Also, a plain background can accentuate your subject and a jumbled background can distract your viewers from the subject.

My Nikon D90 has 12.3 megapixels. My cameraphone has 5 megapixels. A photo taken with my cameraphone would be fine if I’m planning to only display the photo online. But for printing, more megapixels is usually better than fewer.

Other factors are important to the quality of an image. The digital camera’s image sensor, processor, lens, and other factors are as important as the number of megapixels.

I found data online that gives the minimum megapixels for quality prints printed at 300 dpi.

Max Print Size || Minimum MP || Resolution
4 x 6″ || 2 megapixels || 1600 x 1200
5 x 7″ || 3 megapixels || 2048 x 1536
8 x 10″ || 5 megapixels || 2560 x 1920
11 x 14″ || 6 megapixels || 2816 x 2112
16 x 20″ || 8 megapixels || 3264 x 2468
16 x 24″ || 12 megapixels || 4200×2800

If all your pictures are in color, look for the setting in your camera that will change them to black and white and experiment with that for a day.

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” -Wayne Dyer

Some people have made some really amazing macro photos. I will not claim to be one of them since I haven’t spent much time practicing. A quick google search brings up many amazing macro photos. Here are a few I had a merry time taking today.

I learned that depth of field is really shallow when taking macro photographs. I had to use a small aperture (f/18) in order to get a decent amount of the flower in focus.

I also noticed that I had to take pictures in very bright light. I was outside with the sun directly on the flower. After a few minutes, the sun moved behind a tree and the shutter speed dropped from 1/250th to 1/5th of a second.

I hope this post has inspired you to experiment with macro photography.

I offered the suggestion to squat down and get on his level for a different perspective. Here’s an example of that:

Moving your body to get different perspectives will often lead to photos that are more interesting than the usual ones taken from the same standing height. A picture of a house from a helicopter or from the viewpoint of a blade of grass will give drastically different images. This was the first assignment given in my very first photography class.

I challenge you to take a picture from a different perspective and view your world with new eyes.

Elements like shape,
proportion, and color make
eye-catching pictures

Move your subject
from the center of photos
sayeth rule of thirds

Try filling the frame
with your subject to make it
more interesting

Use lines to direct
viewer’s eyes through the image.
They will need your help.

Exposure is a combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. If you choose your settings manually, you can change the exposure by changing any of these settings.

I believe all digital cameras are able to choose the exposure for you and will usually do a great job at it. But in some specific instances, the exposure will be incorrect and the image will not look like it does in real life. Some of these instances are when you’re photographing a lot of snow, a sunny day at the beach, or in a studio. Those are times when you’ll have to change the exposure manually either in the camera or afterwards in photoshop, gimp, lightroom, or some other photo editing program.

Most digital cameras (camera phones and point and shoot cameras included) have an option to simply increase or decrease the exposure itself. Play around with it and see what effects it has on your photography.

This was the biggest source of negative energy in my life for a while. Once I got past it, I ended up learning a lesson from it.

While people were telling me I was doing it for exposure, I was really practicing and gaining experience in something that I wasn’t that great at.

After weeks, months, maybe years of practice, you’ll get to the point where people won’t even think of asking you to do what you do for free.

So when someone is asking you to do your work for exposure, they’re really giving you the option to gain more experience and you can choose whether you’d like to or not. It’s really one of the greatest gifts someone can offer you while you’re building your skills.

Do it for exposure if it’s something you’d like to practice with. Don’t base your career on magical exposure.

Higher sensitivity to light will allow you to use a faster shutter speed in darker conditions like indoors and at night. If your shutter speed was slower, your subject may be blurry or the image itself may be blurry from your shaky hands.

Outdoors on a sunny day, I typically set my ISO to 200 or 400. When I was taking pictures indoors at concerts and open mics without a tripod, I would usually have the ISO set to 800 or higher so that the shutter speed could be faster and I could get a picture of the performer that wasn’t blurry.

Here are examples of pictures with ISO the set at 200 and 3200. Click the pictures to see them bigger.

Clouds ISO 200

Clouds ISO 3200

Don’t be afraid to use a higher ISO (800 or so) with your digital camera. It’s often difficult to notice a difference unless the image is cropped a lot or it gets printed really large. Check out this post at the Digital Photography School website which explains how to choose the right ISO for your digital photography.

Bricks ISO 200

Bricks ISO 3200

Bricks Cropped ISO 200

Bricks Cropped ISO 3200

If you have any images with a high ISO that look wonderful, share a link in the comments!

For a long time, my goal in photography was to take my camera everywhere I went. Then I added more goals such as taking at least one picture daily and making money from photography.

I reached all of those goals and more. I believe it was simply by having the idea in my head of what I wanted to accomplish.

Photography goals can also be specific. An example of a specific photography goal is doing one photowalk a month. Another may be to create a physical or digital photobook of an event or experience. In my case, I could make a photobook using the pictures I took of the spoken word scene during my time in Las Vegas.

If you’ve ever had or currently have a goal that is related to photography in some way, let me know in the comments and maybe we can find a way to work together and reach all of our goals together.