April 6, 2009 • 25 mins
Digital cameras can take great pictures -- especially if you know how to use them well. Tune in to hear the TechStuff guys discuss some handy digital camera tips.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot Com. Join Josh
and Chuck, the guys who bring you stuff you should know,
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(00:20):
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Hello there, everybody, it's time for tech Stuff. Welcome to
the podcast. My name is Chris Poulett. I'm an editor
here at how stuff Works dot com, and as usual,
I have sitting right here next to me, senior writer
(00:40):
Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, except today you're gonna have to
picture this in your head because we're talking about pictures again.
We just did this with the megapixels. I was even
going to say, can you picture that? And I realized, wait, no,
I already did that. So someday your prince will come nice.
(01:01):
I get it. Prince p R I N T. S. C. Pallette.
There did a puny. Let's listen for him to do
another one. He's got two down. No, no no, no, no no, no,
I'm stopping here because we have to get into our
digital camera tricks and tips. Yes, So when we when
we did the Megapixel podcast, we actually had several people
right in and thank us for it. They were people
(01:22):
who were who were shopping for digital cameras and they
were happy to hear that. You know, megapixels are not
necessarily the end all be all when it comes to
shopping for a camera. I mean, it's an important consideration,
but not the only one. And uh so we thought
we'd we'd share some information about ways to use your
digital camera effectively and get the best out of it.
And so away we go. You want me to start,
(01:45):
go right ahead, Okay. So one of the the big
issues with taking pictures with any kind of camera really,
but digital cameras in particular, are it's you know, you'll
you'll see like pictures will come out a little blurry
or it just doesn't it looks a little off. Um,
it's because you really need to steady yourself before you
take a picture. I mean this is just very basic stuff.
Uh taking a picture with one hand, Um, that's probably
(02:09):
gonna give you the worst picture possible for that particular snapshot.
I mean, you might get lucky and be have you know,
nerves of steel, but really you should use both hands. Uh.
If you can prop yourself against something to hold yourself steady,
that might be even better. And of course the best
choice of all is to use something like a tripod.
Or have you seen the gorilla pods? The gorilla pods? Yeah,
(02:32):
gorilla pods. Okay, this is this is something that I
think is uber cool. Gorilla pods are special tripods. They
have articulated legs. Each leg is a series of ball joints, really,
and you can use it to set your camera on
uneven surfaces to create an even plane when you're taking pictures,
(02:55):
and you can even wrap them around objects like say
a lamp post, So you wrap the little legs of
the tripod around the lamp post and you can hold
the the camera up higher than you would be able
to stand. And of course the best part is if
you use the timer on your camera, you can be
in your own pictures. So you've got you've effectively turned
the world into your own photographer. Um, you can use
(03:18):
this little gorilla pod to hold up your camera wherever
you like, pretty much as long as there's a surface
or or verticals structure that you can attach it to
you can use it. And they have different models for
different kinds of cameras, everything from your basic little compact
point and shoot to uh to a full sized professional
camera uh neat things. Um, so that's a there's a
(03:41):
tip for you. Make sure you you keep your camera
nice and steady and if if possible, use whatever is
at your disposal in the area, and that way you
can you can get a much sharper picture. Yeah. Speaking
as a former newspaper reported a small paper, UM, you know,
we had to we had to do a little of everything. Um,
you know, writing, editing, uh, paste up, layout, photography. Um,
(04:06):
I could tell you that. Um, you know, if you
don't happen have a tripod handy, especially in events where
people are doing a lot of moving around or you
need to pick up and move quickly, um, say for
example sports. Um, you can always use yourself, you know,
if you can get yourself in a steady position or
lean against something and steady your arm. Um, just having
(04:28):
a poll or something to to kind of lean up
against and and take some of the uh you know,
humanity out of it. Yeah, exactly that that'll go a
long way. And uh, you know another thing that I
was thinking about, you know, just that you you know,
suggest about blurry pictures. Um, light has a lot to
do with it. Yes, you're gonna have to keep in
(04:49):
mind if you're using especially you know, using a digital camera,
that the less light you have, the more likely, uh
it's going to have a problem focusing. So, um, it's
gonna try and compensate for the light, the lack of
light in the room. And when it does that, it's
gonna leave the shutter open a little bit longer. And
if you're moving, you're gonna blur the picture, so try
(05:13):
to That's gonna be especially important to try to keep
steady when you're in a low light situation because of
that of that problem. Yeah, you can actually adjust the
shutter speed on many cameras, so you could theoretically make
the shutter move faster, but in a low light environment
that may mean the camera cannot get enough light for
that picture to come out very well. But uh, there
(05:34):
are ways to fix that in post, as we like
to say. So, uh So, really when it comes to
lighting and and if if you've become familiar with some
photo editing software, you might be able to compensate for
dim lighting a little better than you could for say,
a blurry picture. So if you have to choose between
the two, I would go with UH making the shutter
(05:56):
speed a little faster UH and dealing with the dim
condition rather than UM than having to try and compensate
for a blurry picture. But here's the nice thing about
digital cameras. You can see what the picture looks like
immediately after you take it, and it's in a digital format.
You don't have to keep it. You can delete it
right then and there, and you can keep on taking pictures.
(06:18):
So here's another tip for you. Try out your cameras settings.
