From the cheapest point-and-shoots to the most advanced professional SLRs, cameras usually are very good at getting the subject in focus automatically. Manual focus is a feature on my FZ10 and on the lenses of my 10D, but I used it very rarely. Sometimes the camera has trouble focusing when the light is very low and/or in macro situations (shooting pictures of very small things), but even in those instances, the camera is usually very good at getting the subject in focus.

What the camera may or may not be good at is deciding what the subject IS. The problem is, a lot of times you want to compose a picture in an interesting way, where the thing that has to be most sharply in focus is not at the center. For example, a picture of a person with something in the background is often more interesting if the person is off to the side rather than smack dab in the middle. But the problem is, the camera usually wants to focus on what’s in the middle. Even SLRs. If you just compose the picture and then press the button, the person (or whatever is the important thing that really should be most sharply focused will be out of focus).

The solution to this is simple. First, point the camera straight at the person (or at the thing that should be sharply in focus). Then, half-press the shutter button. The camera will focus on the person (or whatever). When the camera is focused, it will usually give you a little green light or a beep or something. Now, keep that button half-pressed, because if you take your finger off the camera will just re-focus when you press the button again. Now, re-compose the picture (point the camera in a slightly different direction so that the person is now a little off to the side). And NOW press the button the rest of the way down.

This kind of technique is illustrated below:

Above, a photographer is about to take a picture. Say the photographer wants to compose a shot like this, with the people kinda off to the side instead of at the middle. Problem is since the people are not near the middle, and the area near the middle of the picture is far away, the camera thinks it ought to focus on the far-away stuff, and then the people (who are NOT far away) are out of focus. (The classic example of this would have one person at either side of the shot, and some background visible BETWEEN them rather than off to the side, but I could not find a good one like that among my pictures).

The solution? Point the camera at the people...

...now half-click the button (the people will come into focus, and when the camera is "locked" this way, it will give you a signal, like a beep, or like the display turning green, or something):

Now, with your finger still on the button, recompose the shot (move the camera so it points the way you originally wanted it, with the people off to the side) and finish pressing th button the rest of the way:

“Half pressing” the button might sound weird, but if you press you camera’s button slowly and feel for it, you’ll feel a spot about halfway down that you can easily hold. So press the button that much to set the focus first, and then actually take the picture.

One last thing about this: Most of the delay between pressing the button and hearing the camera take the picture comes from focusing. If your camera is pre-focused (button is half-pressed, or camera is in manual focus mode), then there will be much less of a delay between pressing the button and taking the picture. Therefore, you should have that button half-pressed in advance if your picture is going to capture a precise moment in time. For example, if you’re taking a picture of a tennis player and you want the picture to be of the moment they are swinging the racket over their head during a serve, or at the moment the ball is in contact with the racket, then you need for there to be a small delay from when you press the button to when the picture is taken. Here's what you do: Point your camera at the tennis player and half-press the button, a good couple of seconds (at least) before the moment you want to capture. The camera will have time to focus. As I said earlier, when the camera is focused, it will usually give you a little green light or a beep or something. You then know that, when you press the button, the picture will be taken with minimal delay. So keep the button half-pressed, and then when that moment comes, press the button the rest of the way, and watch it as your camera takes the picture very fast indeed. Maybe not quite SLR-fast, but much faster than if you started pressing the button immediately before you wanted the shot.

Pre-focusing will minimize shutter delay, thus making it much easier to capture those ever-elusive Opposing Passes they do at airshows...

Y’know how, sometimes, you take a picture that’s just too bright? Sure, it’s sunny out, but some of your pictures from that day at the beach look great, while other look pale, hazy, and too bright, with some areas that look solid white! Or say you want to take a picture of a person, building, geological formation, or other object in front of a bright background (like a hazy sky or a setting sun), and you don’t seem to be able to make your object/person/whatever show up as anything but a dark silhouette. Pain in the butt, right?

There’s an easy way around that, and it’s actually using the same technique described above for focusing.

This is the one thing that SLRs are not at all good at. On a non-SLR digital camera, the sensor sees the thing in front of the camera all the time, so it can tell you what the picture will look like beforehand. In an SLR, your eyes look through the lens, and a mirror keeps the sensor from seeing anything until the moment you press that button. Looking through the lens allows you to know exactly what is in focus and exactly what will be where in the picture, but you don’t know how well-exposed the picture is until after you take it. This is known as an optical viewfinder. On non-SLR digital cameras, you can see a great approximation of how well-exposed the picture is on the liquid crystal display (LCD screen) or on the electronic viewfinder (the EVF is the camcorder-like smaller display inside the camera – some cameras do not have an EVF, and have an optical viewfinder instead, but at least they have an LCD on the back of the camera).

Anyways, so how DO you get well-exposed shots with an auto-mode non-SLR? Well, you point the camera in different directions until you think the exposure looks good, and then you half-press the button! For example, say you want to take a picture of a boat. There is water in the lower half or so of the picture, and sky in the upper half or so, with the boat in the middle. If the boat is slightly above the middle, the camera tries to adjust to the dark water and everything looks very bright. If you put the boat below the middle of the picture, the camera tries to adjust to the bright sky and everything gets darker. So the trick is to move the middle of the picture (usually indicated by a square, some “crosshairs”, a small circle, [brackets], or something) slightly above the horizon, and slightly below the horizon, until you get just the right brightness. You then half-press the button (as described in the focus setting) to “lock” those exposure settings, and don’t let your finger off. Finally, compose the picture the way you want (boat by the lower left corner or something) and press the button the rest of the way down.

