10 Quick Tips To Fix Your Bad Photos

Digital photography has democratized the medium. More people are taking more photos than ever before, and they’re sharing their shots online with friends and family.

- Jim Fisher

Digital photography has democratized the medium. More people are taking more photos than ever before, and they’re sharing their shots online with friends and family. It’s easy to place the blame on the camera (or your smartphone) when your images aren’t as nice you’d like. But by following a few guidelines, you can improve the quality of your snapshots without having to shell out big bucks for a new camera. Keep these easy tips in mind next time you head out to capture the world around you.

1. GET BASIC COMPOSITION DOWN

The heart of a photograph is its composition—the position of different elements in a frame. The easiest rule of thumb to learn and remember is the “rule of thirds.” Basically, you break your frame into nine squares of roughly equal size. Try to align the subject of your photo along these lines and their intersections, and imagine the main image divided over these nine boxes. This gives you a more dramatic and visually interesting shot than one where your subject is dead-center. Many cameras and smartphones have a rule-of-thirds grid overlay that you can activate when shooting.

2. ADJUST EXPOSURE COMPENSATION

When you aren’t shooting in full manual mode, your digital camera is making decisions that determine the exposure of a photo—in English, how light or dark the shot appears. Generally, a camera looks at a scene and tries to determine the appropriate exposure based on the correct lighting of a gray card, which is why there are special scene modes for snow—without them, the camera would try to make the white snow gray.