Now I'm really guilty of this. I tend to use
three or four settings a lot because I happen to
know they worked pretty well, but I don't necessarily try
all of them. And I remember I was using my
digital camera UM at an event and I had accidentally
(06:38):
changed the settings because it used a little wheel to
set the settings, you know, and I accidentally thumbed when
I opened it up, I thumbed the wheel to a
different position, and my pictures came out very very well,
and I was like, wow, I'm I've gotten a lot
better at taking photos and I was like, wait a minute,
this isn't on the setting. I oh, and I realized
that the setting I was using was not necessarily the
(07:00):
most effective one for the situation I was in. So
my suggestion is test out your different settings and doing
in a different and several different environments, so you know,
just just play with it. Find out which settings seem
to work in the best situations. So for things that
where you're doing a lot of fast action and bright lights,
you could clearly you could make the shutter speed much
(07:23):
shorter than um. And if it's in a damn situation,
find out if it's better to keep a longer shutter
speed or if it's better to just try and deal
with the dim images in a photo editing program later
on down the line. Yep, yep, that's true. Um. And
you know, it's it's funny that that you would say
that talking about different settings on your camera. I mean, um,
(07:47):
that little book that they give you in the box
with the camera, they will actually tell you what all
those buttons and gizmos do. You are kidding me. But
and this isn't really a tipper trick, but this is
just sort of a thing to think about. And I
don't think a lot of us think about. I think
we you know, haul our camera off to shoot something
in our kids soccer game, or you know, to some
(08:07):
some other event, family event, and we shoot pictures and
then we just don't think about it. You know. That's
one of those cool things about a digital camera. You
can shoot as much as you want. So why not
take your camera out when there's nothing riding on it?
You know, there's no there's nothing big going on, there's
nothing to ruin if you go out and play around
with your camera settings. And it's not like you have
(08:29):
to go spend a lot of money on film developing.
You know, it's a digital camera. You can delete everything
if you want. You could buy an extra smart card
for a fairly low amount, curatively speaking. And then you
even have a couple of smart cards that you can
swap out and you know, fill up one and you're like, well,
let's try it on. Let's try taking those same photos
but on a different resolution setting. That's another good tip
(08:52):
is if you are finding that that your camera capacity
fills up far too quickly, it might be that you
might have set the quality standards a little too high.
It turns out like that. This goes back to the
megapixels discussion we had earlier. Uh, if you said it
to the to the highest settings and start taking pictures,
(09:13):
those individual pictures are going to be very large files. Uh,
and won't necessarily make your picture look better either, unless
you're taking something like a very wide photo and you
want the ability to zoom in afterward to a specific
point and you don't want the resolution to suffer because
of that. If you're or if you want to print
(09:33):
a really large print. In either of those cases, than yeah,
you probably want to use the highest resolution possible. But
otherwise you probably don't need the highest resolution and you'll
be able to take far more pictures that way because
the file sizes will be much smaller. That's true. And
you know, I was thinking, and I was actually reading
on a post by Rick Mishleski of MacLife. I hope
(09:57):
I got his name right. Um, he did at an
essay on maclif dot com about sports photography because he
was shooting pictures of his daughter's rugby game. Apparently she
played for Stanford, and um, he was talking about shooting
practice photos. But um, what he said was you need
to uh, and this is this is again sort of
(10:18):
not a camera trick, but it kind of is. Um,
he said. One thing that to do is, if you're
gonna shoot something like sports photography, watch the people, like
find out who the players to watch are. If you
know number fourteen is the playmaker. Will get yourself in
a situation where you're gonna be able to get a
clear shot at this particular person and um kind of
(10:39):
watch for a few minutes to see what he or
she's gonna do. Because um, if you get an idea
from body language that something bigs about to happen, that
they're going to make a break for the ball or
something like that, you can set yourself up to get
a great shot. And the better you can focus on
their face even more so than the action involved. You
might get a really fantastic sports photo that you might
(11:02):
not have gotten. But um. On the other hand, it
also helps to have the right equipment because some cameras
aren't set up to do sports photography. You need, you know,
the the ability to um to shoot a lot of
photos quickly. UM, sort of like the cannon or no,
not cannon, the Cassio camera that we saw at CS
(11:22):
two thousand and eight. That shoots uh sixty frames per second.
It's usually called burst photography exactly. Um something that will
shoot that and and it will even um shoot photos
before you if you hold down the you know, sort
of half pressed the shutter button, it will actually start
shooting photos before. So it's sort of like a TVO.
You can sort of back up and look at some
(11:43):
of the photos before. So if you happen to be
just a fraction of a second off and go, oh,
I messed a shot, you can back up and look
a seat, maybe you actually did get it scares me.
It's a camera that knows you want to take a picture. Yeah. Yeah,
But the thing about that is is that's not you.
That's really the camera itself. It's not a trick that
you can learn to do. That trick is getting the
right spending the money for it. And that was a
(12:06):
at the time of release. And I think they've come
out with a camera that supplants that even it was
a thousand dollars worth of camera and a lot of
us can't afford that. Yeah, there's a six hundred dollar
Cassio now that takes I think forty a second, so
it's a little slower, but it's also significantly cheaper. Um.
But yeah, yeah. The wonderful thing about that is, of
course you can flip through all those different photos and
(12:26):
and you know there you might think, wow, did I
catch that one moment? And there's a good chance you did.
