The best camera is the one you have with you - using your camera phone

This bonus mid-week post is a slight diversion from how to set up your point-and-shoot camera, but my sister pointed out to me that most of us use our camera phones more often than we use our other cameras, and she was right. I hardly consider myself a camera phone expert. I've never been impressed with photos from my camera, I've just found some to be tolerable, but then again, I'm pretty picky, and she assured me that I knew some tips that might help, so here it goes.

Last post I covered resolution, and it is worth checking to see if your phone has options for that as well. I just made the switch from iPhone to a Droid 2 and it allows me to select my resolution under "Camera Settings" and then "Picture Resolution." If your phone has a "Face Detection" option in your settings, I also recommend turning that on since most of us use our phones to take pictures of people. Those 2 things alone will help in improving your picture quality.

Once you take a photo you might find that the photo is under or over-exposed. Depending on your model you might be able to make an adjustment and retake that photo. Check to see if your camera settings have an "exposure" adjustment option with choices in positive and negative numbers. If so, if your photo was too dark you can select a positive number to adjust the exposure. The higher the number, the brighter the photo will be. Conversely if your image was a complete washout you'll want to choose a negative number, the lower the number, the darker your image will be. With practice you'll probably be able to judge what conditions you'll need to make adjustments on before you take a picture.

Whether or not your camera has options for exposure adjustment you may not have time to fiddle with options to make adjustments. By the time you "got it right" the moment had long past. Now what? How about a free app to the rescue?

Whether you are an iPhone user or an Android user (sorry BB users, no love from Adobe Photoshop for you yet) there is a free app that you should have on your phone - Photoshop Express. For Android users here is a link with info: and for iPhone users her is your link: The Photoshop Express App allows you to crop, adjust exposure, color saturation, contrast, brightness and choose effects like black and white, soft focus, and fun borders right in your phone so you can edit fast and share your improved photos instantly.

Here are a couple of photos I used PS Express on in my iPhone:

I liked the cute border for this one - it had the advantage of hiding some unwanted object in the bottom right corner - why didn't I just see that dang thing before I clicked? Who knows, but oval frame to the rescue:

and this one was horribly underexposed, it was hard to even tell it was a picture of a person (I had the 3GS which didn't have a flash and no option for setting exposure compensation) and PS Express did a fairly decent job recovering something salvageable out of it:

This Sunday it's back to info on your point-and-shoot, but I hope you found something useful here. I'm sure I'll come back to the camera phone topic again. I'll have to stop being such a camera snob and use mine more.

How to Set Up Your Point-and-Shoot Digital Camera, Volume 3: Beach/Snow and Night Portrait modes

Last week I covered the most basic 3 modes aside from "Auto" mode to use when taking pictures of people.  Chances are that your camera has a couple of other very specific modes for taking photos of people:

Night Portrait

Beach/Snow

"Beach/Snow" mode and "Night Portrait" (sometimes called "People at Night" mode depending on your camera's make and model); maybe you've wondered when exactly you should use them and why.  

First the "Beach/Snow" mode:  If you've ever tried to take pictures of people at the beach or in the snow you've probably had some disappointing results.  When it's sunny outside the sand, water, and snow reflect the light, making the scene extra bright.  By default your camera's sensor determines the exposure by evaluating the overall brightness of the scene, so the people in your photo, who are much darker than the snow or sand (even if, like me, they are so pale they practically glow) are likely to be underexposed, or even silhouetted.  Sometimes this is a cool effect, but typically it isn't what you were trying to capture.  Or your camera might "spot-meter" by taking the light reading off of the subject you are focusing on.  In this case, the person in your photo is properly exposed, but the background is completely washed out, or "blown out" in photography terms.  By using the "Beach/Snow" modes your camera will turn the flash on.  Why on earth would you need a flash when it's already too bright?  Isn't too much light the problem?  Actually the real problem is too much contrast in the scene.  In order to resolve the dilemna of exposing for either the bright surroundings or the person you are trying to take the photo of, the flash provides just enough additional light to your darker subject so that it will balance out the overall exposure.  This is called "fill-flash," and it solves the problem.  

without fill-flash

with fill-flash

Okay, so these photos weren't taken at the beach (although there was sand and water), or in the snow, but I always use fill-flash at the beach or snow when taking photos of people so I couldn't find an example, plus it illustrates another point I want to make, the "Beach/Snow" setting can come to your rescue when you find yourself in a very high contrast situation like I had, even when you aren't at the beach or in the snow, like at the pool for instance; the concrete and water produce the same sort of high contrast situation as the sand and surf.  Here in Vegas I find myself in high-contrast situations quite frequently, especially when shooting mid-day.  Another way to get fill-flash is to force the flash to fire rather than choosing a setting like "Beach/Snow," but I'll cover that and more about flash in a future post.

