Many owners of low-cost digital cameras are overwhelmed by results of their photos. They are tired of just producing mediocre photos. Fortunately, there are ways to significantly ramp up our creativity. This should help us to produce photos that we are proud of, although we are still using cheap camera. As an example, composition is one of the most important considerations and it is also essential to consider the technical aspects of our photos. We should look at the surrounding scene the way our digital camera would, especially through 2D point of view. One of the good ways is by closing one eye and using our fingers to have a different view of the scene. In many cases, things can get more interesting as we stop seeing everything through 3D vision. We should know whether the scene is still interesting or it has become a jumbled mess. We should know what makes the scene interesting and what immediately jumps out at us.
There are things that could attract our eyes first, such as human faces, isolation, off centres, brighter illumination sharp contrast warm colors and bright colors. With proper composition, we should be able to fill our frame while keeping good details at specific parts of the photos. In some cases, it is important for use to change our perspectives. We may need to move forward and back or sideways. We should consider distance and breadth, then framing our scene horizontally. We may need to divide our frame into thirds or quarters, both vertically and horizontally. We should put enough sweet spots inside the photos. We should also know that lighting is essential to producing great photos. We should be able to determine the proper lighting balance across the scene. Often, lighting varies wildly at different areas of the photos. In many digital cameras, we should be able to find the automatic exposure setting. However, it is likely that our cameras will be overwhelmed by very bright background, such as reflected sunlight on perfectly white show.
We should control the EV-1 setting to slightly darken or underexpose the very bright scene. In many cases, this should be quite helpful. In many cases, we should keep adjusting the EV control, until we get satisfactory results. We could also experiment with EV+1, when we are shooting indoors and the day is overcast. It is important to improve white balance and we should do it naturally, the way our eyes adjust to the light automatically. At first, we should check how the automatic settings of our camera perform and in some cases, white balance can be adjusted automatically to great effect. To reduce shutter lag, we could use autofocus. We could put the primary subject in the center and then half press the shutter. This will enable the automatic settings to give us the proper shots. While our finger is still on the shutter button, we should let the camera to recompose the shot.