In other words: If the picture looks too bright, point the camera at something especially bright (the picture will get darker to compensate), then half-press the button, recompose, and take your shot. If the picture looks too dark, point the camera at something especially dark (the picture will get brighter to compensate), then half-press the button, recompose, and take your shot.

Here is a real-life example: I want to take a picture of a rock on a beach in a sunset:

But if my camera is pointed up high like it is in the above picture, which (let's say) is the way I want to compose it (a lot of sky – there are all these cool clouds I want to fill the frame with), then I lose all details of the beach, like where the ocean ends and where the sand begins, and the rock is just a black silhouette. (This would be especially bad if it were a person instead of a rock). I want more details of the rock and the beach to be on this picture. This picture is under-exposed (i.e. it's too dark). So I point the camera down towards the darker area so that the picture becomes lighter:

However, down here I can see the rock and the beach fine, but then the cool clouds in the background are washed out in a big white area. This picture is over-exposed (that is, it's too bright).

Now, if I patiently move the center of my camera around the rock-sky boundary, after a little while I get this:

I can then half-press the button, and hold this until the camera tells me the exposure and focus are locked (notice the brackets went green):

I can now compose the shot the way I want (with the horizon pretty close to the bottom and the sky filling most of the shot), finger still half-pressing the button, and take the picture:

Perfect! (Well, you may think that the first picture, with the rock silhouette and the dramatic-colored clouds, was cooler. And maybe you are right. But I wanted to illustrate a point here…)

One more thing: If the picture keeps being over exposed because of bright things in the background (like the sun, or haze), and the thing you want to take a picture of is not more than 15 or so feet away… Use the flash! This is called “fill-in flash”. Most people think you only use the flash at night, but if the background is bright and the subject is close, the flash will usually do a good job of lighting up the subject so that it is closer to the level of brightness of the background, making it easier for the picture to be well exposed both for the background and for the subject. For example, the following picture was taken about an hour after the pictures of the rock above, and it shows my parents watching that same sunset. If it were not for the fill-in flash, my parents would be too dark, and the sunset would be so bright you would not be able to appreciate it in the picture the least bit. I actually hate using the flash at night – everything close becomes over-exposed and pale-blue-ish, and everything far away becomes lost in darkness. But I do think that fill-in flash comes in very handy when the background is bright.

And as a last note about this… Yes, I am aware of the fact that if you can either do the half-press thing to lock the focus the way you want it, or you can do the half-press thing to lock the exposure (brightness) the way you want it, UNLESS one spot you point your camera to both causes the picture to be well-exposed AND to focus on what you want to focus on. Yes, this sucks. Which is exactly WHY MANUAL CONTROLS ARE SO GREAT. With manual controls, you can change the brightness by pressing buttons until it looks right, rather than by “fishing around” for a spot where the camera gives you the desired brightness. You could even take your picture, make it one click brighter, take it again, and then make it a little darker than before, and take it again, so that ONE of them will probably be well-exposed. This is called bracketing, and some cameras even do it for you (you press the button and you hear snap-snap-snap; the camera just took three pictures at different exposure settings). Most importantly, manual controls allow you to get sharper pictures than the auto mode would, because you get to control WHICH of three variables (Aperture, ShutterSpeed, and ISO) is/are changed in order to change exposure (brightness). Read on to find out how to get sharper and better-exposed pictures by using manual controls.

(By the way, the pictures above (sunset) were taken with a Fuji 2800, the old 2mp version of the Fuji S3100. Like its newer versions, the 2800 does not have manual controls, so I did indeed need to use the described techniques to get the above pictures, as well as all the other pictures I took during my trip to Fernando de Noronha).

As I discussed in Page 1, there are basically three things you can alter to change how bright a picture will be. Changing each of these things will have other side-effects as well, so it’s important to know how they work.

A picture is recorded because light is refracted by the lens and focused onto a sensor for a certain period of time. The wider the lens is (aperture), the longer the time is (shutterspeed), and the more sensitive the sensor is (ISO), the brighter the picture will be.

The side-effect of a wider aperture is a narrower depth of field. At f8 or so (not very wide), almost everything will be in focus. At f2.8, if your subject is in focus, anything closer to the camera will be out of focus, and anything further away will also be out of focus. (The “depth of field” is the range of distances from the camera in which things will be in focus – if it’s “shallow”, only things a certain distance from the camera will be in focus). This means getting the focus just right might be a tad trickier at wider apertures, since the depth of field is so much shallower at f2.8 than it is at f8. Also, on SLRs, a wide aperture will mean that even your subject (or whatever is in sharpest focus) won’t be quite as sharply focused as it would be at a narrower aperture, but this slight fuzzyness at wide apertures is quite subtle and can’t really be noticed in digicams. Therefore, there’s really no good reason to not set your aperture at the widest, unless you WANT slow shutterspeeds and motion blur.

