There's a lot of little tricks in photography that you can use
to make your life easier and save a bunch of time. In this video,
I'm going to go through my personal favorites that I use almost every day. So here we go.
That's a landscape, and this is my lens. My question is, how much of that landscape am I going
to capture when I use this lens? Maybe there's something out there that I want to photograph,
and I don't know if I should use this lens or something else in my bag.
Well, the easy answer -- rather than pulling out all your camera gear, taking a bunch of test
photos -- is simply to use the finger trick. What I mean by that is, you just hold out your arm at
arm's length -- which, that's pretty easy -- and then the length of the flat part of my finger here
is how much of the scene I'm going to capture when I use this lens.
And, of course, it does depend on the lens that you're using. This is a 105mm lens, which is why
it's the flat part of my finger. But if it's a longer lens, maybe it's just the tip of my
finger. Or, if it's a wider lens, it could be the length of my hand, or even the length of my arm.
The point is, once you test this out with your different lenses, you'll know immediately how
all of your photos are going to look, without even pulling your camera out of your bag.
Have you ever said to yourself, when you're out taking pictures, "I'll probably end up converting
these to black and white?" I do that all the time. I really like black and white photography.
But the problem is, of course, the preview on your camera screen is going to be in color.
So, if you want it to be black and white instead, you have to do two things. First, make sure that
you're shooting RAW files rather than just JPEGs. If you aren't, this trick is not going to work.
Now, when you are using RAW files, all of those little JPEG settings on your camera -- like
saturation or contrast -- they don't actually get baked into the photo. Once you load those
pictures onto your computer, you could have used the weirdest JPEG settings, and the photo's going
to look the same no matter what. And you can probably see where this is going! Just change
your JPEG control settings to be black and white. The preview on your camera screen is now going to
be in black and white, but you can still switch back to color with those RAW photos when you're
at your computer. You're not baking anything into the image; it's not destructive at all. It's just
a nice trick to change the preview on your camera screen if you like black and white photography.
Next up, polarizing filters. How do you know where your polarizer is going to have the strongest
effect? It's actually a very easy trick. All you have to do is find the sun. And then, once you do,
you point at it (so that everyone else knows where it is). "Hey, it's the sun!" (You have to say
that, or it doesn't work.) Then, stick out your thumb at 90 degrees. Keep pointing at the sun.
And rotate your hand in a circle. Now, anywhere that your thumb just intersected with the sky
is where the polarization effect can be the strongest. It's a very useful way to figure
out how your photos are going to look, and whether or not you should use a polarizer.
A lot of subjects out there look the best when you're at *their* eye level. What I mean by that
is, we always see birds above us, right? But if you have an eye-level photo of a bird, it feels
like we're connecting to them in a different way. And that's equally true with subjects like
children or your pets, that might require a lower angle instead. Really, anyone or anything that
you're photographing, if you can get at their eye level, you'll usually take better pictures. And
that's actually one reason why you might consider a miniature tripod, or a tripod that doesn't
have a center column, so you can lower it really easily and take wildlife pictures at ground level.
Of course, it's completely true that this trick doesn't always work.
There's some amazing wildlife photos and other pictures out there that aren't taken at eye level.
But if your photos aren't as strong as you would want, this is something that I would
take a look at, especially if you're a wildlife photographer. Personally, I find it very helpful.
This next one is my favorite trick ever for landscape photographers, and it's a way to focus
at the perfect spot every single time. Now, as a landscape photographer, if you want the
very front of your photo and the very back of your photo both to be as sharp as possible,
the obvious place to focus would be somewhere between them. But the exact answer is actually
extremely easy. You simply focus at double the distance. Let me show you what that means.
First, you just have to compose your photo. You can see my composition here. Then, look for the
closest item in that photo. Right here, we can see it's probably this plant at the bottom-right
of the frame. Now all you have to do is figure out how far away that object is from your camera,
and then focus twice as far away as that. So, in this case, it doesn't even matter if you
use meters, or feet, or whatever. I'm just going to walk. I'm going to do it in paces.
So, one, two, three, four, five. This plant is basically five paces away from my camera, which
means that I have to focus at something that is five more paces away. So, one, two, three, four,
five. And that roughly aligns with the end of this plant here. And that's really it! I just focus
at the end of that plant. So, let me do that real quick. All that I've got to do is refocus my lens.
And you can see, this picture is incredibly sharp, both on the distant mountain and on
the nearest plant in the foreground. Now, the obvious question you might be asking yourself is,
what aperture should you use now? Because it is true, using this technique, that no matter what
aperture you pick, the front of your photo and the back of your photo are going to look the
same as one another in terms of sharpness. The problem is, they could just both be blurry. So,
you do still need to pick a good aperture when you use this trick. And, personally, I tend to
use f/8 as my default, but I will go to f/11, or maybe even f/16, if I need more depth of field.
Now, that's not really something you should worry about too much, because you'll get better
at picking your aperture over time. All you need to know is, focus at double the distance. Use an
aperture like f/8 or f/11. And your landscape photos are just going to be so much sharper.
If you're a wildlife or sports photographer, I think you'll find this next trick very useful,
although I actually use it for landscape photography too. It's called back button focusing.
