Photography 101

No shot today. I went to get my "fix", but the doc's office was closed. Took a bath for nothing.
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A thought or two on taking photographs, brought on by a friend's Flickr post of yesterday. She is a professional and knows and uses these techniques.

Before you snap the shutter, try to make sure that the picture that you want is what you see through the view finder. Nothing more or less. It is called in-camera cropping, and it is the method that most professional art photographers are trained to use. It doesn't always work for snap shots of the kids or sports photos because of the obvious time limitations.

How to use in-camera cropping? If you have a zoom lens, use it. Taking a step forward or backward, left or right can make a dramatic change. Get up high or get down low to change your perspective. If you get used to using the procedure, it will make you a better photographer on any subject. You will develop an "eye" for what is correct. It worked for the likes of the immortal Ansel Adams, and it can work for you.

Sure, you can use computer software manipulation to crop images, but for every gain with this method, there is a loss; namely pixels, or picture elements, and each photo has a limited number of these. If you remove the unneeded top portion of a photo, then you have to remove something from the side(s) to make up for the lost top dimension. In other words, you are removing pixels. Then you have to enlarge the cropped image to get back to your original size, thus spreading the limited number of pixels over a larger space. This may cause grainy and artifact blemished works.

There are other easy tricks that anyone can use, such as framing the shot, but I will get into them later on.

Class dismissed. For today.