Photo India

Photography Tips

1) Selection

Select only the best of your pictures to show to others and leave the rest in the drawer. Showing someone every picture you have taken dilutes the effect of the best pictures and gets very boring. You may want to show twenty pictures of little Johnny at the park because they are all quite good and you can't decide which are the best but, trust me, you will be better off making that decision and showing only the few good ones.

2) Turn the Camera on it's Side

At first it feels awkward holding the camera on it's side, but it is worth getting used to. If the shape of your subject, a person or a building, fits into an upright rectangle, you waste so much picture space if you shoot in landscape. You paid for all those millions of pixels, don't waste them.

3) Framing

One of the easiest ways to improve your photography is with careful attention to framing. Look into the corners of the viewfinder to see what is there. Do you need all that background? Can you get closer to your subject or zoom in?

Memory

There are quite a few different (and incompatible) memory cards used in digital cameras.

1. Compact Flash (CF) - The original memory card. 42mm x 36mm x 3mm. Somewhat larger than the others, but used on all high end DSLRs. Available in capacities up to 2GB. There are also miniature hard drives (Microdrives) with almost the same form factor as CF cards (CF type II, 5mm thick)) which are available in capacities from 340MB to 4GB. Microdrives used to be cheaper than solid state CF cards, though there is not a big difference today up to about 1GB. The 4GB Microdrives are actually cheaper than the 2GB CF cards though. Of course prices change pretty fast these days! Overall CF cards tend to be cheaper than any of the other forms of solid state memory - though this too could change. CF cards and microdrives contain their own disk controller, so that makes the camera electronics simpler.
2.Secure Digital (SD) - Very small - about 24mm x 32mm and 2mm thick. They have a built in write protect switch to prevent accidental erasure and certain encryption capabilities of little interest to digital camera owners.
3. Multimedia - Same size as SD but with less features and no encryption capability. There are some that can be used in some SD cameras but they aren't 100% compatible with SD cards in all applications.
4.Smart Media - Thinner than CF cards, but lacking an on-card memory controller. Despite the name, they're pretty dumb!
5.Memory Stick - Introduced by Sony and used only by Sony(?)
6. XD - Developed and used by Fuji, Olympus and Toshiba - even smaller than SD. 20mm x 25mm by 1.7mm thick