As we talked about in Page 1, a high ISO means grainier pictures. If the lighting is good, keep your ISO at the minimum setting. If you're trying to take a picture at night or indoors, you might have to raise the ISO a bit so that the picture is not too dark, but don't raise it too much unless you have an SLR or the picture gets real grainy.

Slow shutterspeeds mean motion blur. If you have a tripod and/or a real steady hand, this means you will “capture” motion well, but if not, it means the whole picture will look blurry. So keep your shutterspeed as fast as you can. If you're trying to take a picture at night or indoors, you might have to go slower so that the picture is not too dark. More on this over the next couple of paragraphs.

In short: If it’s bright, set your aperture as wide as it gets, your ISO as low as it gets, and then adjust the shutterspeed so that the overall brightness of the picture looks about right.

(Or, you set your aperture to the widest and your ISO to the lowest, and let the camera figure out the shutter speed IT thinks would be best for a good exposure. This is called "Aperture Priority Mode", and is what I use almost all the time, unless I WANT blur).

Do remember that, on almost any camera (except some Panasonics and some Fujis), the widest aperture goes down as you zoom. On a Minolta, you might set it at f2.8 and a correspondingly low ISO and fast shutterspeed, but then you zoom in and your best aperture goes down to F4.5, and suddenly the image looks too dark. So be aware that, if you use the zoom, you might need to re-set the exposure settings after you zoom in, unless you set the aperture pretty narrow (like 3.7 or 4.5) to begin with.

So, if it’s darker, a high ISO and a slow shutterspeed are the things you can do to make the image brighter. But which should you sacrifice, a non-blurry fast speed or a non-grainy low ISO? It depends on how steady a hand you think you have. A general, safe guideline is “don’t shoot slower than your focal length”. Remember, most cameras have an equivalent focal length of about 35mm at wide angle, so 3x zoom is about 100mm when zoomed in, and 12x zoom is about 400mm when zoomed in. This means if you’re zoomed all the way out, don’t shoot slower than 1/30 of a second. If you’re at 3x zoom, don’t shoot slower than 1/100. If you’re zoomed all the way in using your 12x optical zoom, try to keep the shutterspeed faster than 1/400 of a second. This is a general guideline based on how much most hands shake, and on how much this shake gets magnified at longer focal lengths (i.e. when you zoom in).

So what I would recommend is, if it’s darker, set the aperture as wide as it goes (as usual), set the shutterspeed to about your focal length (give or take), and then change the ISO so that the overall brightness of the picture looks good.

If you think you have a steady hand, and/or if you have Image Stabilization, you can go quite a bit slower than your focal length. Many of the photographers I know will brag about shooting helicopters and propeller planes at very slow shutter-speeds (this is so that the blades have time to move around and make that circle that looks more like the way it looks to our eyes, instead of looking on the picture like little sticks). For example, a photographer might show off a picture and say "I took this picture handheld at 400mm and 1/60 of a second, with no stabilization!", which is impressive because at 400mm it's hard to get a sharp shot if you shoot slower than 1/400 of a second, let alone at 1/60! Myself, I’ve taken a couple of pretty good 1/80s shots at an equivalent focal length of 600mm, hand held (i.e. no tripod, that would make it too easy) but with image stabilization (ok, I’m not THAT good, I kinda need IS to go slow). In any case, if you’re not using your zoom (wide angle, about 30 or 35mm focal length), you’re probably ok using shutterspeeds as slow as 1/30 or maybe even 1/20 of a second, but with IS and with a steady hand you might be able to go as slow as 1/10 or 1/3 of a second. This would allow for lower ISOs and thus for pictures that are not grainy at night.

That’s the neat thing about manual controls. If you are confident in your IS and on your hand steadiness, you can keep your ISO low to avoid graininess (at the price of having to be careful in order to not get motion blur). Or, alternately, you can crank up the ISO if you want, in order to not have to worry about motion blur. Also, this is all independent of the focusing, so you can get good focus AND have the brightness be just right. (On auto mode, you’d have to find a spot that is the right distance from the camera, AND causes the camera to choose the right brightness, to point your camera at and then half-press the button and finally recompose and take the shot).

In other words, once you've figured out what fraction of your focal length you're comfortable shooting at, you can always tell the camera to shoot at that ideal speed, which will prevent sensor noise/grain AND motion blur as much as possible given the speed you're comfortable at. (I, for example, feel comfortable shooting 1/2 to 2/3 of my equivalent focal length. So if I'm at 35mm and it's dark, I feel comfortable telling the camera to shoot at 1/20s, and if I have image stabilization, then I feel comfortable telling the camera to shoot at about 1/10s or 1/8s - about one quarter of my equivalent focal length, maybe a tad less. If I'm feeling particularly adventurous and have really good rock-solid IS (like that in Canon SLRs and Minolta digital cameras), I might shoot as slow as 1/10 my equivaletn focal length (1/3 of a second at 35mm, 1/60s at 600mm on my SLR), but that causes most pictures to be more blurry than I would prefer. In any case, I determine the speed where blurriness is acceptable to me (as a fraction of the focal length), and I stick to that speed. Many cameras will warn me that this is too slow (by showing me a shaking-hand or red-hand icon), so the camera thinks it ought to shoot faster... The thing is, when it's not super-bright, this means that the camera will want to raise the ISO and make the picture grainier. So, by keeping the camera from going faster than your slowest comfortable speed, you're minimizing noise/grainyness! This is very important to me.

