10 Photography Tips for Beginners

You don't have to be a professional to take top-notch photos. Follow these simple tips to improve the quality of your snapshots.

• By Jim Fisher
• January 27, 2012
• 2 Comments

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Contents

• 10 Photography Tips for Beginners
• Tips 6-10

Digital photography has democratized the medium. More people are taking more photos than ever before, and they're sharing them online with friends and family in record numbers. It's easy to place the blame on the camera if your images aren't as nice as some others you see online, but by following a few guidelines you can improve the quality of your photos—without having to shell out big bucks for a new camera. Keep these 10 easy tips in mind next time you head out to capture the world around you. And if you have any tips that have helped you take better pictures, please share them in the comments section.

1. Get Basic Composition Down. The heart of a photograph is its composition—the position of different elements in a frame. The easiest rule of thumb to learn and remember is the Rule of Thirds. Basically, you'll want to break your frame into nine squares of roughly equal size. Try and align the subject of your photo along these lines and intersections and imagine the main image divided over these nine boxes. This gives you a more dramatic, visually interesting shot than one where you subject is located dead center. Many newer cameras have a rule of thirds grid overlay that you can activate when shooting.

2. Adjust Exposure Compensation. As long as you aren't shooting in full manual mode, your digital camera is making decisions that determine the exposure of a photo—in English, how light or dark the shot appears. Generally speaking, a camera looks at a scene and tries to determine the appropriate exposure based on the correct lighting of an 18-percent gray card, which is why there are special scene modes for snow—without them, the camera would try to make the white snow gray.

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Tip: How to Get the Start Menu Back in Windows 8

Desktop users of Windows 8: you don't have to fear the Metro start menu! I, too, was at first taken aback when I'd be shunted back to the Metro Start page after clicking the phantom start button, which in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview only shows up when you move the mouse to the lower-left corner of the screen. But after a little while of using the new interface metaphor, I found the switching smooth and unobtrusive.

Of course, there are always those who cling to the old ways—heck, we have a couple of longer-in-the-tooth contributors who still use WordPerfect! And in truth, it may at least feel quicker to launch programs from within the Windows 7-like desktop mode of Windows 8.

For those who are running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and want their Start menu back, a couple of downloadable utilities have appeared that approximate the old functionality—Start8 and ViStart. Both are free, quick installs. But you can restore some semblance of Start menu-like capabilities without installing anything. In the Windows 8 Developer Preview, there was a Registry setting that would disable Metro, but that's no longer present in the Consumer Preview. (Astute readers, feel free to chime in in the comments if you find a new Registry option that does this.)

No Installation RequiredThe first Start menu feature you can get without any modifications to the default Windows 8 setup is the Run dialog. To get this, you can simply hit Windows Key-R in the desktop. For a little more Start menu feel, you can add a popup list of Libraries, Computer, Control Panel, and Network by right-clicking on the taskbar, choosing Properties > Toolbars and then checking the Desktop check box. Any icons you have on the desktop will appear in the popup list, as well as the features mentioned above. Starting a program could mean sprouting out a multitude of flyout menus, harking back to Windows 95.

Another option is checking Address in Taskbar Toolbars Properties, which will add a search box to the taskbar. In the resulting box, you can type a web address or a local program name, like Notepad or Calc. But neither of these modifications truly brings back the Start menu.

Easy Online Backup

Backup that saves your files off-site is one cloud computing service everyone should consider. Here are a handful of our most recent online backup reviews.

Online backup ranks among the most popular software topics on PCMag.com. It's no surprise, since all the numbers point to the need for backing up your treasured files: Every year, 43 percent of computer users lose irreplaceable data. Why? Because users don't perform regular, frequent backups. An Iomega study showed that 69 percent of home users back up once a month or less.

Data loss can be heartbreaking enough when your personal photos, videos, and music make up the data in question. But if you've got a small business, the potential damage may be even more devastating: 70 percent of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year, according to a recent study by HP.