If it's taking that many a second infect you may
find like five or six pictures that you really have
trouble deciding on between the group of them. Um. I've
got a similar, very very basic tip she kind of
touched on there, which is that if you are preparing
(12:48):
to take a photo and you know that something is
about to happen, and you know, this happened to me
a lot before I realized there was a very simple
solution where I would take a photo of something, but
I would get the moment me lee after the moment
I wanted to catch, hold down the button halfway. That
will prepare your camera. It'll lock focus, so it'll find
(13:09):
the It'll essentially it it focuses on the central figure
that's in the frame. Um, it'll lock the focus and
prepare for a photo. So when that moment happens, all
you have to do is press it down the rest
of the way and it'll take the picture. Um, this
will save you the heartache of Wow, I got the
back of my daughter's leg in the frame while she
ran by because I was preparing a second too late. Uh.
(13:33):
And in a similar vein, let's say that you want
to take a picture and you don't want to do
the normal like let's have the person standing in the
middle of the frame of the photo. You want something
a little cooler. You want them to be off to
the side of the frame, and you want to have
a little bit of the background in there. But every
time you try and take the photo, you're getting the
background in focus, not the not the person, not the
(13:54):
person you want to capture. Uh. My suggestion then is
first frame the picture as if that person is in
the center half and press that button halfway down. That'll
lock the focus. Then you can adjust your position so
that you are pointing in the You've got the picture
frame the way you really want it, and the focus
will stay the same. You can press the button the
(14:16):
rest of the way down. You got your picture. There
you go. I actually have a two that sort of
relate to, uh, to the things that you touched on
just then. Um. One was I was reading some of
David Pogue of the New York Times. He had a
post where he talked about some different things that you
(14:36):
can do to improve your photography. And I have a
a C S two thousand eight. Again, I had my
little Olympus two point one megapixel, which shoots pretty good
photos really, but um, there's a problem. You know, it's
a it's an older point and shoot, and I kept
having trouble getting the moment like I would. I would
set up and I got where I wanted to go,
(14:56):
and I pushed the button and nothing would happen. That's
called shutter lag. And pressing half pressing the button down
and and having the camera focus also produces the shutter
lag time because the camera is ready to take a picture.
So when you completely press the button down the rest
of the way, it should go ahead and take the
picture without that that extra shutter lag because there the
camera is not trying to figure out what's going on.
(15:18):
But um, I read a National geographic and uh, you
know they're reasonably decent with therefore talking. They know a
thing or two about taking pictures, maybe even three. Um,
they were suggesting that when you're composing your picture, you
should imagine that the screen is divided up into nine
segments basically like a tic tac toe board, and um,
(15:38):
you want to center your subject at the intersection of
the lines. Basically it's called the rule of thirds, and
you're trying to get them in that position, uh, to
basically help you compose the picture better and get more
of a better composition. Um, you know, and hopefully you
won't cut off the top of their head or something. Well,
(15:59):
that's that's actually really important because uh, you know, all
the tips and tricks are not going to help you
if you don't. If you don't you develop your own
skill as a photographer. Um, you might get some practice, right,
you might get some nice pictures, but you're not you know,
you're not gonna maximize your your use of that camera
without a little work on your part. Um, I've got
another basic tip that I learned about while researching this
(16:23):
I had. It's something I did not know. If you
want to take a portrait photo of someone, and the
thing I read was that the best the best way
to take a portrait photo is let's say you have
a camera that has three to five times zooming capability.
The suggestion was to zoom all the way in like
as as tight as possible and then hold the camera
(16:44):
vertically so you get the vertical portrait picture and then
move towards your subject until your subject fills the frame
the way you want, and then take the photo that way,
so to actually zoom in all the way. Now, if
you have a camera has a more powerful zoom, like
an eight to ten times, you would only zoom in
about halfway for that. But that this will help you
(17:05):
get a better photo of your subject. And I didn't
know that, um. Another good one that I didn't know
is that if you're taking a picture outside, you may
want to still turn your flash on. It can help
the flash from your camera and the the ambient light
your camera can can take all of that into consideration.
(17:26):
It's called fill in flash, UM, And this will help
you if you want to take a picture of a
subject that perhaps the lighting sources to the side or
maybe slightly behind that person or object, the flash can
help fill that in. However, you have to keep in
mind camera flash has a very limited range. Uh, anything
(17:47):
beyond about ten feet is not going to be effective,
so you want to keep that fairly close. So you mean,
if you if you took your little point and shoot
with the little any bity flash and you go to say, oh,
I don't know, be Alympics and you're in the nosebleed
section and you have the flash turned on. You're trying
to get something that's going on down in the field.
The flash might not illuminate that. Yeah, I was actually
(18:09):
thinking of WrestleMania. If you're at WrestleMania and you are
in the nosebleed section and you want to get a
picture of the Undertaker as he delivers a tombstone pile
driver to John Cena thug Life, then it's that flash
is probably not gonna help. Despite the fact that every
time I watch WrestleMania, I'll I see our flashes in
the background, people cut it out. Actually it's kind of
(18:29):
cool looking for those of us watching at home, but
for those of us who actually have attended the event,
it's just really annoying. Okay, all right, you seem to
have a personal investment in this and really happened to
enjoy the art of the squared circle. All right, okay, okay, um,
so oh I had another one about an outdoor shot. Okay,
(18:53):
polarizing filters. Oh yeah, So let's say that you want
to take a shot of a a scene that's really
really bright, there's maybe some glare, uh like I was.