How do you know if the picture’s brightness will optimally bring out the most detail? Well, you can just look at what the camera’s display shows you! Or, you can use the histogram. A histogram is a graph of how many of the sensor’s pixels are at what brightness. You want some pixels to be pretty dark and some to be pretty light. What you want to avoid is to have a bunch of really really dark pixels (lots of them bunched up towards the left of the graph) or a bunch of really really light pixels (lots of them bunched up against the right side). Here are the histograms (with explanations) of the three rock-at-sunset pictures from before:

While some cameras can only show you a histogram of a picture you just took, many cameras have a "live histogram" feature: as you point the camera at different directions and/or change the exposure settings, a small histogram is displayed at the bottom of the screen, and you can see how the distribution of pixels changes in real-time. If you don't trust "just looking at the screen" as a way of figuring out how well-exposed your picture is, and you need something more precise, then that's one way to do it. Personally, I don't use the histogram except when I'm adjusting the brightness and contrast on Photoshop (in other words: If you get the exposure slightly wrong, you can usually fix it later), but some photographers find the in-camera histogram useful.

Before I finish this section on Manual Controls, I ought to briefly mention that there will be times when you actually want to use slower shutter speeds, but those are described in the next section:

A lot of people, when choosing a digital camera, say:

"I want it to take good pictures in low light", or
"I want to use it to take pictures at concerts", or
"I want to be able to take good pictures at my kids' basketball games", or
"I want to take good pictures at parties", or
"I want to be able to get good pictures of evening games", or
"I want to be able to get good shots at my kids' plays",
et cetera.

Also, a lot of people get digital cameras, and then are surprised at the low quality of their low-light pictures, and want to know how to improve it, or what to look for in a camera where the low light image quality will be better.

Low-light photography is the most challenging kind of photography. Photography is all about capturing light, so if you don't have a lot of light to work with, it will always be much harder. There is no easy or cheap way to guarantee you'll get good pictures in low light. A low-light environment is the situation where really good photographer skills, and really good equipment, really make a major difference. Any dummy with any cheap digital camera can take beautiful pictures outside on a sunny day. But it takes a careful person, and a good camera, to capture shots when you have less light to work with.

The tips on this section should help, though.

Let's go back to the basics for just one second. A picture is recorded when a shutter is open for a little while, which allows a lens to focus some light onto a sensor. How bright the picture will be depends on:
-How much light there is outside,
-How much light the lens can gather (aperture),
-How sensitive the sensor is to light (ISO),
-And for how long the shutter is open (shutter speed).

This means that if you have very little light to work with, one (or more) of the following will be true:

-You're gonna need to make your sensor more sensitive to light (increase the ISO),
-You're gonna need to leave the shutter open for longer (slow down the shutter speed),
-You-re gonna need a lens that gathers more light (wider aperture),
-You're gonna need more light illuminating your subject (use the flash).

If your subject is close, using the flash usually solves the problem. However, if the subject is more than 15 or 20 feet away, this usually does no good. And even when the subject is close, using the flash leads to the colors on the subject being all washed out and the background becoming completely black, which is usually not desireable if you can help it. So, for the rest of the section, I will assume you do not want to use the flash (because yoru subject is too far away or because you don't like the way pictures look when you use the flash).

Aperture: Usually, you already take pictures with your aperture wide open, so that the shutter is open for as little time as possible and motion blur is minimized. So, when it gets dark, you're not going to be able to go much wider. If you know you'll want to take pictures indoors, get a camera with a "fast" lens - this means the aperture can go extra-wide. (Wide-aperture lenses are said to be "fast lenses" because they gather more light and thus allow for faster shutter speeds to be used, so images look less blurry). At the end of this section, I will list some cameras that have exceptionally fast lenses, some of which will allow you to shoot with shutter speeds three to ten times faster than normal digital cameras (so you get one third to one tenth the motion blur). These are usually a little expensive, but fast lenses always are.

ISO: Making the sensor more sensitive to light will allow you to use faster shutter speeds and thus minimize motion blur and camera shake. Cameras make use of this resource when lighting is poor. However, increasing the ISO also makes the pictures more grainy because of increased sensor noise. So you really should not raise the ISO any more than you really have to. Therefore, the important thing when shooting in low light (as I am about to describe in detail) is to figure out the slowest shutter speed at which you don't get too much blur, so that you get as much light in as you can and thus the ISO only has to go up the minimal amount.

