Sharpening Your Skills…….

Over the winter is a great time to sharpen you skills and get ready for spring shooting!   All people that have skills must keep them sharp, singers practice, football players practice, golfers practice and photographers must too!  Now the fun part of practicing as a photographers is a big part of your exercise is shooting more pictures, which is fun anyway, but it goes deeper than that, lets review some key components you must work on to stay sharp and on top of your game!

1.  Getting Tack Sharp Images  –   This is a matter of practice and discipline!  If you hand hold a lot, do this little practice sessions, get your children or grandchildren to sit int he floor in front of you while you sit on a chair or the couch, and practice “squeezing”  of the shutter release.  You should know your shutter release so well that they can’t tell the exact moment it will fire!  The technique is simple, all shutter releases have something call creep, that is the short distance you can press down just before anythting  happens, when you take up this first space, the next slight push will fire the shutter.  If you hand hold very much you need to practice this skill until it is second nature to you.  The kids will love the game and it will make you a lot more skilled at firing the shutter!

2. Tune up your focusing – All cameras that have autofocus “can”  get out of register and give you slightly less than perfect focus.   This is simple to check, find a good brick wall and pick a spot on the wall and focus on that point,  Now carefully shoot and image.  Pull the image into the computer and check it at 100%  You will be able to tell immediately if t=your lens is focusing properly.  If it is not, here are two solutions.  Check you camera manual, many higher end cameras actually have a way in the menus to adjust focus!  It’s not hard just follow the directions in your manual.  If your camera does not offer that feature, you can send it into a authorized repair center for your camera’s brand and they can adjust focus back to factory specs.  For closeups try shooting a newspapers newsprint!

3.  Clean your cameras and lenses for the upcoming season –  This is easy to do and only requires some simple tools.  Get an old toothbrush (dry) and a camels hair brush, which you can pick up at any arts and crafts store or Walmart.  You will also need some lens cleaning supplies, for years I used actual lens cleaner solution and lens cleaning paper from Kodak, I now use the little foil pouched lens cleaners from Zeiss.  You can buy them at the eye care department at Walmart and they are great for wet cleaning of lenses, eye pieces and LCD panels, they also work great for your glasses, iPhone and iPad!  They come in a blue box and are called Zeiss Lens CLeaning Wipes – Pre Moistened.  they simply have alcohol which dislodges any smudges and dries fast.  The proper way to clean a lens surface, and remember they have two a front element and a rear element, is to use a blower bulb (or baby ear syringe) to blow any dust or grit off the lens first, then apply the wipe to wet clean the lens. Use the toothbrush to get into small crevices around the outside of your camera and get all dust and grit out.  You can use the camels hair brush to overall clean the camera.  DON’T ATTEMT TO CLEAN THE MIRROR!!!!  Only use the blower to blow any dust our o the mirror box, cleaning of mirrors is a task best left to a trained camera technician!

4. Test the accuracy of your meter –  The winter is a good time to set up a test subject and see if your meter is spot on!  Once again just set up a subject, and  make sure you have the correct white balance setting then shoot some images and see if all the tones look good, your histogram will be a good way to see if tones are falling where they should.  Some cameras will let you make adjustment to your meter, other need to be seen by a technician.  I’m often asked if the expensive heavy duty pro cameras are worth the money, this is one way they are, they allow all these adjust ments like focus, and metering right in the menus!

5.  Get your eyes ready to see photographically –   Spend some time looking at great, well crafted images, good places to look are the countless websites of very good shooters, you might try some I feature on the Home page.  You can also see some amazing work on 500pix.com
Study how these great shooters composed and set up their shots, you will get a lot of great ideas!   I really like the work of Jim Begley, John Shaw, Tony Sweet, Christopher Burkett, Rod Planck, Mark Alberhasky, just to name a few!  One last suggestion ,my latest Kelby Training class is coming soon, called Learning to See Photographically, I think it will help, as well!

6. Practice – Practice – Practice  –   The best way to get better is study the fundamentals at a Nikon School, or Kelby Training and then practice!!!!

Hope these tips help you get ready for an exciting shooting year in 2012!

the pilgrim