I took a cruise up in Alaska several years ago
and there was this gorgeous glacier. I wanted to take
a picture, but it was a cloudless day, and the
problem was that the ocean, water, the glacier, and the
(19:17):
sky were almost all the same color. It was this very,
very very whitish bluish color, and it was really hard
to tell where the ocean ended, the sky began, and
where the glacier was at all um A polarizing filter
can help take that down a little bit, so you
get a little better definition. But let's say that you
have a regular little point and shoot camera. You know
(19:39):
you don't have the polarizing filter. What do you do then, Well,
if you happen to have a nice pair of sunglasses,
this can actually work. You can hold the sunglasses in
front of the lens of your camera and take a
photo there and it will act as a polarizing lens.
You do want to make sure that you don't have
any of the edges of the sunglasses in the frame
(20:02):
when you take the picture, but it does work. It's
not as good as a professional filter, not by a
long shot, but it can work in a pinch. You know,
professional filters aren't really all that expensive. And that's something
else that you can do to uh, you know, fool
around with and and start seeing how what kind of
effects you can have with your photos. Um. Another nice
effect that a polarizing filter has that has nothing to
(20:24):
do with any of that is if you happen to
keep one on your camera and something scratches the filter,
you can replace the filter, but you may not be
able to replace the lens. Or if you if you
have a camera where you can replace the lens, it's
gonna cost you more than a filter would. Yeah. Yeah,
so it's um, you know, it's just something to consider. Um.
(20:45):
I have a lot more tips. We're sort of running
out of time. I have a couple of weird ones
that I wanted to touch on. All right, let's hit
the weird ones. Okay. One of the other things that
David Poke said, and I find this a little strange,
he said that a lampshade socket could make a good
tripod mount Uh. He said, it happens to be the
exact size of a of the section that you wouldn't
(21:06):
I guess attached to the top of the tripod um,
which I'm admittedly having a little bit of difficulty visualizing.
I also think it might be a good idea to
unplug the light. I was just about to say that, Um,
but I don't, you know, I kind of don't deny it.
I mean, if your camera's not heavy enough and it fits,
and it's unplugged and you don't electrocute yourself or anyone
else or destroy your camera, it seems like it might,
(21:28):
you know, do in a pinch. I wouldn't write I
don't know. I'd have trouble recommending that, but I did
read it, and you know, David Poke suggested it, so um,
you should know a thing or two, the other the
other weird thing, and um, you know, I don't. I
read a lot of tech blogs, but I read a
lot of other blogs, and one of the others the
Candy Dish blog, because I'd like checking out the new
sugary stuff. Oddly, Carl from the Candy Dish blog had
(21:53):
a link today on the day that I were recording this,
to a flicker set where somebody had actually used gunny bears.
It's stuck gummy bears to their flash and it they shot,
the flash goes through you know, the the gummy bear
distorts the light and makes It's sort of like using gels.
They're different colored, like a green or red gel, and
(22:13):
just a very odd and low cost yet sticky solution. Yep,
and one wonders if fruit roll ups would work just
as well. I I don't know. You know, they can
be a little harder to manage. I'm guessing depending on
the size of the flash. I was just thinking, like
a fruit roll up you could cut to the right side.
That's true. That's true, you know, will be thinner than
(22:34):
a gummy bear. We might need to do some research
and get back to you on if nothing else that
will help, I know, And I could use one of
those right now. So so you're you're all tipped out.
Yeah those are my my weird tips. Yeah, excellent. Well,
well you hope that you found these tips helpful. Um,
I guess that just brings us to Listener made serious
(23:00):
the dude. Okay, so today's listener mail comes from Jose
and Jose has to say, Chris and Jonathan, I love
your podcast and have heard all of them. There are
a lot of myths when it comes to cables, and
I'm glad that for the most part, you did a
lot to dispel those myths. The fact that you brought
up James Randy, which is one of my favorite people,
was cool too, And I happen to like Randy as well,
(23:22):
so that was that was a no brainer. But he
goes on to say, one thing that you need to
consider about audio and video paraphernalia is that you set
your setup is only as good as your weakest link.
Strictly from a sound quality standpoint, it doesn't do you
any good if to buy a cable aside from the
one that comes with your stereo, because if you open
up your shiny new speaker, avoiding the warranty, in most cases,
(23:44):
you'll notice that the cable between the connection terminal and
the actual speaker is the same chief cable that came
with the stereo. Even if you bought a one thousand
dollar cable, your weakest link is still in the speaker
and it cancels out any advantage of better cable could
have offered. Keep up the great work, guys, Jose. Thanks
a lot, Jose. That's a really good point. Just like
(24:06):
any system, it's only as strong as its weakest link. Now,
if it happens to be really well made speakers and
that link is fine, then sure your cable may end
up being your weakest link. Or if it's something about
the connectors themselves, that could be it. But you make
a very good point. Uh, there's some things that are
beyond your control. And no matter how expensive a cable
(24:26):
you buy, it's not gonna make it sound any better.
That's kind of sorry to think about, you know, trying
to imagine that you'd spent all this money on fancy
equipment and the the people who made the fancy equipment
skimped on the inside. Yes, so I will be handing
out pitch pitchforks and torches after the show. Excellent, And
(24:47):
if you have anything you want to say to us,
any comments or suggestions or questions or or even corrections,
you can feel free to write us at tech stuff
at how stuff works dot com. And remember we have
a blog up now. It's called tech stuff and you
can find that right off the homepage of how stuff
works dot com. And we will talk to you again
(25:07):
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how stuff Works dot Com, available now exclusively on iTunes.
