How to Achieve Great Indoor Photography Results

Jayson from Image World Photography left a useful comment on the Christmas Photography Tips post that I thought the DPS readership would find useful.

A setting that has always worked for me to achieve great indoor photography. This came about after many corporate photography functions in doors and wedding photography inside churches. These settings allow you to see people or subjects in the foreground and still see the warmth of the room or any features or lights in the background.

Settings for Indoor Photography

* Put you camera onto M for manual (this is the setting on Canon’s, not sure about other models).
* Set you aperture to as big as it will go eg. F4.0 or F2.8.
* Set your shutter speed to around 1/60. It is hard to shoot handheld with anything below 1/60. As a rule of thumb you should never shoot lower than your focal distance while handheld. Eg on a 50mm lense you should never shoot lower than 1/50 sec.
* You will then need to use you external flash, if you can bounce your flash do this, if you have a catch light reflector built into your flash even better.
* Take a few shots and see what they look like.
* If they are not bright enough try bumping up your ISO to 200 then 400 and so on until you achieve an acceptable result.

This style of photography will have great lighting on people in the foreground and still have the impact of the room lighting and features in the shot. Just a plain old photo with the flash will normally burn out people in the foreground and black out the background. Give it a go!

Read more: http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-achieve-great-indoor-photography-results#ixzz0xBHmudIZ

Photo gear is good, but VISION is better

Seems like the more I listen, the more I hear people talking about the gear, the business of photography, the widgets. Let us not forget the simple love of photography.

I understand why there’s so much rhetoric in our industry about the business of photography and the gear and the gadgets. There is the common stereotype that most creative people aren’t good business people. There is fear. Gear is easier to talk about than vision. Exposures are exact, the camera dials have numbers. There is a ‘right’ answer to many of these questions.

But where is your love of pictures? Where are your actions that back this up?

Can you pick up a book of photographs and get lost in it?
Can you walk around with your iPhone or Android or your point and shoot or whatever and take 100 pictures knowing that they’ll never be for a client or a portfolio?
Do you love hunting for pictures?
Will you stay up late or get up early for pictures?
Do you sometimes ‘see’ life as a photograph?

It’s different for all of us, but when you can take a break from all the chatter, remind yourself–as often as you can–why you love photography.

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2010/08/for-the-love-of-photography/