 This presentation, creating quality images, is designed for those of you using a point-and-shoot camera. But if you have an SLR or you're using your phone as a camera, this will work just fine as well. My name is Bruce Sundin. I'm an electronic media specialist for NDSU Agricultural Communication. And photography is my passion, and I'm happy to share any kind of tips I can with you. So let's talk about one of the generic rules that you may or may not have heard of. It's called the rule of thirds. So if you look on that screen on the back of your point-and-shoot camera, it'll look a little like this but without the grid in the middle. This is divided up into thirds. And if you look here and here where they intersect, that is generally where you like to put things that are important, like someone's face or a particular flower or whatever it is you're taking a picture of. Now, this is only a rule, a guide, so it's not hard and fast. There are many times you have to bend or break any of the rules I'm about to explain, but it's good to understand kind of why we do this. So here's an example. This gentleman in India is putting together a fishing net. Now he is off to the side. Some people will want to take this and move it right to the center here. Well, that may not be quite as interesting or compelling and in fact all the space in this area is interesting because you see a little bit more of the net. You can see some of the bricks from a recent tsunami that came to that area. This rule, as you can see, the lines intersect right at his body. Now, when I shot this, I was not thinking about that, but when you practice these things, you won't be thinking about it. It should just come naturally to you. Another point is, his wife was out there and you could also apply that grid right on here and they're both in those intersecting places. Not necessarily have to do that, but it is an option. You can also put your subject along the line. So not necessarily just to intersect here and here, but along vertical and horizontal line. That also moves your subject to one third of the picture. But sometimes, and here's a good example of that, the gentleman on the left is from Africa and he is standing right along that line, just like we talked about. But now our gentleman from India on the right, not so much. You can see the intersections here and here do not match up with anything in particular and his body does not follow that line perfectly. The reason I did that was you see along his arm some pretty cool stuff going on there. So I wanted to make sure I saw that plus the fruit and it's all a judgment call. You're just making a quick decision. So you do not have to follow this rule hard and fast, but it's good for general composition. Here's an example what people also like to do is fill the frame. We did something back when I was in news. It's called nose room where you give a more space in front of the nose of a person, an animal or whatever it is. But also it will push your subject into that rule of thirds, just like here. You can see it just looks more interesting. You can kind of see where they're headed and our subject, which is mostly the gentleman but it's really all three, is off to the right. In this case here, it's a little symmetrical but even if you put the grid on here, you can see that things are following those lines. I don't need the grid for this. You can see that the monkey is off to the left and somehow he's managing to sit there in that occasion tree without getting poked. And here's a boy by a gate. Now, not only do you get something that's more interesting if you look down in this area, you can see how it's kind of tattered and it gives the photo a lot of character as well. So let's talk about a little bit with color here. So when you're outside and you're taking a picture and it's sunny, you can change the white balance even though you don't even maybe know you're doing that. On the setting, you go from auto to cloudy or auto to landscape because some cameras do not have a cloudy setting. So if you look right on your camera, you'll see a picture of what looks like a mountain and they look different on every camera so I just showed a couple of examples here. That will actually change the color balance just enough to warm it up just a tad. So you can add a little more punch also with a polarizing filter. Now a lot of these cameras, you cannot put any kind of filter on. So if you get a good pair of sunglasses that are polarized, you'll be able to see the effect and it'll actually look pretty cool. If you do have an SLR, I highly recommend it. This is a filter that rotates on the end and what you're trying to do is cut out some unwanted light hitting your lens because it's coming at you generally in two ways straight in the lens and also reflecting down off of things. So as an example, right outside of IACC here, I looked up at the sky, this was in the fall and I took a picture of leaves in the sky. Now that's without any type of filtration and now do you see the difference? The blues are deeper which also makes the trees look even more yellow than they are even though they haven't changed but it really helps quite a bit. Another example of what polarization can do is it affects the reflection on water. Now this has the filter on it so you can kind of see through the water. You can still see the mountain in there a bit but again that's that light that's reflecting. So if we go ahead and don't use it, the polarizer, you can see that now it looks like almost two mountains which actually is a pretty cool effect depending on what you're trying