower on the right) by blurring the background with a wide aperture (low f/stop).  Aperture can also be used to focus everything in a picture with a narrow aperture (high f/stop).  (The photo on the left is with Wide aperture (low f/stop) and corresponding shutter speed).

On most digital SLR’s (Single Lens Reflex) cameras today you can even change the sensitivity of the sensor when collecting light which is called the ISO speed.  The common span of ISO speed is 100 to 800.  The higher the ISO speed the faster the camera collects light but it also adds more noise to the photograph than the lower speeds.  For example if your trying to take pictures in dim light without a tripod you might want to raise the ISO speed in order to get a picture that’s not blurry.  Most of the time you should keep it at a lower ISO speed if there is enough light, but it makes a big difference when there isn’t.

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Picture the scene, you are on holiday and having a wonderful time. You want to document the moment for posterity. The best way is to take a picture. There are a few simple rules to travel photography that will allow you to capture those special moments in the best way possible.

1. Have the subject’s permission

If you find an interesting subject and want to take his/her picture it is not only inconsiderate but can actually go against somebody’s belief or faith if you don’t get their permission first especially if you are capturing their face.

If you want to publish the photo or sell them then you may have to get the person to sign a release form too.

2. Lighting

To shoot a good picture, light is very important. Unless you are a shooting a child when using a flashlight shining from below really can capture a child beautifully, but this technique is not flattering on older subjects.

Soft light works much better. If they are indoors then daylight coming from a window or light coming from a reflector works best.

If shooting outside, it is still advisable to use a little fill flash on the face, or if possible use a reflector (gold ones give a warmer light). If you want to add character to a portrait then using shadow can add a mystical quality.

3. Choosing a lens

When choosing a lens, using an 80-100 tele lens (or zoom) works best for most portraits and helps get rid of unflattering details.

When using a wide angle lens be sympathetic because this type of lens can really distort a face and really make some one nose appear quite large.

4. Angles

Composition of a picture from an elevated position may be dramatic but the general rule is to hold the camera at the same height as your subjects head.

Also take your subject into account as shooting from the front with the subject nose straight into the lens can make a big nose smaller. Whilst making a small nose larger can be achieved by shooting from a slight angle.

5. The depth of field

In most cases you do not want the background to distract from the subject. If you use a tele lens it reduces the depth of field. You can reduce the field further if you shorten the exposure time and have a wider aperture.

Many very good portraits only show the most important part of the face (usually the eyes) in focus.

6. Filters

Even if you want to experiment with filters I would still recommend taking a few unfiltered shots first, then use those starting points as a guide to following photos.

Filters can help achieve the right look by softening or warming the light. In today though a lot can be done at home if you have the right software package and they are several free ones that can be easily downloaded off the web for free.

In conclusion

Overall there is a lot to consider. It is always important to have your camera at the ready as the moment can pass very quickly and if you aren’t prepared you can miss a great shot. Always be considerate of your surroundings and cultures and make sure taking a picture is appropriate. In some cultures they believe taking someone’s picture means your capture their sole too.

If you are considerate of other people you will find on your travels that people are much more and can also lead to getting a great shot that you never thought possible.

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I’m sure you’re aware of just how powerful Adobe Photoshop can be to edit your digital photos. In fact almost all professional photographers now offer "Photoshop touch ups" nowadays – my wife even jokes she’s just "Photoshopping" herself when she’s putting her make up on!

If you’re not yet competent enough with Photoshop to be able to confidently work with your digital images, then listen up, because I’ve got what you need!

A business partner and very good friend of mine – David Peters – is just about to launch the very best set of video tutorials around on "how to use Photoshop to edit your digital photos". You can follow along and be ready for the launch at his blog here: http://www.edityourdigitalphotos.com/blog/

Also if you’re brand new to Photoshop you’ll first need a good grasp of the basics to get the most out of David’s new tutorials. And there’s no better resource than David’s starter series called "Photoshop Fast Track For Newbies!" – these tutorials will show you how to master the basics of Photoshop in just 2 hours, and if you visit his site here you’ll see for yourself the incredible user feedback he get’s from happy customers.

