I'm tired of looking at bad photos. Blurry pictures, bad composition, poor lighting, dark faces, over-exposed subjects, lens flare. These are just a few of the bad photos I've seen and I see them everyday.
Seriously, you don't have to be a professional photographer to take a good picture. You don't even need an expensive camera to take a good picture. Just a few simple rules will help improve your photos 1000 times.
Rule 1 - Focusing
Most cameras now have autofocus feature. But a lot of people don't know how to use this.
There are two ways to do a proper focus. One is to press the shutter button half way, just until you feel it stop. This will activate the autofocus and you should see or hear a sound when the camera is properly focused.
What most people do is complete press the button all the way until the camera takes a picture. This doesn't give the camera time to focus and they wonder why their shots are always blurry. The other thing most people do is press the button half way, let it focus, then releases the button and presses it all the way.
This completely defeats the purpose since releasing the button takes away the focus lock and then pressing all the way won't let it focus properly. This is specially true if your subject is moving or you move your position.
The second way to properly focus is to know where you should be focusing. Cameras usually have a rectangle in the middle of the viewfinder or LCD screen. This is where the focus is concentrated on.
If you put your subject in this rectangle and press the button halfway, you will get a properly focused subject in the middle of the rectangle.
But what happens if you want your subject off-center? Like taking a picture with a background like the Eiffel Tower?
Let me show you a sample I pulled from the web. Look at this photo
http://badpopcorn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/05/img_2818.jpg
This photo was composed and focused as you see it. When the photographer press the focus button, he assumed that everything will be sharp. Bam! Nice photo of the guy with the Eiffel Tower at the back.
But if you look at it closely, the sharpest object is the tree and the first platform of the Eiffel Tower. The guy is a bit blurry because the main focus where the rectangle is on the camera is the tree near the head of the guy in the picture.
How can you fix this picture?
First you focus on the eyes of the guy by putting his eyes in the middle of the rectangle. Press the shutter button halfway to focus on the eyes and lock in the focus. Then, while keeping the button pressed halfway, move the camera the the composition you see where you get the subject on the lower portion of the picture so you can see more of the background. Then press the button all the way down without releasing it.
The resulting picture will have the guy very sharp especially his eyes, then you will have the background a bit blurry.
Kind of like this photo.
http://images.inmagine.com/img/moodboard/mb515/mwi12900079.jpg
This is a bit extreme where the Eiffel Tower is really blurry, but the subject (woman) is very sharp. There are ways around this if you want the Eiffel Tower to be sharp as well. But that's for another article.
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