David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Appendix B. The Top Ten Tips of All Time

There's a lot to learn about photography. It's endless. Between all the books, the Web sites, the courses, the workshops, the discussion groups, and, of course, your own experience, the enlightenment just never stops.

Even this book has 300 pages of dense text and pictures. How are you supposed to keep it all in your head?

Well, here's a cheat sheet: a collection of the juiciest tricks from this entire book. Clip and save (unless it's a library book).

Take a lot of shots.

Take a lot of shots.

Once you've bought the camera, digital photography is free. You can shoot as many pictures as you want, and you'll never pay a nickel for film or developing.

So if you ask any professional the secret to great photographic results, one of the first things you'll hear is, "Shoot a lot." Yes, yes, it's true—you'll wind up deleting most of them. But shooting a lot increases the odds that, somewhere in that massive pile of pictures, there are some true gems.

In particular:

• Portraits. Shoot the same thing a few times in a row. The smile or the eyes might change slightly between shots—and one of them might be the winner you'd have missed. (That's especially true of group shots. The more people in the shot, the greater the odds that someone's eyes are closed.)

  Change the angle and keep shooting. Take a step to the right, or zoom out, or ask your subject to shift head positions. And keep shooting.

• Scenic shots. The sun is always moving in the sky; the light is constantly ...