Shutter speed: This is where good photographers and/or good equipment can make low-light situations much easier to work with, and where bad photographers and bad equipment take pictures that look awful. Knowing how to deal with slower shutterspeeds will make or break your low-light shots. One recommendation is to get cameras with image stabilization. The main problem with slow-shutterspeed pictures is that your hand usually moves just a little bit whilethe picture is being taken. If the shutter is open for longer, that leads to blur. BUT what image stabilization does is, it senses that the camera is moving, and actually moves the lens the opposite way! This means the lens keeps pointing the same way even if the rest of the camera shakes, therefore slow shutterspeeds will cause much less blur than they normally would. IS (image stabilization) can lead to drastically improved low-light pictures. But, still, the big question is, how slow CAN you shoot? I mean, it seems clear that there is some minimum speed where, if you shoot slower, you get motion blur. The thing is, if you shoot faster, then you get less light, and so the camera has to increase the ISO, and the picture ends up coming out grainy. So yes, it is VERY important to figure out your minimum speed and stay at it, so that the pictures are neither blurrier nor grainier than they have to be. Yeah, ok, but what is that minimum speed!? Well, it's a function of the equivalent focal length. The more you zoom in, the more magnified the shaking of your hand becomes, and the faster you have to shoot. The general guideline is: The slowest you can go is your equivalent focal length (in mm, as a fraction of a second). What I mean is: If you're zoomed all the way out, then your equivalent focal length is something around 28mm to 38mm, right? So shooting any slower than 1/30 of a second will probably make for a blurry picture. If you zoom in all the way with your 3x zoom lens, then the equivalent focal length is around 100mm, so shooting any slower than 1/100 of a second will probably cause noticeable blur. If you have a 12x zoom lens (equivalent to around 400mm), then you probably don't want to shoot any slower than 1/400 of a second when you zoom all the way in. This is, of course, just a general guideline based on how much most hands shake and how much this shake gets magnified when you zoom. If you have steady hands (or if you follow the tips in the next paragraph), you can shoot even slower than your focal length. Conversely, if you have shaky hands, you might want to shoot a little faster than your focal length, like one and a half times the focal length (when zoomed all the way out at 30mm, shoot at 1/50 of a second, and when zoomed at 3x at 100mm, shoot at 1/160 of a second, for example, which will decrease the blur but require either a faster lens or a higher ISO so that the picture does not look too dark). Ah, and image stabilization allows you to shoot two to four times slower: At 35mm, you can take pictures at 1/10 of a second, maybe even as slow as 1/8, which will let in PLENTY of light. At 100mm, you can probably get away with shooting at 1/30 to 1/60 of a second, maybe as slow as 1/25. At 400mm (using that 12X zoom), you can probably shoot at 1/160 of a second, give or take, if you have good image stabilization. Again, remember you want to shoot as slow as you can (without getting shake-blur), so that more light enters the camera, and you don't have to crank up the ISO sensitivity (which leads to grain).

I said "1/160s, give or take" because depending on whether your hands are shaky or steady, you may feel comfortable shooting even slower, or you may feel you need to shoot faster. Here are some tips for shooting at slower shutter speeds:

-Use two hands! One on the right side of the camera, the other either on the left side or under the lens.
-Rest your elbows on your chest instead of sticking them out to the sides. That way, your arms wobble less, since your torso will help steady your arms.
-Use the viewfinder instead of the LCD. You know how, a lot of the time, you take pictures by looking at the screen on the back of the camera, holding the camera out in front of you? That's bad in low light. If your camera has a viewfinder (the little thing you look into, like on film cameras), use it! And press the camera a little bit into your face if you can, like into the nook between your nose and your brow. That will make slow shots a lot steadier, trust me. Squishing the camera hard into my nose helped me tremendously with slower-shutterspeed shots.
-Hold your camera gently with your fingers or fingertips, don't gove it a death grip with your whole hand. You may be surprised at how much less the camera shakes when held gently, compared to when it is held strongly.

After some trial and error, you should be able to say "I can comfortably shoot at around two thirds or three quarters of my focal length", or some such fraction. Remember that fraction. Knowing how slow you can go as a fraction of your focal length will allow you to always use the slowest shutter speed you can, which will prevent noticeable motion blur but will keep the ISO from being higher than it needs to be (and the picture from being grainier than it needs to be). Someone who is familiar with their grip on their camera, and/or with their image stabilization system (if any), should have a good idea of the speeds they can photograph at, and this will allow their low-light pictures to be as good as possible. This is why I said you have to put some thought and effort into it if you want good low-light shots. It's simply not as easy as daytime photography.

Shooting at these slow speeds may STILL not make the image bright enough. If that is the case, then you might still need to raise the ISO after all. But know that, if you are shooting as slow as you can confidently go, then your ISO is not being raised any more than absolutely necessary.