to do but if you put those side by side you can see the difference in that reflection and then it's more dramatic too depending on the situation that you're in. Here, this isn't about composition obviously there's not much going on here but it's a good case of let's look at that color. Now if we go ahead and put on the polarizing filter you can see that the blues got bluer the greens got greener and if we put them next to each other you can really see that dramatic difference. So if you're taking any pictures outside of people well let's use that flash. Sounds strange but it really does work well. So if you get somebody with the sun on their back or on their side and you can get that flash to fill in it is the same color balance as the sun so it shouldn't look like a flash it'll just sort of fill in. You can do the same thing under a shade tree. It's just enough. You don't want to blow them away and it shouldn't because it's so bright outside. So here's an example. This gentleman in India is opening some clams and the camera, if you can see around here is taking in all this. So when it says oh plenty bright I'm going to make sure this is dark because this is what's supposed to be exposed but the problem is you lose detail in that area so you have two choices. If you know how to force your flash to come on that would help fill it in. Or if you change angles your camera sees more dark and it will automatically come on. But you can see the difference in those photos as far as detail in the shade. It's kind of important to see and it doesn't look like a flash because it matches and it doesn't overpower the rest of the picture. And if you use macro it's awesome. It brings you into a whole new world. So on your camera there should be some sort of picture of a flower and that tells you that you're going into macro mode and that's where you actually bring that lens way in close. And the basic steps are you bring it in close, you'll hear the camera adjusting and try to put it in focus. Still when you're going to take the picture you need to half squeeze it so it still locks in that focus and exposure and then finish the squeeze. It's always best to use a tripod if you can. When you get really close it will make a pretty big difference. Here's an example. Outside of IACC a bush. Nothing extraordinary about it but when you get in close look, I didn't know these berries were there but now I can see them and it looks completely different than the last picture. In fact there's my finger just to give you an idea how close I am. See the FBI, they could get me here because there's my fingerprint. I mean we're in pretty tight. This looks sort of like a tree. Now I'd have to help get help from a forester or something to know the difference but the whole point is you get in close and you're seeing stuff you didn't see before and you can even see spider webs. Now there is one thing I haven't mentioned it's called depth of field. When you have a lot of depth of field it means everything in front and back of your subject is in focus. Low depth of field like this, there's almost no depth of field it's only a certain distance from the camera that's in focus to everything else goes out. That can be a problem but it also helps things look more compelling. Let's look at depth of grain. With that macro you can get in there and if you need to even explain insects that were in this you can really see the benefit or if you are shooting insects this dragonfly which should have flown away but let me get in really close can really pick up a lot of detail. Flowers can look simply gorgeous and you can see that depth of field how some of the photograph is sharp and a lot of it is very soft. In this case you see the flowers behind it very soft just makes for a nice backdrop and if you could guess maybe where these are from it's yes it's at NDSU but it's not those beautiful gardens as you come into NDSU it is actually in front of the Thorsen Maintenance Center pretty boring until you get in really close. When you look in the back of your camera and you're looking in that little viewfinder or window it makes it very difficult sometimes to keep things level. So here are some tips on keeping it level. First of all it's digital so a lot of these things you can try and retry and then pick the best one when you get back but basically take the picture, reposition and it just takes practice and even with practice you're going to doubt yourself I do all the time so I keep shifting around so some examples of that would be this elephant it's pretty easy to kind of keep him level but you can see the horizon in the background it does help if you just keep that in mind because if you're just watching your subject this woman I may have tilted the camera to be level with the top of this container but it would have been way off. There is a bit of a horizon in there and that is what I looked at even though I didn't think about it and these ladies you see how the ground is very angled here and you can you can pretty much tell this is level but this helps you when you're taking that picture all those horizontal lines make a big difference so I do recommend always as big a media card and extra batteries don't need to write these numbers down or anything it's just the idea that the more megapixels that your camera does it generally takes a larger it takes a larger file size so you want big and you always want to spare because if you ever run out it'll be the time when you need it the most same with the battery so high resolution you need all that big space on your card because you should have the highest