Photo Rant

Insanely easy things you can do so that you go from a completely miserable, incompetent photographer, to someone who can take pictures that don't make me and others cringe and weep:

1 - Set the time and date (but at least the date, and at least the year!!!) on your camera. It takes like 10 seconds to do and if you ever decide to organize your pictures, or you want to look back at them later to remember what day you did what, you will be so glad you did. When my friends and I swap photos at the end of the trip, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT their photos are dated from 2005 or 2006 or some such, and really mess up my automatic photo organization.

2 - Either include someone's whole body, or cut them off at the waist, or do a close-up of face and shoulders. DO NOT just cut off hands, feet, or legs below the knee. It looks awful every time.

3 - Don't be a slave to centering the subject. Real photographers almost never center the subject. I'm not telling you not to do it at all - it's easier to just center and it looks pretty decent. But let's say you're taking a picture of someone standing in front of a church. I've had people tell me they couldn't fit the whole church in the picture, even though I checked before I handed them the camera and I knew it was possible. The problem? They wanted to center me in the frame completely, meaning half of the church was cut off to make room for tons of empty floor/ground below my feet.

4 - Consider setting the camera down on something or just trying to hold it steady when the light calls for borderline flash. Depending on the situation, sometimes flash is unavoidable and the only way to capture the memory. But pictures with on-camera flash (which is what you have if you are reading this guide) NEVER look good. Flash eliminates shadows making faces look flat, kills the mood, causes red-eye and darkens the background. If there is some way you can take the picture without flash, it will be better every time. 

5 - It's okay if the person looks small in the frame. Pretty much all cameras nowadays have enough megapixels that I can zoom in and crop later on my computer and get as close as I want. If you zoom in too much, you lose quality if it's a digital zoom, and even on an optical zoom you lose a lot of information and picture that you could otherwise have worked with when cropping. For example, if you zoom and get a picture of someone without any extra space, you won't have enough room to rotate the picture to make the horizon straight later without cutting off their head and feet.