If you have a fast lens or if your camera does well at higher ISOs, then you don't need to shoot at these harder super-slow speeds. And if you have image stabilization, shooting at these slow speeds and not getting blurry shots is easier. So here are some cameras with fast lenses, good high-ISO performance, and image stabilization so that you can know which cameras can take good indoor shots:

First, the high ISO. It used to be that digital SLRs all had great high ISO performance, and fixed-lens digital cameras all took horrendously grainy pictures if the ISO was not set at the minimum level. While all digital SLRs still excel at high ISO performance, some of the normal fixed-lens digital cameras now are also good at that. Fuji has developed some truly fantastic high-ISO technology for their sensors, so Fuji's newest digital cameras do a LOT better in low light than any other. I mean, they do as well as SLRs! It's almost unbelievable - if you don't believe me, Jeff Keller has taken many pictures and shows you just how well the cameras perform at high ISOs on his pages about the Fuji F10, Z1, and S5200. There are even newer, better verions of these cameras, all of them good at high ISO (the Fuji Z3, F11, F20, F30). These cameras kick butt in the high-ISO realm and leave all others (except SLRs) in the dust. Ah, wait, there's one more. It used to be that Sony's cameras took really grainy pictures (especially their 5 megapixel cameras), but I guess Sony got tired of hearing people complain about this when they made the new T9 and the W100. These pocket-sized cameras take pictures with very little grain, even at high ISOs! Not only that, the T9 also has image stabilization. Definitely the pocket-sized cameras to have in low-light situations. However, if you want reliably good low-light shots, the outstanding high-ISO capabilities of most digital SLRs (and the super-fast lenses you can get) are still the surest way to get good low-light shots.

Now, the fast lenses. Only a handful of cameras are any faster than f2.8. Also, when you use the zoom, the maximum aperture almost always gets a lot worse - and those are the times when you need faster shutter speeds! This means that lenses where the aperture stays about the same when you use the zoom are really the only ones where the use of the zoom in low light is practical. Ok, so which cameras have these exceptionally fast lenses? Panasonic, Fuji and Canon are the only manufacturers that make cameras with lenses that stay fast when you use the zoom - they only get 10 or 20 percent slower (f2.8 to 3.1) even when you use 10x or 12x zoom!!! (Compare this to the Minoltas, which get about 3 times (300%) slower, or the Casios, which get five and a half times slower (556%) when you zoom just 3x!!! Terrible!). Panasonic and Canon have image stabilization to boot, and the Fuji S5200/S5600 also has that great high-ISO mode. So if you want zoom 10 or 12X and you want to be able to do it indoors, then the Panasonics (FZ4, FZ5, FZ10, FZ20), the Canons (S1-IS, S2-IS), and the Fujis (S5000, S5100, S5200, S5600) are the ones that can stay at f3.1 or better. If you only want to zoom 5X, though, then Sony has the F707, F717 and F828, which can stay at an amazing f2.2 all the way through the zoom range! This means it can use shutter speeds over one and a half times as fast as the Canon, Fuji, or Panasonic when in low light!!! (But it can only zoom in 5X, not 10 or 12). So that's it for the zooming, which is important for sports and plays and concerts and so on. But what if you just want to take pictures at parties, or of the interiors of buildings, where using the zoom is not as important but you want to have an even faster lens? Well, those Sonys can do f2.0 without the zoom! The only camera with a faster lens is the Olympus 5050 (has f1.8). The Canon G6 also has an f2.0 lens. The Olympus C8080 has an f2.4 lens, which is still quite a bit faster than the usual f2.8. And to finish our list of faster-than-usual lenses, the Nikon 8400 has an f2.6 lens (which is just a tad faster than the f2.8 lenses found on just about every digital camera). So, for bigger-than-usual apertures, the best cameras are (Starting with the best): The Olympus 5050, the Sony F707/717/828, the Canon G6, the Olympus C8080, and the Nikon 8400. If you want to zoom in more and still be able to have extra-fast apertures, the Sony F707/717/828 is the camera for you. If 5X is not enough zoom, then the Panasonic FZs, the Canon S1 and S2, and the Fuji S5200/S5600, are the ones to go with for fast lenses. However, let me remind you once again that SLR lenses can be even faster.

And what about image stabilization? Most big zoom cameras have it, but few pocket-sized ones do. As I've said, the Panasonic FZ series and the Canon S1 and S2 do, and they have fast lenses too. The minolta Z3/Z5/Z6, the Sony H1, the Kodak P850, the Nikon 8800, and the Canon Pro1 also have image stabilization, but their lenses are not very fast (aperture slower than f3.1). The pocket-sized ones that have stabilization are the Panasonic FX7, FX8, and FX9, the Sony T9, and the Minolta X1. Then, the Panasonic LZ1 and LZ2 are "medium-sized" and have stabilization. And remember, of all of these, the Sony T9 is the only one to have a super-low-grain sensor, which makes this new Sony THE pocket-sized camera to have in low-light situations. Ah, yes, and there are plenty of SLR lenses out there with stabilization, from wide-angle lenses (Canon has a 17-85mm with IS) to big zooms (like 400mm, which is equivalent to 600mm on a digital SLR), but those usually cost a FORTUNE (no less than $500, usually more like $1500-2500, or $3000-7000 for the fast primes).

(If you want to buy any of those cameras, please visit this page and use the "[Price] at Amazon.com" links to buyt them at Amazon. You'll get a great deal, and you'll be helping to support this site! Thanks! =] )

So the cameras from the above lists should help you get better low-light shots, as should the tips I list in the paragraphs before that. It's tricky, and it will take a few tries. Slow shutterspeeds take some getting used to. But if you know what your camera is doing and what you can do to fix it (which is what I have just explained), then you should be able to figure it out. Good luck!

Now, I’m not THAT great a photographer (I do know a few, though), but I have some tips you may find useful in taking fancy-looking pictures.

