Photo Albums with Better Photos
Collecting family photos for a photo album is still the best way to capture those precious memories and preserve your family’s history. However, do you ever feel like you take hundreds of photographs, but few turn out to be usable? Do you end up with blurry, grainy, or too-dark photos no matter what you do? Even if you are not a professional photographer, you can still brush up on some picture-taking basics that will greatly improve your photos. With a little research and practice, you can capture pictures that you will be proud to include in your personalized scrapbook albums. Here are our top five tips for improving your photography skills:
1) Lighting is key to good photos, and a flash has a tendency to wash out everything. Natural lighting always works best, but it can be tricky to manage indoors. Look around your environment to get the best lighting, and if you have a DSLR, practice to see how aperture, ISO, and shutter speed work together to get the best shot. For example, in outdoor situations, you may need to raise your shutter speed to capture action shots, while lowering your ISO.
2) Declutter your shots. When you are seeing too much in your frame, you have no real focal point, which leads to uninteresting photos. Perspective and composition help create visually appealing shots.
3) Photo editing programs allow you to vastly improve even the most mediocre pictures, and you do not need to invest in something expensive. For example, Google’s Picasa is a free program that allows you to crop and retouch photos, adjust lighting, and apply filters and color effects.
4) Even if you do not have a DSLR, most smartphones now offer both great cameras as well as dozens of photo editing apps. They also offer some add-ons, like tripods, remote controls, and external lenses that can help improve your photo quality.
5) Practice, practice, practice. Practice will make the biggest difference in your photo quality. You want to get a better understanding of how your camera works under various conditions, so that when the time comes, you know instinctively how to adjust your settings for the perfect shot. When you take the time to practice, you gain invaluable experience that will make all of the difference.
Once you have your photography skills up to par, you can make a photo album scrapbook that your family will cherish for decades to come.