• 

The people in your household are a good captive audience now. And…so are your pets.

This portrait was taken with my little buddy sitting on my lap. I was able to click the shutter fast enough to take a few frames. Here’s the one I like the best.

As the weather gets warmer the backyard is showing its true colors. Plants and flowers are coming up all over. While out with the dog I noticed some flowers. They were about ten feet away. So, of course, I started taking pictures. This was the first photo…

I moved a little closer and took this one.

And then I moved a couple of steps closer.

And finally I moved very close, bent down, and took this photo.

I guess this tip all boils down to MOVE IN CLOSER! 🙂

1. Take a walk…around your apartment or house.
2. Look for nifty spots to take pictures.
3. Move in closer. Look up. Look down.
4. Get your camera…or take it out of your pocket. Smartphones are great cameras.
5. Take pictures.
6. Look at the pictures. See which ones you like.
7. Go back and move in closer. Your smartphone can take really good close-ups.
8. Here’s the hard part. Look at your camera/smartphone instruction manual. You will probably find things that will help you take even better pictures.
9. If you are using a smartphone, it has built in apps that can help you enhance your photos.
10. If you’ve never used it, try increasing the saturation of your images. It will make the colors look better.
11. There are zillions (maybe just hundreds) of photo apps that can turn your photos into works of art.
12. Staying in doesn’t mean you can’t take nifty photos. Go ahead…take some photos!

When Lincoln came to deliver a speech in New York City, before he was elected President, he stopped at the studio of Mathew Brady for a portrait. This is it.

• 

Notice anything wrong with it. Look at his right sleeve. Look at the creases in his coat. Notice the shirt collar?

Who would take a picture looking like that?

Well, it didn’t matter very much. Lincoln’s portrait was used in newspapers around the country, along with the speech he made. Lincoln thought that the picture was one of the reasons he became President of the United States.

So, what was wrong with it? I’d say absolutely nothing!

Did you know that Apple can help you take better pictures with your iPhone. Although it’s a little hidden, it is available. Check out https://support.apple.com/explore/taking-managing-photos.

All you have to do is take a single photo with your smartphone. Go ahead. Take it right now.

To see if you passed the test go to The Test.

That’s it. You’ll be told if you passed the test there. It’s really a very simple test.

Looking at my iPhone Photos file I found this…

The number it doesn’t show is the number of prints I have made in the last month. Zero.

It dawned on me that shooting with the fastest camera I ever had, my iPhone, hasn’t produced many worthy (in my opinion) images. So…I decided to slow down and create a new talk called “Point-and-Shoot vs. Point-and-Meditate.”

Stay tuned for the details.

Too many speakers are lazy and look for stock photos to use in their PowerPoint presentations. Although stock photos are available on all topics, they aren’t personal.

For example, if I were speaking about Pugs (a topic near and dear to my heart) I could find a zillion photos of Pugs to illustrate my talk. However, using the photo of P.J. would make it special. I could explain that I took it more than 25 years ago, when P.J. attended his first dog show. [He didn’t do very well that day, but did eventually become an A.K.C. champion!]

If possible, use your own photos! It will help your presentation be unique and personal.

Before we used digital cameras, we had to figure out exposure using light meters that weren’t very accurate, cameras that varied in their results, and chemicals that we had to keep at specific temperatures. Few photographers paid enough attention to the details. Fred Picker did.

Over the years he wrote a quarterly newsletter that described what he thought was the ideal way to take photos…as well as advertise equipment from his Zone VI company. The one issue of the newsletter that I remember was in April 1980, Issue #24. In it he described what he called a “Key Day.” A Key Day was the ideal sunny day without clouds. According to Fred, if you knew the setting for a key day, you could figure out the proper exposure for other outdoor scenes.

For those who shoot with digital cameras, from iPhones to DSLRs, you might want to quiz yourself on how well you can predict proper exposure settings. Take a picture. Guess what you think is the correct f/stop, shutter speed, and ISO. Then cheat…and look at the digital photo’s info, like this one. How well did you do?