Now, by default, almost every camera out there engages autofocus when you press down the shutter
button halfway. There's a good chance that you're familiar and even comfortable with that system--
but it's really not all that great. The problem is, sometimes you'll just want to take a picture
without refocusing. For example, maybe there's a bird, and you're waiting for it to fly off of a
tree. Once it's in the air, your camera would have a really hard time pinpointing focus during that
fraction of a second. Instead, it's much better to focus in the right spot ahead of time so that it's
not a problem when the bird takes off. But, if the camera autofocuses any time you press the shutter
button, that becomes almost impossible! Now, you could try some workarounds, like flipping back and
forth to manual focus, or just holding down the shutter button halfway for as long as it takes.
But the best solution out there is to get rid of autofocus when you press the shutter button,
and move it to a button on the back of your camera instead. Some cameras already have this button,
and it's usually labeled AF-On. Other times, it won't have a label, and it's just something
that you can assign to one of the buttons. But almost every camera out there has this capability,
and you can find it really easily just by Googling your camera model, followed by "back button
focusing." It's something that I highly recommend doing. And I admit that this system can definitely
take a bit of time to get used to, especially if you've been using the shutter button to focus
for a long time. But of all the photographers who I know, none of them have ever regretted
switching to back button focusing. It really is a game-changer, especially for wildlife photography.
Let's say that you're trying to figure out how the lighting setup is going to look
when you're shooting portraits. One trick that I recommend -- so much quicker than taking a bunch
of test photos -- is just to look at your hand. Hands are kind of bumpy. They've got
bones and stuff on them. You can tell how the light looks by seeing how it affects your hand
as you move it back and forward, or to different locations. That way, you don't have to take nearly
as many test photos, and you're already able to answer a lot of the important questions:
What direction is the light? What colors are the light and shadows? How soft is the light?
All of these are things that you can tell just by looking at your hand. And then you can modify
the light or move to a different spot to get the best possible look. It's very helpful, especially
if you're pressed for time. You can figure out your lighting setup a lot more quickly this way.
This next trick is about composition. It's something that I find helpful to run through
my mind all the time. If you want to take better pictures, pay more attention to the
edges of your photo! When you have anything along the edges of your frame that's bright,
colorful, high-contrast, whatever it is, people's eyes are really going to be drawn to that. And
they'll even look away from your subject, which is usually not at all what you'd want. Frankly,
I'd even say to pay more attention to the edges of your photo than to the center. And that might
be going a little too far, but, at least for me, adopting that as a mindset is a really big help.
Now, you can actually have two different types of composition. Both of them do relate to this
discussion. The first one is just called "closed composition," and this is where your subject is
basically framed by things around the edge of your photo. If that's your goal, it's really important
to avoid distractions along the edge. And then the other big type is "open composition," where it
kind of feels like whatever you're photographing is one part of a larger world that extends beyond
your photo. With open composition, you do still need to watch the edges of your photo,
but this time it's more about finding disruptions to that pattern or that flow out of the frame
that could just block your viewer's eye. So, in either case, the edges of your composition are
extremely powerful, and they're a big part of whether or not your photo is going to succeed.
Now we've got one called bookending your photos. And this is a very useful trick
any time that you're taking a series of pictures that you want to turn into a panorama or an HDR.
It's very simple. Right before the first photo in your series, you're just going to take a quick
picture of your lens cap, or even a quick picture of your hand. And then do the exact same thing
after the last photo in your series. What you've done now is you've blocked off that set of photos
away from all the others. And then, when you're back at your computer after some time has passed,
you're going to know exactly which photos to blend together without a second thought.
And it is just a trick to save some time, but if you've got one panorama after another,
and you're trying to figure out where each one starts, you're really going to find it helpful.
If you take pictures in popular locations, you're probably going to end up with some people who walk
through your photo. And it could even be hard to take pictures that don't have people in them.
But there's an easy trick to fix that if you have a tripod, and it doesn't even involve hitting
people with it! All you need to do, after composing your photo, is just take 10 or 12
pictures over the course of a couple minutes. The idea is that if people are moving, they'll be in
different spots in every photo. So, all you have to do is average out those pictures in Photoshop
or whatever software you've got. And usually, you'll be left with no people at all in the photo.
You can see that this picture here definitely has some people at the bottom of the frame,
but if I average it together with just one other photo, they do start to become a bit blurrier.
And, eventually, it averages out to just the background. And you can actually do the same thing
in one photo instead, if you're just using a dark neutral density filter. The reason behind it is
exactly the same this time, although you're just going to use a long exposure photo of about one
minute or so to average out any people who have moved through the image. And I definitely prefer
this filter method myself, just because it's so easy to do, and it doesn't bring along that tricky
question of how much editing you should actually be willing to do. But I did want to tell you about
both of these methods, just because the first one doesn't require any extra gear. It's something
anyone can do, and you can even do it with your phone if you've got a stable enough platform.
When you're editing your pictures, it's easy to spend so much time looking at one photo
that you kind of lose track of whether your edits are even helping or hurting.
And of course, stepping away from the computer can always be a good idea. But especially if it's one
of your older photos that you're already really familiar with, that's probably not going to be
enough to solve the problem. Instead, my trick to see any of your photos with a brand new eye
is just to flip them horizontally. You can do this with almost any post-processing software,
and it really does show you that photo in a different light. Now, you will probably want
to flip them back afterwards -- this is not meant to be permanent -- but if you're just trying to
figure out if your horizon looks right, or if you've cropped the photo properly, or even how
someone else is going to experience that photo for the first time, this can be very helpful.
And that's it! Those are all my favorite photography tricks. They'll save you a
bunch of time. And also, if you've got any of your own, let us know in the comments section.
Maybe someone's going to see it, and it could really change their photography.
With that said, I'm Spencer Cox. This is Photography Life. And I'll see you next time.