resolution because it's awesome for printing and also the highest quality compression which means in your camera it may say detail, extreme, fine there's ultra fine there's a lot of different just find the highest settings on both and use them. Definitely best for printing. Different than the screen that you're possibly looking at right now is that high resolution is only 72 that's all it takes to reproduce a photograph nicely but when you're printing you need a huge resolution more like 300 or better and that is important because it's trying to reproduce everything by printing all these little dots so here's an example of how resolution is really your benefit when you're just keeping it on your computer this picture is a macro shot right but it technically is way bigger than the screen and software when you're viewing a picture you know squishes it down so you can see the whole thing so as I crop this I'm not zooming in I'm just cropping as I crop it it moves in closer without losing any detail so if I wanted to get in there and really talk about some of this look at that amazing detail you can see all the jagged little edges pretty cool way to show something or even educate someone about whatever it is you're trying to demonstrate a tripod is important you don't think about it so much in still photography but if you are doing these close ups and you use the camera timer slow shutter speeds or what have you very important and sometimes it can be as simple as a little tripod like this now I'm not recommending this I'm just using it as an example you can also use a full size tripod that you put a video camera on and either way it's a good thing to use the self timer does help with the whole missing photographer syndrome I know about that I take a lot of pictures and I'm not in many of them so if you use that timer you can get yourself flash is important autofocus may or may not work most cameras now are pretty good about autofocusing and not shooting between people and getting the background and focus which used to happen a lot and also the long exposure is if I don't want to be touching the camera I don't want it to shake I'm going to use that timer here's an example of here take a picture of us we're on vacation oh this is quite a few years ago in fact Jake up there in the middle is just as tall as me but you can see that there might be a couple things wrong here like what's important up here people want to put those heads right in the center but now we have all this wasted there's nothing up there we really want to see and where are our feet at this point this is a hint I want to give you if you're out and about and you need a picture of you or people you're with from someone else that what you do is frame it up on your friends whoever you're with family and make sure you see your feet and then when you give them this person you don't know your camera to take a picture just say can you get my feet in the picture it'll automatically make them push the camera down and you won't have all that space okay doesn't always work but it has a pretty high rate and look it's not very level but I could change that if I wanted to just in one of those programs in a program like Pocasa or IrfanView or some of these other programs you could tilt that back but look at that right in the middle we put on that grid and there we are in the middle of a nice happily composed family there now this is just sort of an effect you may or may not want to try this you cannot shoot it in auto you can to get this effect which is freezing in time when you come out of it and you start playing with the shutter speed you have to shoot in the shade you can get shots like this where the water sort of blurs everything else is in focus it just shows motion it's something that you have to work with but you can get some pretty cool results and lastly I just want to talk about moments moments are something that will happen like it says a moment maybe it's a second or two don't worry about it, leave your camera in auto you'll want to not worry about tweaking things when it's a moment I go back into manual when I need to do something special but keep it in auto look for those moments here's an example an Indian came up behind a little girl and I said hello and she turned around she was pretty surprised big white guy aiming that thing she smiled afterwards girls they only laughed like this for a moment a person talking said that I'm very impressed you're such beautiful girls and that was a reaction I happened to catch it otherwise it would still be a nice picture of all these girls with all those beautiful colors but much nicer with the smiles same thing with these kids in Africa they just came running up and they were very excited and if I had to sit and tweak I could have missed that picture she's a little surprised that I'm taking a picture of her sitting in that container versus the other two are sitting on top that's pretty funny but then when you give them a moment they give you a nice smile well I hope you have fun taking pictures and that some of these tips will help you out I do have a little information you can use picasa or urfin view and these are great programs for tweaking your photos picasa does a little bit more with managing your photos as well if you're using a mac xe is an excellent program but if you're in the market for a camera or a lens or anything like that look up digital photography review they do not endorse any particular brands or anything they just have nice reviews and all these products again I hope this helped you out in some way and enjoy taking pictures