Hello there, everybody, it's time for tech Stuff. Welcome to
the podcast. My name is Chris Poulett. I'm an editor
here at how stuff Works dot com, and as usual,
I have sitting right here next to me, senior writer
(00:40):
Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, except today you're gonna have to
picture this in your head because we're talking about pictures again.
We just did this with the megapixels. I was even
going to say, can you picture that? And I realized, wait, no,
I already did that. So someday your prince will come nice.
(01:01):
I get it. Prince p R I N T. S. C. Pallette.
There did a puny. Let's listen for him to do
another one. He's got two down. No, no no, no, no no, no,
I'm stopping here because we have to get into our
digital camera tricks and tips. Yes, So when we when
we did the Megapixel podcast, we actually had several people
right in and thank us for it. They were people
(01:22):
who were who were shopping for digital cameras and they
were happy to hear that. You know, megapixels are not
necessarily the end all be all when it comes to
shopping for a camera. I mean, it's an important consideration,
but not the only one. And uh so we thought
we'd we'd share some information about ways to use your
digital camera effectively and get the best out of it.
And so away we go. You want me to start,
(01:45):
go right ahead, Okay. So one of the the big
issues with taking pictures with any kind of camera really,
but digital cameras in particular, are it's you know, you'll
you'll see like pictures will come out a little blurry
or it just doesn't it looks a little off. Um,
it's because you really need to steady yourself before you
take a picture. I mean this is just very basic stuff.
Uh taking a picture with one hand, Um, that's probably
(02:09):
gonna give you the worst picture possible for that particular snapshot.
I mean, you might get lucky and be have you know,
nerves of steel, but really you should use both hands. Uh.
If you can prop yourself against something to hold yourself steady,
that might be even better. And of course the best
choice of all is to use something like a tripod.
Or have you seen the gorilla pods? The gorilla pods? Yeah,
(02:32):
gorilla pods. Okay, this is this is something that I
think is uber cool. Gorilla pods are special tripods. They
have articulated legs. Each leg is a series of ball joints, really,
and you can use it to set your camera on
uneven surfaces to create an even plane when you're taking pictures,
(02:55):
and you can even wrap them around objects like say
a lamp post, So you wrap the little legs of
the tripod around the lamp post and you can hold
the the camera up higher than you would be able
to stand. And of course the best part is if
you use the timer on your camera, you can be
in your own pictures. So you've got you've effectively turned
the world into your own photographer. Um, you can use
(03:18):
this little gorilla pod to hold up your camera wherever
you like, pretty much as long as there's a surface
or or verticals structure that you can attach it to
you can use it. And they have different models for
different kinds of cameras, everything from your basic little compact
point and shoot to uh to a full sized professional
camera uh neat things. Um, so that's a there's a
(03:41):
tip for you. Make sure you you keep your camera
nice and steady and if if possible, use whatever is
at your disposal in the area, and that way you
can you can get a much sharper picture. Yeah. Speaking
as a former newspaper reported a small paper, UM, you know,
we had to we had to do a little of everything. Um,
you know, writing, editing, uh, paste up, layout, photography. Um,
(04:06):
I could tell you that. Um, you know, if you
don't happen have a tripod handy, especially in events where
people are doing a lot of moving around or you
need to pick up and move quickly, um, say for
example sports. Um, you can always use yourself, you know,
if you can get yourself in a steady position or
lean against something and steady your arm. Um, just having
(04:28):
a poll or something to to kind of lean up
against and and take some of the uh you know,
humanity out of it. Yeah, exactly that that'll go a
long way. And uh, you know another thing that I
was thinking about, you know, just that you you know,
suggest about blurry pictures. Um, light has a lot to
do with it. Yes, you're gonna have to keep in
(04:49):
mind if you're using especially you know, using a digital camera,
that the less light you have, the more likely, uh
it's going to have a problem focusing. So, um, it's
gonna try and compensate for the light, the lack of
light in the room. And when it does that, it's
gonna leave the shutter open a little bit longer. And
if you're moving, you're gonna blur the picture, so try
(05:13):
to That's gonna be especially important to try to keep
steady when you're in a low light situation because of
that of that problem. Yeah, you can actually adjust the
shutter speed on many cameras, so you could theoretically make
the shutter move faster, but in a low light environment
that may mean the camera cannot get enough light for
that picture to come out very well. But uh, there
(05:34):
are ways to fix that in post, as we like
to say. So, uh So, really when it comes to
lighting and and if if you've become familiar with some
photo editing software, you might be able to compensate for
dim lighting a little better than you could for say,
a blurry picture. So if you have to choose between
the two, I would go with UH making the shutter
(05:56):
speed a little faster UH and dealing with the dim
condition rather than UM than having to try and compensate
for a blurry picture. But here's the nice thing about
digital cameras. You can see what the picture looks like
immediately after you take it, and it's in a digital format.
You don't have to keep it. You can delete it
right then and there, and you can keep on taking pictures.
(06:18):
So here's another tip for you. Try out your cameras settings.
