Digital cameras are easy for virtually any school-age child.
Are you a budding photographer? Digital cameras have opened up the world of photography to anyone who has an eye for interesting subject matter. Take your knowledge of your digital camera to the next level by experimenting with the universal features found in your camera's individual settings. Get some great photos while your at it!
A Picture Every Hour
Set up your digital camera on a tripod or in a secure spot near a busy street corner. If you don't have access to a street corner, choose a fixed subject matter in a changing environment; such as a tree that catches morning and afternoon sun, or a flower that closes it's petals at night. Remove any screens or obstacles in front of your subject matter. Do not move your camera once the project has started. Keep the flash turned off for day pictures, and turn your night mode on for pictures taken between twilight and dawn. Set a watch or timer to go off every hour to remind you to take a photo of your subject matter. In 24 hours, you should have 24 images in succession. Upload the images into a slide show format on your computer and put it on a loop. Extend the amount of pictures in your experiment to see changes over days, weeks, or even months.
Capture the Action
On a clear, sunny day, grab your digital camera, an athletic friend and go outside. Choose a basketball court, tennis court, soccer field or a skateboard park as the setting for your project. Pick a spot with plenty of direct light and turn off your flash. Set your camera to sports mode. Sports mode is the running figure on your digital camera settings. If your camera doesn't have sports mode, find the ISO settings in your manual mode and set them to 800 or higher. Keep your camera's focus in fixed spot, and stand no further than 15 feet away from the point of action. Keep your shutter speed near 1/125th of a second or faster. Have your friend shoot, kick, serve or jump from the same place several times. Repeat the shot and see if you can catch the play at the height of the action. Experiment with the shutter speed and the ISO settings. How does changing the settings affect the light in your picture? The quality? The motion? Did you capture the action the way you wanted?
Blur the Background
On a sunny day, bring your digital camera and a friend to a park with a merry-go-round. Have your digital camera set to portrait mode. Sit on the merry-go-round across from your friend and focus the camera on their eyes. Spin the merry-go-round and take several shots of your friend's face against the spinning background. In the manual mode, adjust the shutter speed up and down to see how it affects the photo. Try sitting on the swing next to your friend with your camera. Swing in time and take several photos of your subject against the moving background. Lengthen the shutter speed to get more background blur.
Create a 360-Degree Panoramic Photo of Your Room
Set up your digital camera on a tripod in the center of your room. Open the shades and curtains to allow for natural light. Adjust the tripod so the camera can spin in a circle, level with the halfway height of the wall. Take a picture, rotate the camera 45 degrees and repeat until you've come full circle. You should have at least 8 pictures, one of each of the four walls and for each of the four corners. If you have a long room, take 2 extra photos of the longer walls to allow for the images to overlap. Use a digital image program such as photoshop or autostitch to put the images together. Once you have your panoramic view, you can load the image into a program, such as Quicktime Virtual Reality, that allows you to view it interactively.