"Night Portrait" or "People at Night" mode.  This is an often overlooked but very useful setting.  Have you ever tried to take a photo of someone at night and you wanted a picture of the whole scene, but what you ended up with was a photo of your subject with the background so dark it could have been taken anywhere?  This is where "Night Portrait" mode comes in.  Your camera might have a few different settings to use at night, but the one with the icon that has the person in it is a special mode that combines both flash and a slower shutter speed.  In photographers' lingo it's a technique known as "dragging the shutter."  Your camera will take a longer exposure allowing the background not lit by your flash to show, and then will "freeze" your subject by firing a flash at the end of the exposure so that your subject isn't blurry, although moving people or objects in the background not primarily lit by the flash would be blurred.  The end result is that you can see the both your background and your subject.  See the below examples from Christmas Eve last year.  While I like that my son is isolated in the bottom of the two photos below, in the top photo too much would have been lost.  Without "dragging the shutter" all we would see is my brother wearing the shark towel on his head, and we wouldn't know why he was wearing that (to make my son laugh) or seen my clearly very amused husband in the background looking on. 

So these photos point out an additional point, that you can use the "Night Portrait" mode in any low-light situation indoors or out.  My sister's home was very pleasantly lit that evening, but as I'm sure you've experienced, well-lit to your eye and well-lit to your camera are two very different things.

Cameras vary and your camera may have even more specific options for photos of people indoors or outdoors.  "Indoor" modes will usually assume tungsten lighting which is yellow in color (yes light has color and temperature) and it adjusts your color balance accordingly.  If you if you are taking photos indoors where it is lit with overhead flourescents, say at your child's school for instance, the "Indoor" setting might result in a color cast since flourescent lights are typically more green.   Of course as we all change over to our more "Green" (pun intended) compact flourescent bulbs, that will increasingly be an issue, but chances are the camera manufactures will start making "Flourescent" settings more common on our cameras to compensate for this.  

So now you've added 2 more photography terms to your vocabulary, "fill-flash" and "dragging the shutter." So the next time you use your "People at Night" mode and get a nice photo, when someone tells you what a great picture you took be sure to impress them by telling them, "yea, I dragged the shutter on that one."  They won't have a clue what you're talking about, but they're sure to think that you are an expert.  You're welcome!

Before I move into the settings on your camera for photographing landscapes, and other specialty settings like Macro and fireworks, we'll be taking a break from details on settings and I'll be spending several weeks covering more general topics on how to take better pictures.  As always, it's great to read your comments and emails and find out what topics you would like to me to cover.

How to Set Up Your Point-and-Shoot Digital Camera, Volume 2: Kids&Pets, Action/Sports, and Portrait Modes

If you have ever pressed your "menu"  or "function set" button, and hopefully after my last blog post you did in order to properly set your resolution (you did do that, didn't you?), chances are you have noticed the icons for the different modes your camera can be set to shoot in, and you've probably wondered what the heck they were, and when you were supposed to use them. Your camera's "Auto" mode probably does a fairly decent job most of the time, but undoubtedly you've found yourself frustrated with your pictures from time to time and didn't know what went wrong. I'll be covering the most common modes for point-and-shoot cameras over the next couple of weeks. Models vary, so your particular camera may have more or fewer options and the modes may have slightly different names, but I'm going to cover the most common ones. This week I want to start with the 3 most basic modes for taking pictures of people.

Let's start with the number one complaint I hear from people: "My kids come out blurry in my pictures." This is one of the areas where "Auto" mode can let you down. Kids are usually on the move, and often when you are taking pictures outdoors your camera's auto mode will decide there is enough light to make a proper exposure and will not fire the flash to freeze the action, or will not bump up your ISO high enough to increase your shutter speed fast enough to capture quick movement. What is ISO anyway? I promise not to get overly technical here - basically it refers to light sensitivity. If you are old enough to remember buying actual film for your camera (if not, go ask your parents - why pass up a perfectly good opportunity to make them feel old?), you had to choose which speed of film you wanted to buy: 100, 200, 400, 800, etc..  If you were taking photos outside in bright sunlight you would use 100 film, it had a lower light sensitivity and gave the best looking photos with little grain (little dots), and great color saturation. If you were shooting in low light or action shots you would use 800 film, and 400 film was sort of a compromise, for when you would be shooting both indoors and out. Well the days of film are behind us (yes, I said it, film is dead except for artsy-stuff and die-hard hold-outs who haven't accepted that digital quality really has caught up to film), but your digital camera still uses the convention of ISO, changing the light sensitivity of your camera's sensor depending on what mode you choose and the overall light conditions as determined by your camera and choosing a correspondingly fast or slow shutter speed to make the proper exposure.