Simpler, More Reliable
Online backup services make this safeguarding your data easier and more reliable. Since the files are stored on remote, redundant servers, your lost laptop or crashed hard drive is covered, and if a disaster strikes your premises, your backup won't rely on physical discs. And these services all automate the actual back up procedure, so you don't have to remember to plug in your external drive or load a blank DVD and hit "Start backup." As long as you've got an Internet connection, the services can automatically grab changed files up to their secure servers while your PC is idle.

Common pricing for online backup runs at about $55 a year for unlimited storage for one PC. Some services let you back up as many PCs as you want in an account, but charge you for storage space in 25GB increments.

The Best Tuneup Utilities

A new PC has snappy out of the box performance that lets you launch programs, process data, and surf the Web with ease. Unfortunately, that silky-smooth experience eventually goes bye-bye as the hard drive suffers fragmentation, and junk files clog a system's insides. Make no doubt about it, your PC will experience this problem. Reinstalling the operating system will remedy the issue, but that's a time-consuming activity that you wouldn't want to perform on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. There is another solution: use a PC tune-up utility.

PC tune up utilities are applications designed to fix the wear and tear that computers suffer over time by repairing hard drive fragmentation, fixing the registry, and deleting useless files. While all of the tools listed here perform these basic actions, a few go the extra mile by implementing unique features. For example, the Editors' Choice award-winning Iolo System Mechanic 10 ($49.95, 4.5 stars) scored high marks for its top-notch tune-up capabilities, but also for its Program Accelerator (which smartly re-aligns all of a program's dependent files on the hard drive so that the PC finds them faster), useful desktop widget (which delivers at-a-glance system information), and Whole Home Licensing (which does away with install limitations). SlimWare Utilities' SlimCleaner also scored an Editors' Choice Award for its unique approach. Not only is it free and license-free, but it uses aggregated data from its user base to recommend the optimal settings for your PC; it even rewards you with badges for contributing accurate information. AVG PC Tuneup 2011's ($29.99, 4 stars) overall performance and real-time system monitoring makes it another to turn to when it's time to clean up a PC.

Browser Wars: Chrome vs. IE9 vs. Firefox

You really can't go wrong with any Web browser choice these days. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari, all are fast, standards compliant, and feature rich. A lot boils down to what you're comfortable with and which features are most important to you. For many people, the choice is moving to the product offered their favorite search site. The last time we compared all five major Web browsers Google Chrome had just over 12 percent of the market. That's now doubled, and it looks like Chrome's market share will pass Firefox's soon.

Speed
I'd like to think the reason for this was my awarding Chrome the PCMag Editors' Choice, but there are other possible good reasons for Chrome's rise. Foremost among them is speed. Links to download the browser on the leading search site, and bundles with PC makers doesn't hurt either. But Chrome adds a few compelling features all its own: Chrome Instant means you'll often see your page before you've even finished typing its address or title. And it's the only browser with a built-in Flash player and PDF reader.

Phones With the Best Battery Life

Have you ever felt your cell phone vibrate and pulled it out of your pocket, expecting to to see a text or e-mail message, only to see a low-battery warning instead? Surely, you've uttered the dreaded words, "My phone is dying, so I have to say this fast!"

It may be time to consider investing in a phone with better battery life.

I don’t know about you, but the idea of carrying an extra battery or charger around, or even strapping a battery case to my phone is not all that appealing. But I’m realistic. Smartphones, with their big touch screens and fast processors, suck up a lot of power, so I’m not expecting to make it through the week on a single charge. Still, there’s no excuse for not being able to make it through the day.

The Best Android Phones

It's hard to believe that it's been little more than three years since Google's open-source Android mobile operating system hit the scene. When the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, was released, the mobile landscape looked very different. Most people carried simple handsets that focused on making calls. If you were lucky, you could listen to music or play games on your mobile phone. Back then, you didn't have to have a smartphone that ran thousands of apps to let you, in the palm of your hand, do many of the things your computer could do. Apps weren't even a thing yet. Apple had only released the iPhone 3G and launched its groundbreaking App Store a couple of months earlier.

It was the introduction of Android that helped propel the app-based smartphone to what it is today. The thing Android offered, which Apple's iPhone couldn't, was choice. Since it was an open-source platform, several hardware manufacturers could use the OS on their handsets, and a variety of wireless carriers could offer those phones—and they did.