Photo 101

Took the Photo 101 "class" with Scott and Laura tonight (they even had a syllabus and illustrations). Scott gave a good overview of common features of digital cameras, and I had a chance to spend time finding them on my Canon Powershot SD630 Digital Elph (which took a self portrait of himself there on the left). Then Laura went over some of the basic principles of photography and composition as shown in the lovely illustrations below. A couple of tips that I picked up:

-You can cover the flash of your camera with a piece of paper (like a receipt from your pocket) to get a diffuse flash (using a finger will give everything a red tone and a dollar bill will make things green).

-Instead of using a digital zoom it is usually better to just crop the picture after it is uploaded, the one exception could be when the subject is in much different lighting conditions than its surroundings and the camera can't auto focus or auto meter without being digitally zoomed.

-Red eye tends to be worse the closer the flash is to the lens (or when your subject is drunk, because their eye responds to light more slowly)

-You can take a picture into the sun if your subject's head blocks the sun and it will make them look like they have an aura (otherwise there really isn't a trick to being able to take a picture of someone in front of a particular backdrop when the sun is also low in the sky behind them).

-I only get about two hours of use out of my camera when I am tinkering with it as I was for this class