I can confidently recommend the above 2 resources to you if you want to quickly learn the Photoshop secrets of the professionals!

Beautiful subjects and technical ability are not enough to make a good picture. Photographers must properly compose the photo, too. Composition should be pleasing and harmonious; it should help driving the viewer’s eye through our picture as we desire. Elements to consider for an attractive composition are dominant feature, balance and rhythm.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A composition looking harmonious to a person might look lackluster to another. So feel free to adapt the suggestions in this article to your needs and attitudes. Besides, try your best not to be stuck into rules and commandments, because they might be the loss of your creativity. Remember: photography is the art of seeing, not the skill of following the rules. Seeing things differently might convey different composing, which is good, because original and personal. Experiment with your creativity and inspiration; try breaking purposely the rules. This means that occasionally you will have to throw away a few shots and this is good, too. Indeed, if you have seldom some shots to dismiss, it means you are not experimenting enough. Having said that, let us list a few concepts we should refine our sensitivity for.

Main Subject

It should be self-evident that before shooting we should know exactly what our main subject is. We must do our best to convey the viewer’s attention to it, without distracting elements. This does not mean that we must exclude everything except the dominant feature in our image. In fact, we have three options:

1) Macro-photography. Show only the main subject and nothing else. This yields the advantage of no distractions to the viewer.

2) Intimate landscape. Show the main subject together with its neighborhoods to give it a spatial placing. This can be useful to make it easier to recognize the subject or to say something more about it.

3) Grand scenic. Show the subject immersed in its entire surrounding. This can be done if the surrounding is meaningful to the feelings you want to convey.

In any case, the viewer’s attention must be attracted to the main subject first, and only then he can wander around the rest of the picture. If the viewer’s eye does not go directly to the main subject as soon as he looks at the picture, the photographer has failed his mission.

Here are a few useful tips in order to emphasize the dominant feature. Put your main subject in the foreground so that it appears bigger. Typically, this requires a large depth of field. Another popular method is using converging lines toward the subject to direct the viewer’s eye where we want to. Putting the dominant feature against a contrasting colored background is effective, too. For instance, the main subject could be a splash of color against a complementary colored backdrop. Finally, a shape with a textureless background will serve the purpose of making the main subject figuring prominently. An example of this might be a flower in the desert sand.

Balance

In a photograph, more than one object or person is usually present. Each item in an image must be properly balanced. A balanced composition is pleasing to the eye because inspiring a sense of stability. Each item has a weight or visual importance that depends on the level of attraction for the viewer’s eye.

Balance can be symmetric or asymmetric. In asymmetric balance, a small object is balanced by another bigger having more or less the same visual importance. For instance, this is the case when a small highly colored or contrasted object is related to a bigger but plain or textureless item.

Rhythm

Rhythm relates to time and it implies adding the time dimension to photographs. As we saw, the viewer should be first attracted to the main subject, but then there are other (well-balanced) items in the picture he should look at. The photographer should be able to take the viewer in a journey, to involve him in the image. The journey begins with the main subject, and then the viewer should be led to the rest of the picture smoothly and with participation, along items of secondary importance. Think about this imaginary journey and try to compose it in your picture so that the viewer will be delighted to follow you and to go all over the path of your vision.

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Why is it so difficult to capture mountain images like the ones we see in those lavishly-produced coffee table books? Is it just down to equipment, or is the photographer simply better at it than we are? Was he just lucky with the weather that day? And if so, why am I never that lucky? Well, luck does come into it, having the right equipment is a necessity, and if the weather’s not right, there’s not a lot you can do about it, but you don’t have to be a John Cleare or Colin Prior to produce fantastic mountain images that will capture the essence of your perfect day in the hills.

Mountains are by nature photogenic, but it is not always easy to capture their scenic grandeur in a photograph. Serious professional photographers have to use very expensive, large-format equipment to produce the image quality required for reproduction in a printed book or magazine, but for non-professional purposes, a decent 35mm SLR camera, preferably with a wide angle lens, will produce highly acceptable results.

