1. Have fun! As your family's CMO (Chief Memory Officer), take the
opportunity to document the holidays from your unique perspective. Also, make sure you get out from behind the lens and into some pictures
yourself!
2. Candids! Candids! When amongst family and friends, pretend you are a
paparazzo (with manners) and go for those journalistic shots where the subjects are not posing for
you. People talking, laughing, being together. The natural
results will be very pleasing.
3. Take a picture of your decorated
living room every year. It will make for great memories in
later years!
4. Your camera's factory settings for file size and compression are almost
always the best for general shooting. Don't be tempted to turn down the quality
to get more pictures on your memory card.
5. Take closeup pictures of the Christmas decorations in your house. They
make really cool scrapbook page
elements!
6. Don't always crop close to your
subjects. Looking at photos from the past, we like to see the styles of the day.
Christmas is the one time of year when almost everybody takes out their camera,
so take advantage of capturing your customs and fashions from year to year.
Your grandkids will appreciate it!
7. Use your flash on a sunny day in the
snow! It may sound crazy, but the brighter the conditions, the
more shadows can appear on peoples' faces. Using your flash can help to fill in
the shadowy areas.
8. For a beautiful picture of your Christmas tree, try turning off the flash and using a
tripod. Or, you can set your flash to "night mode", or "slow"
mode. Click the picture on the right to compare
the results.
9. Photo Express is not open on Christmas day, so
make sure you have enough memory and battery power on hand (hey, maybe
you're getting a 4 GB memory card for Christmas!). It is a good idea to charge
up your batteries before you start your holiday traditions. If your
camera uses AA batteries, you can use alkaline batteries in an
emergency.
10. Focus, then
recompose. Put your intended subject in the centre of your
viewfinder, then press the shutter release button half-way to focus (this may
seem obvious to a lot of us, but a lot of people aren't aware that pressing the
button half-way allows an autofocus camera to search for a focus point). While
keeping the button half-pressed, you can now move your subject to a more interesting area of the picture.
11. Try several
different angles or zoom positions to get that perfect shot.
Standard photos of smiling people holding presents make great memories, but try
to go outside the norm as well. Candid shots, photos of children taken from
down at their level, closeup shots of Christmas baking, Christmas cards, etc,
make wonderful additions to scrapbooks and albums.
12. Don't let bright Christmas lights fool
you. You generally need to use your flash
when taking people shots indoors. Make sure you are within
acceptable range (see article on flash photography here) to avoid
underexposure.