So what mode should you choose for taking photos of kids or people on the move? If your camera has the option, choose the "Kids&Pets" mode. Often with an icon that looks something like the image on the left.  Cameras vary as to what exactly this setting does, but generally speaking it will fire the flash, choose a higher ISO (but will still use the overall brightness to select it), choose a faster shutter speed to reduce blur, while using a smaller aperture  giving you a wide depth of field. "Depth of field" refers to how much of your image will be in focus. A "shallow depth of field" means that only a small amount of a scene is in focus, and the rest is blurred in proportion to it's proximity to the focus point.  A "wide depth of field" means that a large amount of the scene is in focus, whether close to or far away from your focus point.  Since kids are often moving around and might move away from where you initially focused by the time your camera makes the exposure, and especially if you are trying to take a picture with more than one person in it, you'll want that wider depth of field so that they are in focus.

shallow depth of field

portrait

Depth of field is the main difference between selecting "Portrait" mode on your camera and "Kids&Pets" mode. It's often very pleasing in a portrait to have your subject in sharp focus, while the background is softly blurred. It puts more focus on your subject and is generally softer.  That is where the "Portrait" mode comes in. Especially when the background is less than perfectly pleasing this can be a real lifesaver. You're on vacation in a picturesque spot, your adorable daughter is actually sitting still for you for a moment, but right behind her off in the distance is some tacky tourist sporting the keg belly with the dark socks and sandals. Lovely. "Portrait" mode to the rescue! You can have the photo of your daughter with a pleasantly blurred background and the tacky tourist becomes just an indistinguishable blur. "Portrait" mode assumes that your subject is relatively still and that all the subjects in the photo are on the same plane. If your subjects have too much variation in distance from you, some people will be in focus and others will be out of focus. "Portrait" is definitely not the setting you want to use for a larger group photo as only the people in the center of the photo and in the same row as the person the camera focused on will be  sharp, and the others will be progressively blurrier the further in distance in any direction they are from the point of focus.  "Portrait" mode can be used for a small group, like say your spouse and 3 kids, if you make sure that everyone in the photo has their heads on relatively the same plane and you make sure that you don't stand too close when taking the picture; you may need to use your optical zoom to accomplish this (please don't use your digital zoom for this situation - I'll cover that in another post, just trust me for now on this).  The closer you are to the subjects, the larger the perceived difference between the people or objects in the scene (more on this in a later article when I cover "Macro" mode and focusing).

So what about "Sports/Action" mode? Your camera may have a separate mode for this, and in some models there isn't a "Kids&Pets" mode, so this would be the mode you would need to select if "Auto" was resulting in blurry pictures of your moving kiddos.  Typically this mode turns the flash off, because it assumes that your are too far away from your subject for the flash to make a difference (like at your kid's soccer game), and compensates for the fast movement by choosing a higher ISO.  Why not just use this mode all the time instead of "Kids&Pets?"  Since you are probably not using a flash, unless your are in a very bright setting your camera is going to have to make up for the lack of flash by setting a very high ISO to have enough light to make the proper exposure at the fast shutter speed you need to freeze the action and prevent motion blur without the flash.  The higher the ISO the more "noise" (the little dots either light and dark or with color variation)you'll have in your photos.  Here's an example of a photo with both color and luminance noise:

Back in the film days the same problem existed and caused "graininess" in photos with high ISO film.  Manufacturers differ and  if your camera doesn't have both "Kids&Pets" and "Sports/Action" modes, I think it's worth a little investigation to see if yours defaults to firing the flash or not.  Since we already established that you aren't the manual reading type, the next time you choose the "Sports/Action" mode have someone watch for the flash as you take your photo, and voilà, you'll have your answer without ever cracking open that manual, and then you'll have a better idea when you can use that mode effectively.

Night Portrait

Beach/Snow

There are a couple of other really useful modes for photographing people that your camera probably has available: the "Snow/Beach" mode and the "Night Portrait" mod and I'll cover those next week.  I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions about the challenges you face when taking pictures, so keep the comments and emails coming.