First and foremost, TAKE LOTS OF PICTURES. EVERYWHERE. ALL THE TIME. Don’t go anywhere without a camera – you’ll be surprised how interesting angles, reflections, colors, and lighting effects seem to come up everywhere when you have an eye out. Take close-up pictures of small objects or of objects with interesting textures. Take pictures of reflections on shiny surfaces. Take pictures of crowds. Take pictures of perfectly normal household objects from weird angles, weird perspectives, with other things in the shot that are lit very differently, colored very differently, or much closer to (or much further away from) the camera, than the main subject. Take a few pictures of the same object: from very close, from far away using the zoom, and somewhere in between, so you get an idea of how something looks different at wide angle versus at long focal lengths. If you try all these things many times, you’ll soon be able to spot interesting shots everywere. Sure, your girlfriend might complain that going on a walk with you takes forever because you stop to take a picture of some random thing every 26 seconds, but oh well, one gets used to that…

Another important tip is to look at pictures. Look at lots of pictures. Think about the composition (the arrangement of the different objects in space), about the colors, about the lighting, and about the focus on pictures that “look good”, on ads, and on movie shots. Try to replicate them, and don’t feel bad about blatantly trying to copy a cool shot you’ve seen. Look at books of wildlife photography (the good ones are MUCH more exciting than just a bunch of animals standing around), of photography taken in major cities, of photographs taken at sporting events, of military photography, of photography that captures the beauty in the designs of machines and architecture… Travel photography, landscapes, macro photography of bugs and little frogs… There’s a lot to look at, and if it’s been published or put in an ad or featured prominently by a big website, then it’s probably worth looking at. (MSN will often feature NBC's “The Week In Pictures”… WebShots always has tons of inspiring stuff… and so on. Sure, some of these pictures require very long or very fast lenses, or underwater equipment, in order to be taken, but you'd be surprised how some of the most memorable ones simply do neat things with wide-angle or macro photography, color, composition, lighting, motion, and slow-ish shutterspeeds - things you can do with an affordable, small digital camera with manual controls).

Let's see, what else is there... Ah, LIGHTING! How a subjects is lit has a huge impact on how the picture will look. And I’m assuming that, if you’re reading this, you don’t have studio-quality strobes or anything like that, so you probably have to make the most of the sun, of the lights on the street and inside buildings, or (ugh) of your flash. First of all, you want the sun behind you if you can help it at all. If the sun is in front of you, you will shoot your subject’s shadowy side, and the background will probably be quite bright. (As I mentioned already, this is the time to use fill-in flash unless your subject is farther away than your flash can reach). If the sun is behind you, it will light your subject from the direction you’re looking, which will give you more light to take the picture with (thus allowing for faster shutterspeeds and lower ISOs). Now, here’s another thing: The more diffuse the light is – in other words, if it comes from many directions at once – the harder it will be to make out the shape and texture of your subject, because the shadows won’t really be there to help with that. The subject will look kinda smooth and there will not be too much depth. This is why pictures taken on cloudy days don’t have the depth or richness of pictures taken on sunny days. Sunny days make for darker shadows and better-lit lighter areas, making the pictures richer with contrast, allowing for details to be more easily captured on camera. But then again, if the sun is TOO harsh (like near noon on a hot, sunny day), then shadows get TOO dark and lighter areas get TOO light, making the pictures look too contrasty and making subtler details harder to capture. So the ideal time to take pictures rich in detail is near sunrise and sunset: You get nice long shadows and lighting from the side, which makes everything look very 3D and full of texture and subtle details. You get the details and textures to be brought out, but not the harsh contrasts or super-dark shadows of the mid-day sun. So that’s one variable to consider.

Another tip for artsy and surprisingly cool photos you can take with compact digicams: USE THE MACRO! The neat thing about non-SLR digital cameras (other than the fact you know how well you're exposing ahead of time) is that they are very miniaturized. Most of them have sensors that are a tiny fraction the size of a piece of film. This means, however, that for the angles (like the field of view) on the picture to be the same as on a film camera, that the lens has to be shrunk correspondingly. In other words, the whole picture-taking part of the camera is much smaller – MUCH smaller – than on a film camera. But then, the way the camera focuses on the outside world is different. Since it’s proportions and angles that determine focusing, it’s like the camera lens thinks everything is huge! (Because the lens is so small). Or, think of it this way: Say you have an SLR and you’re taking a picture of a saucer (like one a tea cup would sit on) and the saucer is a couple of feet away from the camera. Now, since the focusing and depth of field is all about angles and proportions, they would remain unchanged if this whole system was reduced in size. Reduce it to 1/8 the original size and you have a mini-camera (with a sensor and lens the size of most digital cameras') taking a picture of something the size of a dime about three inches away from the lens. Well, with compact digital cameras, that’s what you get. It's as easy to take a nice sharp picture of a dime that is three inches away from the lens as it would be to take a nice sharp picture of a saucer a couple feet away from an SLR's lens (all other things being equal).