Now I'm really guilty of this. I tend to use
three or four settings a lot because I happen to
know they worked pretty well, but I don't necessarily try
all of them. And I remember I was using my
digital camera UM at an event and I had accidentally
(06:38):
changed the settings because it used a little wheel to
set the settings, you know, and I accidentally thumbed when
I opened it up, I thumbed the wheel to a
different position, and my pictures came out very very well,
and I was like, wow, I'm I've gotten a lot
better at taking photos and I was like, wait a minute,
this isn't on the setting. I oh, and I realized
that the setting I was using was not necessarily the
(07:00):
most effective one for the situation I was in. So
my suggestion is test out your different settings and doing
in a different and several different environments, so you know,
just just play with it. Find out which settings seem
to work in the best situations. So for things that
where you're doing a lot of fast action and bright lights,
you could clearly you could make the shutter speed much
(07:23):
shorter than um. And if it's in a damn situation,
find out if it's better to keep a longer shutter
speed or if it's better to just try and deal
with the dim images in a photo editing program later
on down the line. Yep, yep, that's true. Um. And
you know, it's it's funny that that you would say
that talking about different settings on your camera. I mean, um,
(07:47):
that little book that they give you in the box
with the camera, they will actually tell you what all
those buttons and gizmos do. You are kidding me. But
and this isn't really a tipper trick, but this is
just sort of a thing to think about. And I
don't think a lot of us think about. I think
we you know, haul our camera off to shoot something
in our kids soccer game, or you know, to some
(08:07):
some other event, family event, and we shoot pictures and
then we just don't think about it. You know. That's
one of those cool things about a digital camera. You
can shoot as much as you want. So why not
take your camera out when there's nothing riding on it?
You know, there's no there's nothing big going on, there's
nothing to ruin if you go out and play around
with your camera settings. And it's not like you have
(08:29):
to go spend a lot of money on film developing.
You know, it's a digital camera. You can delete everything
if you want. You could buy an extra smart card
for a fairly low amount, curatively speaking. And then you
even have a couple of smart cards that you can
swap out and you know, fill up one and you're like, well,
let's try it on. Let's try taking those same photos
but on a different resolution setting. That's another good tip
(08:52):
is if you are finding that that your camera capacity
fills up far too quickly, it might be that you
might have set the quality standards a little too high.
It turns out like that. This goes back to the
megapixels discussion we had earlier. Uh, if you said it
to the to the highest settings and start taking pictures,
(09:13):
those individual pictures are going to be very large files. Uh,
and won't necessarily make your picture look better either, unless
you're taking something like a very wide photo and you
want the ability to zoom in afterward to a specific
point and you don't want the resolution to suffer because
of that. If you're or if you want to print
(09:33):
a really large print. In either of those cases, than yeah,
you probably want to use the highest resolution possible. But
otherwise you probably don't need the highest resolution and you'll
be able to take far more pictures that way because
the file sizes will be much smaller. That's true. And
you know, I was thinking, and I was actually reading
on a post by Rick Mishleski of MacLife. I hope
(09:57):
I got his name right. Um, he did at an
essay on maclif dot com about sports photography because he
was shooting pictures of his daughter's rugby game. Apparently she
played for Stanford, and um, he was talking about shooting
practice photos. But um, what he said was you need
to uh, and this is this is again sort of
(10:18):
not a camera trick, but it kind of is. Um,
he said. One thing that to do is, if you're
gonna shoot something like sports photography, watch the people, like
find out who the players to watch are. If you
know number fourteen is the playmaker. Will get yourself in
a situation where you're gonna be able to get a
clear shot at this particular person and um kind of
(10:39):
watch for a few minutes to see what he or
she's gonna do. Because um, if you get an idea
from body language that something bigs about to happen, that
they're going to make a break for the ball or
something like that, you can set yourself up to get
a great shot. And the better you can focus on
their face even more so than the action involved. You
might get a really fantastic sports photo that you might
(11:02):
not have gotten. But um. On the other hand, it
also helps to have the right equipment because some cameras
aren't set up to do sports photography. You need, you know,
the the ability to um to shoot a lot of
photos quickly. UM, sort of like the cannon or no,
not cannon, the Cassio camera that we saw at CS
(11:22):
two thousand and eight. That shoots uh sixty frames per second.
It's usually called burst photography exactly. Um something that will
shoot that and and it will even um shoot photos
before you if you hold down the you know, sort
of half pressed the shutter button, it will actually start
shooting photos before. So it's sort of like a TVO.
You can sort of back up and look at some
(11:43):
of the photos before. So if you happen to be
just a fraction of a second off and go, oh,
I messed a shot, you can back up and look
a seat, maybe you actually did get it scares me.
It's a camera that knows you want to take a picture. Yeah. Yeah,
But the thing about that is is that's not you.
That's really the camera itself. It's not a trick that
you can learn to do. That trick is getting the
right spending the money for it. And that was a
(12:06):
at the time of release. And I think they've come
out with a camera that supplants that even it was
a thousand dollars worth of camera and a lot of
us can't afford that. Yeah, there's a six hundred dollar
Cassio now that takes I think forty a second, so
it's a little slower, but it's also significantly cheaper. Um.
But yeah, yeah. The wonderful thing about that is, of
course you can flip through all those different photos and
(12:26):
and you know there you might think, wow, did I
catch that one moment? And there's a good chance you did.