How to Set Up Your Point-and-Shoot Digital Camera, Volume 1: Resolution

For the past few years my mother has made the same request of me for a Christmas gift: a 52 week desk photo calendar with family photos.  She truly cherishes and uses this book all year as both a master calendar and a brag-book, so I'm always happy to create one for her.  This is a big project as it requires 54 pages of photos, and being who I am, I like to make sure each photo has some relation to the week that it appears on.  Since myself, my husband and my children are the only ones in my family who live in Nevada, I am not always there to capture important moments during the year of the other siblings and their families myself, so I make the annual request for high-res (printable) photos to be emailed to me for use in the calendar.  I kept running into the same problems with the photos that were sent to me, they were not print-quality resolution.  In trying to get to the bottom of this I talked to my sister, because I was sure that she was somehow unknowingly compressing the files when she was emailing them to me, so I told her I would just get them off her computer the next time I came to Southern California.

Turns out she was not compressing the files, she had been sending me the highest resolution images she had.  The problem turned out to be the camera setup.  Her camera was set to maximize the number of photos that the camera's memory card could hold.  I then remembered that I had helped a number of people over the years set-up their digital cameras to take better pictures.  I was surprised how many people never read their owners manuals.  My husband assures me that this is not unusual, that in fact I am the weirdo who enjoys reading manuals cover to cover to find out every feature of my electronic stuff.  So, I thought that maybe if I break the most important features of digital point-and-shoots down for you, you'll be able to adjust your settings even if you never crack that manual open, and help you get the most out of your camera.  This is the first in the series of articles on this topic, so be sure to subscribe to my blog if you want to be sure not to miss one.

Setting Your Camera's Resolution
First of all, what is resolution and why is it important?  No, we're not talking about your promise to yourself to lose weight and get to the gym 5 times per week that you just made and have already broken; I'm referring to how clear a photo image looks.  Let's look at two different resolution settings of the same image so you can see what I mean:

The bottom of the 2 images is lower-resolution and we would probably say that it looks too "pixelated" or in photographers lingo would say "it has a bad case of the jaggies."  Feel free to throw that phrase around to impress your friends.  (If that actually works, by the way, be sure let me know)

In digital photography the widely used convention of expressing resolution is megapixels.  This is only partially true, but if you are not the type to cuddle up with a manual, I'm sure that you don't want me to launch into an explanation of demosaicing algorithms in your camera's processor which use interpolation to reconstruct a color image from the incomplete color samples that your camera's image sensor puts out.  Did your eyes start to glaze over just now?  Yea, that's what I thought.  So for the hard-core techies out there, this article is not for you.  Go read your manual.  For the rest of you normal people, we're going to say that the number of megapixels your camera is set to produce per image is the greatest factor in determining your image resolution.

Chances are whether you really knew what is meant or not, the number of megapixels the camera is capable of producing per image was probably one of the factors you looked at when choosing your camera, but a 10mp camera will only output 10mp images if you set it at the maximum setting.  I often hear from people that they selected a low resolution setting because they wanted to get more images on their memory card, and they didn't understand the effect it had on image quality.  If your memory card promises 1000 images on it and didn't cost at least a hundred dollars, it probably will only hold that many if you have your camera set to a pretty low-resolution setting.  If you are only planning on using your photos to create a Facebook photo album, that resolution will look just fine.  If you are like most of us, yes, you want to create the Facebook album, but you also want the ability now, or down the road when you are promising yourself you will finally have the time to scrapbook, to make nice prints from your photos.  Prints require vastly higher resolution.  Why limit yourself?  What if you end up taking a photo that you absolutely love (and if you subscribe to my blog and religiously read all my posts this is likely to happen) and you want to blow it up to an large print and frame it to hang on your wall?  Yes, choosing a maximum resolution setting will take up more room on your memory card per photo, but I suggest you just buy more memory cards and be sure to upload, and back up your photos more frequently, like EVERY time you take pictures, and then erase and format your memory card so that you have blank cards ready to go at all times.  If you are going on vacation, buy more memory cards to take.  On any given photo shoot I take at least 10 cards with me, and many of mine are the very expensive ones that hold 500 photos at very high resolution.  Why? See my last blog post about taking more pictures.

