How To Take Better Vacation Pictures

Choose Your Camera
The camera you choose is your personal preference whether it is a camera that uses film, digital or even a cell phone. One thing to keep in mind, if you are wanting to enlarge your photos, you will need a camera that shoots with higher mp (mega pixels). More mp means better pictures at larger sizes (basically it is higher resolution). If you are using a DSLR camera, your disk needs to be a class 10 card or better. In addition, if your taking pictures with a cell phone, some companies will not enlarge cell phone image files.

Get Familiar With your Camera
I would suggest not to learn all of the gadgets on your camera however, do learn the important ones such as focusing, flash, automatic mode versus manual modes. If you use manual mode, try to always keep your ISO at 100. This makes the image sharper.

Look At Your Surroundings
When you are on vacation, there is always those touristic pictures to take….please take those for your vacation family album but, look around you to see what else is in the setting. Maybe is a interesting bird flying by, architecture on a building, geographic patterns on a fence….Look around….Art is all around you. You just have to look deeper.

Focus
Once you find the picture to take, take your time to make sure you have your shot in focus. Yes, you have to look through the viewfinder to get a better picture. In addition, the way you hold the camera is very important. You also may want to use a tripod to steady your camera. This really keeps the camera from moving, The best picture can not have any movement when the photo is being taken. Nothing is more frustrating then when you get home the picture that you took was blurry. Then your picture is lost forever, unless of course you can travel there again and are able to take the picture again but, that’s kinda expensive and the odds of the same shot being there are slim.

Composition
There are many ways to make the picture more interesting. The most common in composition is the rule of thirds. See attached example. You can also fill the frame, which consists of focusing on an object and taking the picture so the object touches all four sides of the frame or close to it. A good way to do this is with a zoom lens. Simplicity is another way to do composition. Basically you focus on the subject without a cluttered background. Leading lines is always a very visual composition. This is done by having lines in the photograph that direct you to the focus of the picture. Framing is always fun. This is accomplished by having anything framing the center of interest in the picture. And lastly, there is always fibonacci. See attached example. This composition is the hardest to achieve, but the results are amazing.

Editing
So your photograph doesn’t have the exact composition, lighting or color that you would like it to have. All of those things can be fixed with minor editing. For jpegs and raw format files, there are several programs you can use on your computer to achieve your results. Some programs are even free. Just google free editing software to see what is available for your computer. For cell phones, you can edit right on your cell phone.

And lastly….Always make sure you charge your camera daily before you go out to take photographs or have a back up battery so you always have a charge!

Please feel free to contact Melissa to talk about her passion for photography.
You can connect with her on FaceBook or Instagram at MelissaLanePhotography, see her on Flickr at MelissaLane5, email her at [email protected], or visit her website MelissaLanePhotography.com