May 6, 2008

Photo Tutorial...

of what NOT to do.

Free Portrait Photography Tip of the Day...IMG_3467Ready to Ride

Firstly, and foremostly, when taking photographs of your darling son(s), make sure you have him/them remove his/their hand(s) from his/their crotch BEFORE hitting the shutter button. "Duh!" you say? I forget this simple tip more often than I care to admit.

IMG_3468Ready to Ride
IMG_3478Ready to Ride

Secondly, put your manually selected autofocus point (you guys do manually select your autofocus points, don't you? If not, immediately read up on these in your camera manual and start using them!!) on the thing upon which you want to focus. In this photo, it would have been nice if I had focused on either my darling husband's or my darling son's happy, delighted face, not my neighbor's white porch bannister in the background.

IMG_3479Ready to Ride

So, to recap: hands off the crotch and focus on the right spot. End of lesson. No need to thank me.

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7 comments:

Rhea said...

fabulous lesson!! lol I love the "what not to do" series. You should do a lot more of this.

Great bike, btw. Hubby and little dude look so cute together!

Keys to the Magic Travel said...

Now, this is a tutorial that I could write...I have TONS of photographic examples :-) But, yeah...I am an automatic girl on the camera. I do know how to push half way down to focus on something other than what's in the middle. Reading the manual though...yuck. Remember I need Javier?!

Anonymous said...

Okay, I simply MUST know what kind of camera you have so I can run out and purchase one in the hopes of having shots at least as half as good (terrific!) as yours!

Seriuosly. What kind of camera do you own? :o}

Brittney said...

Gotta love those boys!!!!

We are thinking about getting a trail a bike when we move to Cali. I guess Davis is a BIG biking town.

Lisa~ said...

LOL.. I need all the tips I can get darlin! I'll take it!

I do have it on auto... I found out my pictures stink if its manual... a lot of the photos I thought would be good at a bonsai garden ended up being blurry, or I also focused on the wrong spot...

Practice, practice, and practice I guess hu??

So… I guess this is my new check list to start be back on manual focus! lol

Skeller said...

Lisa-
Forget about manual focus!! (I rarely ever use it - only when I need to force the camera to take a picture than it "thinks" it can't take). No, what you want to look for is instruction on the autofocus points (in my Rebel book it's called "Selecting the AF point", in the index it says "AF point"). You choose the "point" and position it right on top of what you want to focus on (usually someone's eyeball in people pictures) and then let the camera autofocus for you.
Just keep practicing!! After several thousand photos, I'm starting to feel like I have an inkling what I'm doing ;-)

Skeller said...

Elle-
I'm currently using a Canon 5D. It's a fairly pricey camera and I love it, but there are lots and lots of cameras that will let you take amazing photos. I was thrilled with my Canon Rebel (if you scroll back a couple days, the purple flower picture was taken with the Rebel, and all my posts before mid-January were shot with the Rebel).