So how do you check the resolution setting on your camera and make sure it is set to the maximum resolution possible?  Of course every camera is different, but I have found that most every digital camera has a "menu" or "func" (short for function or function set) button.  In order to get into your camera's settings, you may have to change the mode that it is in, make sure it isn't in video mode for starters, and your camera may need to be in shooting mode rather than playback mode in order to have the resolution setting option available depending on the make and model.  Then you'll look for a "preference" or "settings" in the menu to select.  Next you'll look for an option such as "quality," "image size," "resolution," or something along those lines.  Once there, you'll then see your options for setting image quality.  These can be confusing.  Often they are expressed with only letters:  "L", "M" (sometimes further broken down into M1 and M2) and "S" which, not surprisingly, stand for large, medium and small, so choose the "L," in that case.  Sometimes they throw a "Max" in there as well, which makes it easier actually; just choose "Max."  Some models express quality in terms of "economy," "fine," "super-fine," in which case you should select, you guessed it, "super-fine."  Sometimes quality settings are expressed in usage terms such as: "email," or "web,", "4x6 print," "8x10 print," "11x17 print."  I highly recommend that you select the largest print size possible.  You may never intend to print anything at "11x17" or "20x24"  size, but consider this: what if you love how your daughter looks in a photo, but Aunt Maude in the background is making a weird face?  Cropping could save that photo, but if your resolution isn't high enough that won't work, unless you want to print a 1"x1.5" photo.  You can always reduce image and file sizes after the fact, but you can't increase it.  Well, not much, and not without special software, which still won't save a photo with a bad case of the jaggies (see how I just threw that in there?).

If your camera is advanced enough to have a quality setting labeled "RAW" then I suggest you consider learning to use that setting.  RAW is not an acronym, it means "raw," as in "raw data."  When you select "RAW" you are choosing to have your camera capture the image, but not to process the image.  Remember I mentioned the demosaicing algorithms earlier?  Wait, stay with me, I promise not to get all technical here.  You can store more of the data on your memory card and after you upload it to your computer you need to use either the software that came with your camera, or another processing software like Apple Aperture, or I use Adobe Lightroom, which allows you to make the processing choices for your photo and can save many photos that are under or overexposed for instance (within limits of course).  If you are not someone who enjoys editing your photos afterward, then RAW is not for you.  The other thing to consider when selecting RAW shooting vs jpeg is how fast you need to be able to shoot.  If you are in a situation where you need to be able to shoot photos in a row rather quickly to capture something that is happening fast, that might be a case to switch to the highest jpeg setting possible as it takes cameras longer to write RAW files to your memory card.

I hope that you found this information helpful.  I look forward to your feedback on this topic, and would love to know if there is anything you would like to know more about to help you take better pictures.

Happy New Year!
Kelly Stampe Gaez
KSG Photography

Just Keep Shooting

As a photographer I find that I am asked the same several questions over and over again and I've realized that they really all come down to the same basic core idea, "I want to take better pictures."  I decided that while I learn something new about photography everyday (usually in the form of, "wow, I should definitely NOT do that again"), I have actually learned enough over the years that I know I can help you take better pictures. First off, let me assure you that I still think that you should hire me, KSG Photography, for your portraits and special events, but since I can't be with you everyday to capture all of your everyday memories (well actually, if you have deep pockets and want to hire me to do that we can talk) I want to help you take great pictures.


So, where to begin?  I think that first and foremost, what you can do to take better pictures is to take MORE pictures!  No matter what kind of camera you have, as long as it is digital, memory is cheap, yet people tend to treat it like we were still in the film days where you had to pay for your 24 exposures of film and then had to pay to develop it.  Thankfully those days are behind us, so take advantage and snap away!  Think about a photo shoot, how many photos do you think a photographer takes to get that one cover shot?  Ok, I don't know from personal experience, I'll let you know when Vogue calls, but I know it's a lot!  It's not unusual for me to come home from an event with 600 photos.  I upload them to my computer right away, make a backup copy and then erase and reformat my memory card.  Did you hear that?  Right away, people, not 3 times a year (you know who you are).  Don't let them sit in your memory card taking up space and risking being lost forever because you or someone else accidentally erases all your photos, or because your card gets corrupted (yes, it happens).  Then I ruthlessly delete the rejects and select my best photos to process (since I shoot RAW files they require processing to become jpegs) and the ones that are not bad, but not great I just leave alone.


Why take more photos?  It's not just because by dumb luck if you take 200 photos one of them is bound to be good (although that might be partially true). I'm sure you look at your LCD display to see what you took after you shot it, right?  What do you do if you don't like it? Leave everything the same and take another hoping it will magically be better?  If you are like most people, yes.  Well if everything was great except that grandma had her eyes closed, then that would be the right thing to do, otherwise, not so much.  Take a different picture.  Change your settings (yes, you might actually have to, gasp!, read your manual to figure out how to do that, but you want to take better pictures, right?), or change the composition, get closer, much closer to your subject, or go off-center or at an angle.  I'll have more specifics on settings and fill-flash and all that good stuff in later posts, but the basic idea is to try different things.  Go ahead and make lots and lots of mistakes.  Just try to make them different mistakes so that you are actually learning something!  And have a really good time doing it!