What are some photography hacks everyone should know?

Photography Tricks

These are my favorite collection of photography hacks which everyone should know and very easy to try:

HACK 1 : Use a Drop of Water to Create Your Own Macro Lens on Your Smart Phone

A Best Macro Lens trick is to use a straw to drop a small droplet of water on your smart phone lens to magnify your image immensely. A small drop won’t run off when you pick up your phone to take a picture.

HACK 2 : Take back light photos at golden hour for desirable portraits with a warm glow

The golden hour in photography is the first and last hour of sunlight of the day, where you get the desired soft light for halo like portraits. And if you really want to be precise, there is an app for that. The Golden Hour App shows you the path of the sun in the sky for the location and date selected.

HACK 3 : Turn a ordinary Pan into a DIY Beauty Dish

Beauty Dish is used by portrait photographers to get a flattering lighting effect on their subject. The intensity of light on the subject compared to the surrounding, and the silver color reflected off of the aluminum add to the effect. Cut a hole in the center of the turkey pan, add some aluminum in front, assemble as shown with the flash/bulb inserted.

HACK 4 : Use a plastic bag on your lens to get a haze and blur effect

Crumple a plastic bag, wrap it at the front of your camera lens and fix it with a rubber band. Tear it at the center using your hand which will create stretch marks and create a fading transition effect from blurred to sharp region. You can double up on bags to achieve an even greater blurred effect.

HACK 5 : Use burst mode to capture a fleeting range of expressions, motion and improve the odds of a good group shot

In burst mode, several photos are captured in quicksuccession. This feature is available on most digital cameras, DSLRs andthrough app features on your smart phone. You shoot in this continuous highspeed by holding down the shutter button on your camera.

HACK 6 : Overexpose your photo in low light situations

Use your camera’s exposure compensation capability to dial the exposure compensation to the positive side in order to purposefully overexpose your photo. The scale on most DSLR’s allow from -3 to +3 stops in1/3 stop increments.

HACK 7 : Be in two places at once with an easy panoramic trick

With the help from a friend and a little jogging, you can pose in the frame multiple times. Open your phone’s camera app and select the panoramic mode. Have your friend start on the far left of the frame and slowly pan to the right. As soon as you are out of the frame run around behind your friend and pose again somewhere to the right. Play around with it to see how many times you can squeeze into the frame.

HACK 8 :  Use Apps, such as Camera Awesome and Camera+, to enhance your smart phone pictures, to enhance your smart phone pictures

Photography apps on smart phones have come a long way. While smart phones don’t offer the professional capabilities of DSLR camera, you can still use these apps to help adjust and enhance your photos to take them to a new level.

Two favorites are Camera Awesome (iphone and Android) and Camera + (iphone). Camera Awesome has an easy-to-set timer and burst feature. It also allows you to set ISO, white balance and exposure separately.

HACK 9 :  Perfect“Jumping” photos using burst mode and faster shutter speeds

Get low to take the photograph so the jumpers appear higher! If you have your subjects try to create shapes with their bodies instead of jumping straight up and down, it will give more of a floating effect. To ensure sure you capture the perfect moment, use the burst mode on your camera and a faster shutter speed to freeze the movement.

HACK 10 :  (last one a Photoshop Hack than a Photography Hack):

DELETE TOURISTS FROM TRAVEL PHOTOS

THIS LITTLE TECHNIQUE MAKES IT EASY TO GET RID OF THE TOURISTS IN YOUR TRAVEL SHOTS! (PHOTO FROM STOCK)

This is an awesome trick for travel photographers. Sometimes you’re at an amazing location, but there are people in the way of your shot.  If you want to take a picture of a landmark and people are in your shot, you will likely spend the rest of your adult life cloning people out of the shot unless you try this technique.

Step 1: Set your camera on a tripod.

Step 2: Take a picture about every 10 seconds until you have about 15 shots, depending on how fast people are walking around.

Step 3: Open all the images in Photoshop by going to File> Scripts > Statistics.   Choose “median” and select the files you took.

Step 4: Bam!  Photoshop finds what is different in the photos and simply removes it!  Since the people moved around, it fills the area where someone was standing with part of another photo where no one was there.

The “statistics” script mentioned here is only available in Photoshop Extended or in the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop; also you can get a somewhat similar effect in recent versions of Photoshop Elements by going to Enhance >Photo merge > Scene Cleaner.

All these are my collections, which are very easy to try by anyone. You don't need to be a professional photographer to do this. Try and use it in your own way and knowing these hacks increase the quality of your photograph.