If it's taking that many a second infect you may
find like five or six pictures that you really have
trouble deciding on between the group of them. Um. I've
got a similar, very very basic tip she kind of
touched on there, which is that if you are preparing
(12:48):
to take a photo and you know that something is
about to happen, and you know, this happened to me
a lot before I realized there was a very simple
solution where I would take a photo of something, but
I would get the moment me lee after the moment
I wanted to catch, hold down the button halfway. That
will prepare your camera. It'll lock focus, so it'll find
(13:09):
the It'll essentially it it focuses on the central figure
that's in the frame. Um, it'll lock the focus and
prepare for a photo. So when that moment happens, all
you have to do is press it down the rest
of the way and it'll take the picture. Um, this
will save you the heartache of Wow, I got the
back of my daughter's leg in the frame while she
ran by because I was preparing a second too late. Uh.
(13:33):
And in a similar vein, let's say that you want
to take a picture and you don't want to do
the normal like let's have the person standing in the
middle of the frame of the photo. You want something
a little cooler. You want them to be off to
the side of the frame, and you want to have
a little bit of the background in there. But every
time you try and take the photo, you're getting the
background in focus, not the not the person, not the
(13:54):
person you want to capture. Uh. My suggestion then is
first frame the picture as if that person is in
the center half and press that button halfway down. That'll
lock the focus. Then you can adjust your position so
that you are pointing in the You've got the picture
frame the way you really want it, and the focus
will stay the same. You can press the button the
(14:16):
rest of the way down. You got your picture. There
you go. I actually have a two that sort of
relate to, uh, to the things that you touched on
just then. Um. One was I was reading some of
David Pogue of the New York Times. He had a
post where he talked about some different things that you
(14:36):
can do to improve your photography. And I have a
a C S two thousand eight. Again, I had my
little Olympus two point one megapixel, which shoots pretty good
photos really, but um, there's a problem. You know, it's
a it's an older point and shoot, and I kept
having trouble getting the moment like I would. I would
set up and I got where I wanted to go,
(14:56):
and I pushed the button and nothing would happen. That's
called shutter lag. And pressing half pressing the button down
and and having the camera focus also produces the shutter
lag time because the camera is ready to take a picture.
So when you completely press the button down the rest
of the way, it should go ahead and take the
picture without that that extra shutter lag because there the
camera is not trying to figure out what's going on.
(15:18):
But um, I read a National geographic and uh, you
know they're reasonably decent with therefore talking. They know a
thing or two about taking pictures, maybe even three. Um,
they were suggesting that when you're composing your picture, you
should imagine that the screen is divided up into nine
segments basically like a tic tac toe board, and um,
(15:38):
you want to center your subject at the intersection of
the lines. Basically it's called the rule of thirds, and
you're trying to get them in that position, uh, to
basically help you compose the picture better and get more
of a better composition. Um, you know, and hopefully you
won't cut off the top of their head or something. Well,
(15:59):
that's that's actually really important because uh, you know, all
the tips and tricks are not going to help you
if you don't. If you don't you develop your own
skill as a photographer. Um, you might get some practice, right,
you might get some nice pictures, but you're not you know,
you're not gonna maximize your your use of that camera
without a little work on your part. Um, I've got
another basic tip that I learned about while researching this
(16:23):
I had. It's something I did not know. If you
want to take a portrait photo of someone, and the
thing I read was that the best the best way
to take a portrait photo is let's say you have
a camera that has three to five times zooming capability.
The suggestion was to zoom all the way in like
as as tight as possible and then hold the camera
(16:44):
vertically so you get the vertical portrait picture and then
move towards your subject until your subject fills the frame
the way you want, and then take the photo that way,
so to actually zoom in all the way. Now, if
you have a camera has a more powerful zoom, like
an eight to ten times, you would only zoom in
about halfway for that. But that this will help you
(17:05):
get a better photo of your subject. And I didn't
know that, um. Another good one that I didn't know
is that if you're taking a picture outside, you may
want to still turn your flash on. It can help
the flash from your camera and the the ambient light
your camera can can take all of that into consideration.
(17:26):
It's called fill in flash, UM, And this will help
you if you want to take a picture of a
subject that perhaps the lighting sources to the side or
maybe slightly behind that person or object, the flash can
help fill that in. However, you have to keep in
mind camera flash has a very limited range. Uh, anything
(17:47):
beyond about ten feet is not going to be effective,
so you want to keep that fairly close. So you mean,
if you if you took your little point and shoot
with the little any bity flash and you go to say, oh,
I don't know, be Alympics and you're in the nosebleed
section and you have the flash turned on. You're trying
to get something that's going on down in the field.
The flash might not illuminate that. Yeah, I was actually
(18:09):
thinking of WrestleMania. If you're at WrestleMania and you are
in the nosebleed section and you want to get a
picture of the Undertaker as he delivers a tombstone pile
driver to John Cena thug Life, then it's that flash
is probably not gonna help. Despite the fact that every
time I watch WrestleMania, I'll I see our flashes in
the background, people cut it out. Actually it's kind of
(18:29):
cool looking for those of us watching at home, but
for those of us who actually have attended the event,
it's just really annoying. Okay, all right, you seem to
have a personal investment in this and really happened to
enjoy the art of the squared circle. All right, okay, okay, um,
so oh I had another one about an outdoor shot. Okay,
(18:53):
polarizing filters. Oh yeah, So let's say that you want
to take a shot of a a scene that's really
really bright, there's maybe some glare, uh like I was.
