Your digital camera, whether it’s built in to your cell phone or it’s a hefty DSLR, is an incredible creative tool. If you’ve only used it as it comes straight out of the box, however, you’re only scratching the surface. Here are our top 10 photography hacks to supercharge your camera.
1. Use your camera’s timer to take steadier shots
It’s difficult to take a good, steady shot if you have absolutely nothing with which to stabilize your camera. This problem is exacerbated by the need to click the camera’s shutter, causing just a little extra movement that can mean the difference between a sharp and blurry photo. What’s any easy way to solve this? Use your camera’s timer function. You can click the shutter take a couple of seconds to stabilize your shot, breathe like a sniper, and you should end up with a more stabile photo.
2. Stabilize your camera with a tennis ball
If the timer trick isn’t quite enough, you can create a DIY stabilizer out of something as simple as a tennis ball. Basically you just put a weight in the tennis ball and attach a mount that will screw into your camera’s base. The weight in the tennis ball will help keep things a lot more stabile, and it’s a tool that’ll easily fit in your pocket (although you might want to wear a belt so the weight doesn’t pull your pants off).
3. Turn a piece of paper into a simple flash softbox
There are plenty of options for DIY flash diffusers, but nothing is more readily available and easy to use as a sheet of paper. If you need to use a flash but hate the harsh lighting it provides, you can easily overcome this by folding a piece of paper into a softbox and placing it over your flash. This will diffuse the light and is pretty much the cheapest and easiest method around.
4. Take wireless photos with your iDevice
There are some remarkable apps for iOS that let you control your DSLR. DSLR Remote lets you not only control just about every function of the camera, but lets you tap to focus and look through the camera’s lens via your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Shutter Snitch is another option that lets you snap photos and wireless transfer them to your iDevice. If those two aren’t enough, you can build an infrared remote trigger and use DSLR.Bot to control your camera as well.
5. Paint with light
Light painting is a means of creating compelling photographs by using slow exposures and a light source. Basically, you use a dark room or take your camera out at night, set your camera’s exposure time to at least ten seconds (but you’ll probably find more is better in most cases), and move your light source around during the exposure to capture the movement of the light. This can be really fun and produce some really cool effects, but be careful in the dark.
6. Eliminate the clutter
This is huge! The best images are ones that are simple and have breathing room for the subject. Try to find the simplest background possible. It’s no different than walking into a super cluttered house versus walking into a clean minimalistic space with very few items to distract you.
If you are taking a photo of a person, take the extra second to look around and find a minimal background that doesn’t distract the viewer.
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