Taking better holiday photos
A long time ago I had a good camera and took lots of ’slides’ of fascinating places. Remember slides? Little bits of plastic that you watched by projecting the picture onto a big white screen. These are now sitting in the attic going brown and spotty until I get them converted to digital photos.
But for the least few years I’ve used a cheap digital camera - not bad, but not very impressive either. Then that broke and for the last year I’ve been using Mrs B’s little portable camera - not very good at all.
So I thought it was time to sort things out and recently bought a ‘proper’ digital camera (Canon EOS 400D if I remember right, I can’t check because Mrs B has taken it to the Loire Valley with her this week).
This new camera is a whizzy SLR thing with more functions than I could ever dream of using, but also takes very good photos with little effort, which is all that matters. And it cost less than my ancient camera did four years ago.
Incidentally if you are buying a camera for your summer holiday this year, remember the lens quality is as important as the number of pixels, perhaps more so - a portable telephone with built in 5 megapixel camera still probably won’t take very good pictures.
Anyway, with the summer holidays approaching and having seen Mrs B trying to use a camera, I thought I’d suggest a few easy ways to improve your holiday photos. Not because I’m an expert, but 20 years of messing things up and I hope I’ve learned something useful
1. When taking your photo, stand very still and hold the camera very still, with your arms braced against your sides and the camera held firmly.
2. Look through the little viewfinder, not the big LCD screen on the back of the camera - you can’t hold a camera as steady when it is 20cm away from you
3. Try and have something in the foreground of the picture - this almost always makes a picture more interesting to look at. The ’something’ doesn’t need to be in the middle of the picture, it can be to the side.
4. Look at the scene through the viewfinder as if you are looking at the actual photo. Many pictures are spoiled by the presence of dustbins, television aerials, and electricity pylons sticking out of people’s heads. All these can be avoided easily with a bit of attention.
5. Get closer. The majority of pictures I take or get sent can be improved just by removing all the unnecessary space at the edges and focussing in on one part of the photo.
Please also leave your own suggestions below.
Meanwhile of course, if you do take some great photos of France this summer send them over to us and get your moment of everlasting fame on francethisway. We’ve got quite a good range of photos of France now (mostly thanks to our generous readers) but still need more for loads of places…
I’m good at number four. The family goes mad when I insist on moving all the cars out of sight “just to take a picture”!
Good tips, thanks.
I can’t count the time I’ve spent standing at the end of streets waiting for the people to clear away. I don’t even know why really, there’s no big problem with a busy town looking like a busy town. If you looked through our photos you’d think we always travelled in the middle of winter or that no one else ever came to France.
I’ve been reading blogs of ex-pats in europe, mostly Italy so I have decided to expand my horizons to France.
I too bought a new digital camera, a Canon S5 IS I think, it’s at home. It takes fabulous pictures. Not SLR though.
I remember slides, I remember at one job having to go through them and file them in those slots in binders…not fun.