I took a cruise up in Alaska several years ago
and there was this gorgeous glacier. I wanted to take
a picture, but it was a cloudless day, and the
problem was that the ocean, water, the glacier, and the
(19:17):
sky were almost all the same color. It was this very,
very very whitish bluish color, and it was really hard
to tell where the ocean ended, the sky began, and
where the glacier was at all um A polarizing filter
can help take that down a little bit, so you
get a little better definition. But let's say that you
have a regular little point and shoot camera. You know
(19:39):
you don't have the polarizing filter. What do you do then, Well,
if you happen to have a nice pair of sunglasses,
this can actually work. You can hold the sunglasses in
front of the lens of your camera and take a
photo there and it will act as a polarizing lens.
You do want to make sure that you don't have
any of the edges of the sunglasses in the frame
(20:02):
when you take the picture, but it does work. It's
not as good as a professional filter, not by a
long shot, but it can work in a pinch. You know,
professional filters aren't really all that expensive. And that's something
else that you can do to uh, you know, fool
around with and and start seeing how what kind of
effects you can have with your photos. Um. Another nice
effect that a polarizing filter has that has nothing to
(20:24):
do with any of that is if you happen to
keep one on your camera and something scratches the filter,
you can replace the filter, but you may not be
able to replace the lens. Or if you if you
have a camera where you can replace the lens, it's
gonna cost you more than a filter would. Yeah. Yeah,
so it's um, you know, it's just something to consider. Um.
(20:45):
I have a lot more tips. We're sort of running
out of time. I have a couple of weird ones
that I wanted to touch on. All right, let's hit
the weird ones. Okay. One of the other things that
David Poke said, and I find this a little strange,
he said that a lampshade socket could make a good
tripod mount Uh. He said, it happens to be the
exact size of a of the section that you wouldn't
(21:06):
I guess attached to the top of the tripod um,
which I'm admittedly having a little bit of difficulty visualizing.
I also think it might be a good idea to
unplug the light. I was just about to say that, Um,
but I don't, you know, I kind of don't deny it.
I mean, if your camera's not heavy enough and it fits,
and it's unplugged and you don't electrocute yourself or anyone
else or destroy your camera, it seems like it might,
(21:28):
you know, do in a pinch. I wouldn't write I
don't know. I'd have trouble recommending that, but I did
read it, and you know, David Poke suggested it, so um,
you should know a thing or two, the other the
other weird thing, and um, you know, I don't. I
read a lot of tech blogs, but I read a
lot of other blogs, and one of the others the
Candy Dish blog, because I'd like checking out the new
sugary stuff. Oddly, Carl from the Candy Dish blog had
(21:53):
a link today on the day that I were recording this,
to a flicker set where somebody had actually used gunny bears.
It's stuck gummy bears to their flash and it they shot,
the flash goes through you know, the the gummy bear
distorts the light and makes It's sort of like using gels.
They're different colored, like a green or red gel, and
(22:13):
just a very odd and low cost yet sticky solution. Yep,
and one wonders if fruit roll ups would work just
as well. I I don't know. You know, they can
be a little harder to manage. I'm guessing depending on
the size of the flash. I was just thinking, like
a fruit roll up you could cut to the right side.
That's true. That's true, you know, will be thinner than
(22:34):
a gummy bear. We might need to do some research
and get back to you on if nothing else that
will help, I know, And I could use one of
those right now. So so you're you're all tipped out.
Yeah those are my my weird tips. Yeah, excellent. Well,
well you hope that you found these tips helpful. Um,
I guess that just brings us to Listener made serious
(23:00):
the dude. Okay, so today's listener mail comes from Jose
and Jose has to say, Chris and Jonathan, I love
your podcast and have heard all of them. There are
a lot of myths when it comes to cables, and
I'm glad that for the most part, you did a
lot to dispel those myths. The fact that you brought
up James Randy, which is one of my favorite people,
was cool too, And I happen to like Randy as well,
(23:22):
so that was that was a no brainer. But he
goes on to say, one thing that you need to
consider about audio and video paraphernalia is that you set
your setup is only as good as your weakest link.
Strictly from a sound quality standpoint, it doesn't do you
any good if to buy a cable aside from the
one that comes with your stereo, because if you open
up your shiny new speaker, avoiding the warranty, in most cases,
(23:44):
you'll notice that the cable between the connection terminal and
the actual speaker is the same chief cable that came
with the stereo. Even if you bought a one thousand
dollar cable, your weakest link is still in the speaker
and it cancels out any advantage of better cable could
have offered. Keep up the great work, guys, Jose. Thanks
a lot, Jose. That's a really good point. Just like
(24:06):
any system, it's only as strong as its weakest link. Now,
if it happens to be really well made speakers and
that link is fine, then sure your cable may end
up being your weakest link. Or if it's something about
the connectors themselves, that could be it. But you make
a very good point. Uh, there's some things that are
beyond your control. And no matter how expensive a cable
(24:26):
you buy, it's not gonna make it sound any better.
That's kind of sorry to think about, you know, trying
to imagine that you'd spent all this money on fancy
equipment and the the people who made the fancy equipment
skimped on the inside. Yes, so I will be handing
out pitch pitchforks and torches after the show. Excellent, And
(24:47):
if you have anything you want to say to us,
any comments or suggestions or questions or or even corrections,
you can feel free to write us at tech stuff
at how stuff works dot com. And remember we have
a blog up now. It's called tech stuff and you
can find that right off the homepage of how stuff
works dot com. And we will talk to you again
(25:07):
really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot Com brought to you
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