After years & years of thinking I finally bought a quite a good Digital Camera (Super Zoom) about 2 months back. Though I have been clicking digital photos from quite sometime (since Sep'2001), I always thought that I would always carry 1 cool gizmo which would solve all my purposes. All these years my Phone has always been the coolest product I have always help - right from Photography to Internet to Push Mail to GPS. Finally I realized that by craze for Photography, especially Wildlife Photography, could never be satisfied by a Cell Phone.
I have gone for Nikon's Coolpix P90 24X Zoom Camera. Thought it is not a DSLR camera, it offers lots of manual controls like Manual Focus, Shutter control, Aperture Control, White Balance control, Exposure Control, etc. Adding a few more bucks would have given me a DSLR, but I had to again pay extra for a Zoom lens which would be very costly. So I settled for this one & seemed to be quite happy with its performance.Since I am not a Professional Photographer I should not give too much of gyaan but would definitely share some of my experiences from my mistakes & some common mistakes which I find my friends committing while clicking snaps through their Digicams -
- Digital Cameras are very sensitive to shakes. You need to really have a very stable hand to click a sharp picture with the Digicam & that comes merely with practice.
- When clicking human snaps don't just concentrate on the subject (i.e. people visible on the viewfinder), also try to have a check on the background. The background gives real perspective to a good snap.
- Never click a snap with a bright light falling on the camera lens.
- With basic digital cameras don't try to click distant images with the flash under low lighting conditions. There are fair chances that the image might not turn out to be good.
- Avoid clicking snaps under harsh sunlight, that's mid-afternoon. The best time sto click a snap are dusk & dawn.
- Don't click all snaps in Landscape mode, i.e. camera held horizontally. Few snaps come out excellent when clicked in Portrait mode, i.e. camera held vertically. This is a common mistake I find among most of the amateur photographers.
- If you realize that a snap clicked is not good, delete it immediately. At the end of the day you would occupy unnecessary space on your camera's memory with useless snaps.
- While uploading your snaps to a public photo-sharing site, do have a check on the repetitiveness of the snaps. I find many people uploading multiple copies of same picture with minor change uploaded. It distracts the viewers.
- If you have time, do check out if editing the images result in a better snap. Even basic image management software's like Picasa is good enough for editing.