I use a Sigma 12-24mm wide-angle zoom lens on a Nikon D2X, usually at its wider settings, or a Tokina 20-35mm. Wide angle lenses are necessary to include the large physical area occupied by mountain scenes, and impart a sense of scale and space. It is a good idea to include some foreground detail like figures or buildings to emphasise the scale of the scene.

But owning the latest Canon or Nikon 35mm will not turn you into Ansel Adams overnight. Ask any photographer what is the most important element in the picture-taking process, and he will reply – the person behind the camera. The camera should become an extension of your eye, allowing you to frame the image in the viewfinder the way you see the scene in your mind’s eye. This is where viewpoint, composition, and lighting enter the equation., and although the best photographers do this instinctively, there are basic principles which you can adopt, and apply to your picture-taking, which will dramatically improve your photography.

Viewpoint is the first consideration – most places and objects, whether they are mountains, buildings, people, or your prize begonias, have an optimum viewpoint, from which angle they are shown to best effect. With large objects like mountains, there will be several viewpoints from which interesting and often dramatic images can be captured. These viewpoints are often well known, and books like The Welsh Peaks and the Lakeland Peaks by W.A. Poucher contain specific information about the best viewpoints for mountain photographs in these areas. There is also every chance that your normal walking routes will pass several striking viewpoints during the day.

Having selected your viewpoint, you need to compose the image in the camera, a process known as ‘framing’. Although images are often cropped prior to publication, the photographer usually composes the image in the viewfinder, and there are some handy devices employed by top photographers to improve the composition of their images. A common failing of the pictures we bring back from our day in the hills is that they seem empty and flat, when at the time we were surrounded by soaring peaks and dramatic views. To remedy this, we need to include an object of known size, your walking partner for instance, to impart scale – lack of foreground interest also makes pictures look boring, so try to include something like a cairn, a tarn, an interesting bit of rock, anything which will improve the composition. One trick landscape photographers use is to angle the camera downwards, to avoid the inclusion of too much empty sky, and to fill the frame with more of the foreground. Of course, the sky is often an interesting feature in its own right, and a dramatic cloud formation can often rescue an otherwise mediocre scene.

The primary consideration affecting the quality of any photograph is lighting, even more so when shooting landscapes. The lighting on a particular scene can change dramatically depending on several factors – the weather, time of day, season of the year, and location of the scene.

Generally speaking, lighting for mountain photography is better early or late in the day, and from autumn through to spring, when the sun is low in the sky, producing side-lighting which emphasises the shape of the mountain. During the middle of the day, and particularly in summer, the sun tends to be very overhead, and produces lighting which flattens the contours of the landscape.

Sunlight on a crisp winters day, with snow on the peaks, often produces the most satisfying results – the air is cold and clear, intensifying the blue of the sky, and definition of the landscape is at its most pronounced. In summer, heat produces a dust and photochemical haze in the atmosphere, reducing definition, and causing the sky to appear grey and colorless, even in bright sunshine.

It is also important to remember that the light moves around the points of the compass from dawn to dusk, rising in the east, passing through south in the middle of the day, and setting in the west. Light illuminates different facets of a mountain at differing times of day, so that an east-facing mountain will receive light in the morning, west-facing will be lit in the afternoon, and south-facing will receive light all day. Often a shot from a desired viewpoint must be timed to suit the timing when the light will be at its most advantageous – side-lighting generally yields better results than flat over-the-shoulder lighting.

Finally, don’t leave the camera behind because the weather is bad – often the best results occur when the light suddenly breaks through clouds after rain, glinting off wet rock. This is where the luck comes in – all the planning in the world won’t help if the weather isn’t being co-operative, but any serious photographer will be ready for that single moment when the light miraculously appears before the gloom descends once more – if your camera is permanently buried at the bottom of your rucksack under the first-aid kit and the emergency fruit cake, and you only bother to dig it out to record that summit moment, then you’re probably going to miss a multitude of mountain photo opportunities. So keep the camera accessible – that way, if the perfect panoramic landscape does appear during your day out, you’ll be able to record it – and even if every image on the film isn’t an award-winning spectacular, photographs are a great way of recording your walks.

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