Tag Archives: digital camera

Tips For Taking Portraits

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So you’ve gotten an assignment and want to try your hand at taking a picture of a particular person for the article. If you aren’t really a photographer yet, how do you go about gettting a good shot? Here are a few tips that are based on my own experience:

  • Natural light is generally the most flattering, so take a picture outside if you can. Just make sure that the sun isn’t casting weird shadows on the person’s face.
  • Get the person to relax a bit before taking the photo. Talk to them about hobbies, kids, etc. If they are tense, it will show in the picture.
  • Take tons of different shots. You never know which one you’ll wind up using.
  • Try different angles. Do full length shots and closeups. Variety is important.
  • Count down so that they know when you’ll be snapping the picture.
  • Look at the review screen to see if the person’s eyes are open. (This is assuming you have a digital camera.)
  • Don’t get too close or the camera will not focus.
  • Watch your background. Try to avoid things such as trees growing out of the person’s head or a lot of distracting clutter.

There is no reason you shouldn’ t be able to take a photo like this, so give it a go! Here are some more tips for shooting portraits to help round things out. Remember, confidence is key, so don’t let on that you’re a novice!

Photography For Writers: Which Camera?

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One of the best tools a freelance writer can own is a good digital camera. Supplying your own images for an article can make you more marketable, and any steady reader of this blog knows we are digital camera evangelists here. Writers who don’t take their own photos wind up cheating themselves out of the extra cash you often get for supplying images together with the story.

“Which camera should I buy?” Naturally this is the first question non-photographers always ask. There are two basic kinds of cameras; the point-and-shoot (P&S) variety and digital SLRs. SLR stands for “single lens reflex” and this basically means that what you see what you look in the viewfinder is the exact image the lens sees.

I strongly advise writers not to buy the cheap P&S model. For professional use, even as a beginner, P&S cameras are too limited and you will grow out of them as soon as you learn the difference between what an indoor shot with no flash looks like at 100 ISO vs. 800 ISO. What does THAT mean? We’ll save that for another article.

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