Digital photography has made taking pictures easy. You’re not limited by film in the camera or the expense of having that film developed, so you can just snap away. This has resulted in people’s lives being almost entirely documented, but it also means that there are a lot of less than great photos out there. If you would like great looking photos, you’re going to need to do a little more than just point and click. Thankfully, getting better photos doesn’t take tons of time or hours of practice. In fact, here are three tips that can give you better looking photos in less than five minutes: Composition is King – Before anything else in photography, you need to consider your compostion; the way things are arranged in the photograph you’re taking. The basic rule is the rule of thirds, where you divide the frame into third vertically and horizontally. Imagine looking at your screen and seeing nine equal sized squares. What you want to do is put your subject at one of the spots where these lines intersect. The other essential part of composition your point of view. You don’t have to stand a few feet away and take a picture. Angles can change the look of an entire photo, so don’t be afraid to take a picture from a high angle, or to get down on the ground and photograph up. Remember, a digital photo costs nothing, so try as many different compositions as you can. Use That Resolution – Modern digital cameras tend to give you the options of having ludicrously high resolution, but not a lot of camera owners get as much out of it as they should. You paid good money for that quality, but if you’re like most people, you’ve probably got your camera set to a lower resolution. Why? To save on the memory. Most people tend to store photos on their camera for great huge whacks of time, and in order to necessitate this, they use a lower resolution for those photos. The results is that the pictures they take only look good when the picture is about the size of a postage stamp, which is a not a preferred viewing size for most people. So don’t do that. If you’re concerned about memory, buy some more memory cards. They’re cheap, they’re tiny, and it’s the work of a second to swap them out. You will notice an immediate improvement in the quality of your photos when you use the higher resolution. Warmer Is Better – Most people don’t have any idea what a white balance is, but they probably have noticed that some of their photos have a kind of cold, clinical look to them. This is usually a result of the default white balance of your digital camera, which tends towards a cooler look, heavier on the whites and blues.The easiest way to change this is get in your camera and change your white balance setting to cloudy. What this does is increase the reds and yellows in your photos, which makes things look warmer and richer, and it takes less than five seconds to change. You can try this out on your own. Just take a couple of shots with your camera on auto, and then repeat the shots with the camera on cloudy. The odds are very good that the second group of pictures is going to look better. If you’re feeling experimental, your camera probably has lots of white balance settings to play with, all of which will give you different effects.
