Six quick tips to improve your digital photography

For chapter one in my book Stunning Digital Photography, I want to go over some quick tips that can really quickly improve your
photography. I'm going to use my favorite model here, Cowboy. The first tip that I have is that I
don't carry a camera bag around nor do I use a lens cap. You see all I have is a camera strap When you carry all that extra gear it
just slows you down.

Every time you go to take a picture you have to spend a few seconds taking your camera
out, maybe digging through all those different lenses. So here's tip number two, and it's to
eliminate distractions so this is how most people would take a
picture. They would just stand at eye level and take a nice wide angle shot. Nice smile, Cowboy.

And what happens there is,  you don't really know what
the subject to the picture is, it looks fine when you're seeing it with your eye. But when you look at the actual photo, you
see a lot of things in the picture besides the
subject. To eliminate distractions, the easiest thing to do is to get closer and to zoom
in. So I'll do that now.

Cowboy, look up here. Good boy! Getting closer also reduces the depth of field, it blurs the
background a little bit which I cover in depth in Chapter four. The next thing to do, tip
number three is to try different viewpoints. So, I just shot Cowboy from eye level and it's not that flattering.

For smaller
subjects like dogs, you really wanna crouch down and get to the eye level same thing applies for kids. Good boy,
Cowboy. If you're taking pictures of something like
the Eiffel Tower, you can move to many different sides of it get high and get low, get close, zoom in
zoom out that leads me to tip number four which
is take lots og pictures but delete most at them. You can't take too
many pictures with digital, it doesn't cost you a thing but please don't put 150 pictures of the
same thing on Facebook.

Just pick one. For tip number 5 I would
like to talk about flash. Now by default your camera  just points the
flash directly at your subject which provides a very flat lighting I'll take a sample shot now. A better way to
do it is to use bounce flash.

Many cameras allow you to attach an
external flash to the hot shoe With the bounce flash you can angle the
flash up. Many bounce flashes even have a diffuser built in that will spread the
light a little bit more evenly. Now as I take a second picture of Cowboy you'll notice that the lighting is very different the background has more even shadows, the lighting overall looks more natural And if he had red eye in the first
picture, he wouldn't have red eye in this picture For my last tip, I want to suggest that you edit your photos. All you need to do is
to download a free application like Picasa and just give it a little crop, maybe adjust
the colors and the white balance until looks good Often the application can edit the
settings automatically This was for  chapter one in my book
stunning digital photography this was the most basic video and
chapter in the series after this it gets much more complex I can take you from beginner to
very advanced amateur or even professional if you're willing to put the
time into it.

The print book is about twenty dollars. If you get the ebook which is just a few dollars, you should be able to watch videos like this embedded right in it, many videos
which you can't find on YouTube or other sources. If you like this video
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right back to you.

Thanks. High five Cowboy! Alright! [Background laughter].