So what I mean is, compact digital cameras have AMAZING macro capabilities, the kind of sharp focusing on small objects that you used to have to pay a fortune for a good macro lens in order to get. And big pictures of tiny objects – especially bugs – are COOL. You’ve seen those super-closeups where you have to guess what the picture is OF – a piece of fabric, the surface of a vinyl record, bubbles or foam in a liquid (like champagne), etc. So bring your camera REAL CLOSE to stuff and take pictures! And then see if your family can guess what the pictures are of! This is best done in parks or gardens, but you’ll find interesting details in very small objects all over the place, not just on plants and bugs. Here are three macro pictures I really like that I took with my Panasonic:

And as you can see above, at smaller focal distances you can more easily get those nice artsy shallow depths-of-field (blurred backgrounds).

Another important thing is making good use of the BACKGROUND. Say you want to take a picture of an object, or of a person, and you have some choice of what will be in the background. Here’s a tip: Things like mountains, trees, large bodies of water, and a blue sky with white fluffy clouds, make for better backgrounds than buildings, cars, telephone poles, or fences, unless your subject is urban.

Also, think about not having your subject dead in the center of the picture. So as to show off the background and add a nice 3D depth effect to the shot, move your subject off to the side and take in the background.

This reminds me of an often-mentioned very basic “rule” of composition: The rule of threes, aka the rule of thirds. (I never took any photography lessons – I actually learned about this four years ago when I was reading the manual for my second digital camera, a Fuji, and noticed that I could have the display show a grid of three-by-three squares (like a tic-tac-toe) over the picture I was taking. I looked this up and found out about this rule). The rule basically says, divide your frame into three rows and three columns, roughly equal in width and height, like drawing a tic-tac-toe (i.e divide your picture into thirds, vertically and horizontally). Now, try to align most (or the strongest) horizontal lines and vertical lines in your shot with the edges of the rows and columns (i.e. with the tic-tac-toe). For example, have the horizon be either one-third of the way up the picture, or two-thirds of the way up, not halfway. Also, try to put your subject (or whatever details of the picture are important or draw the eye) on one of the four places where the tic-tac-toe lines intersect. This will make your pictures appear expertly composed (and incidentally will make for better computer wallpapers, leaving room for your icons).

Click on the following thumbnais for some examples of the rule of thirds / rule of threes at work:

Now on to a completely unrelated but very interesting technique: As I mentioned earlier, slow shutterspeeds are not always the enemy, especially if it’s artsy effects you’re after. One good photography skill to develop is PANNING. This means you move the camera in such a way that your subject stays in the same spot in the frame, even though it’s moving around. Like those video shots of a racecar going by, or of a runner, or aircraft… In these videos, the moving thing (runner, car, plane, tricycle, motor-cycle...) stays in the same spot on the screen, while the background moves past. If you can do this with a camera and use slow shutterspeeds, you get wonderfully blurred backgrounds and a subject in sharp focus, which gives you a great sense of depth and speed. To be able to go that slow but not over-expose, you’ll need to use narrower apertures (like f8, f15, f22) and/or a filter to darken the image (ND2, ND4, ND8, polarizer).

Something else you might find fun to do is to take long exposures. You definitely need a tripod for those – no matter how steady your hand is, you CANNOT hold the camera perfectly steady for several seconds/minutes. So you set your camera on a tripod, set the ISO real low, usually set the aperture as narrow as it goes, and set the shutterspeed to a few seconds or a couple of minutes. If you do this by a road at night, cars turn into long straight lines of light (or turning lines of light if you’re by an intersection or something). Do this by an airport and airplanes flying at night turn into long parallel lines of light with dots here and there (the blinking lights). By train tracks… you get the idea. It's also a great, great way to photograph fire works or lightning (What, you thought the photographers who took pictures of lightning just had really fast trigger-fingers? Nope, they just sit and wait with the shutter open). Also, try taking long-exposure shots by a beach or a river, where water is moving around, and the water becomes this cloudy, fuzzy white stuff, it’s really quite neat. If you have lots of time, long-exposure pictures of the night sky can also come out very cool. Let's see, what else?... Pictures of crowds taken at slow shutterspeeds can also be really neat. If your slow-shutterspeed picture shows people walking, or a dance hall, the people disappear (to varying degrees depending on your shutterspeed) and become strange blurry ghosts of motion. (Notice how, as people move, their feet actually stay in one place for most of the time, and then snap forward to their next position, while the body moves relatively smoothly… this means long-exposures of people walking/dancing will sometimes have clear, sharp feet and blurry everything else, which is quite interesting). Another interesting effect comes from taking a long-exposure shot and using the flash. One instant of the exposure will be captured sharply, and be superimposed over a background of motion-blurriness. I have not managed to do this very well at all – I don’t like using the flash much, really – but it’s pretty neat if you do get it (examples: dog in Times Square, Rabbis at Kfar Maimon).

If I got you interested in long-exposures (my favorite aspect of artsy photography - mostly because it requires repeated tries and waiting, instead of agile and precise hand movements), this article does a good job outlining all the different kinds, and how you get started with each one. Trust me, it's easier than it looks.

Whew, I think that’s enough for now. I’ll post more tips as I think of them. So stay tuned. And thanks for visiting. You can find some more advanced photography tips on Page 4 of this site.