25 Simple Practices to Improve Your Shooting Skills

1.Perfect Planning: Is always best. Most of the times we realize and just jump into for the shot Planning maybe time consuming, but can save a lot of actual shooting time and will definitely give you better results. You need to plan the 'when, where, how, what, who' of the shot planning will enable you to visualize the composition before you've shot the photograph.

2.Use the Check List: Never be over confident about your preparation. This might lead to problematic situations. Prepare list of things to be carried. Make notes, planning your shot beforehand, consult the list of repeatedly to ensure that you do not forget anything important.
The list may even include simple things like, charging the batteries for your CAMERA and its external flash, or the number of lenses you may require for certain shots, Or the number of reflectors and lights that might be needed.

3.Accessories for More: Don’t forget to dress up your Digital camera with genuine its own Accessories like Normal Lenses and Wide angle lenses, Micro lenses and Tele lenses.

4.Control Your Gear: Know the abilities and limits of your camera gear. Then get rid of the AUTO mode and turn on the MANUAL mode, which will ensure that you have complete control of your camera. In the Manual exposure mode, you can control both- the Shutter Speed and Aperture size.
Also, you can set your shutter speed to ‘blub’ to obtain longer exposures, the duration of which can be
Manually controlled by you.

5. Visualize Your Shot, Before You Click: Learn to see your shot without having to look through your camera’s Viewfinder. Use your hands to make a virtual viewfinder frame and see your scene through this. This will help you in the composition, selecting or removing of the elements from the frame.

6. Having the Right Composition: The right composition enhances the beauty of photograph. Composition is nothing but the correct positioning of elements within the frame. Once you have the right composition, you’ll be surprised by the radical change in you photography. You can mix conventional composition rules, bend them and you can break them consciously to create magical photographs.

7.Try Different Angles: Try as many angles as you can. Bend a little, lean on the ground or climb over the wall- try different perspectives and don’t merely point and shoot. Doing this might make your pictures more dramatic. And yes, if you are shooting pictures of children, don’t forget to shoot at a child’s eye-level.

8.Be Focused: Photographs with soft focusing are good only if it is done deliberately. If you want your pictures to be sharp, then take a little while to focus before releasing the shutter. In the Auto focus mode, look through the viewfinder while pointing the camera at the subject. Now half-press the button and hold it like that, this will enable you to see whether or not you have an accurate focus. Now you can release the shutter completely to take that sharp picture.

9. Manual or Auto Focus: Sometimes, using Manual Focus is better. Especially when your frame has many objects at varying distances. In cases where the main subject is obstructed by other elements in the frame, you should consider switching both, your camera and the lens to the Manual mode, so that you are able to focus properly on the subject.

10. Look Before You Click: ‘Depth of Field’ allows you to bring more depth in your picture and makes it more three dimensional. The elements in the foreground are the ones which will be sharp and the ones in the background will appear blurred. In today’s digital age, it’s quite simple to control DOF in your shots.
Generally in portrait shots, when you want to keep the background out of focus and want to emphasize upon to use ‘shallow DOF’. On the other hand, for landscape photographers, if you want to everything in the frame to have the same level of sharpness, you should use a higher f-stop (smaller aperture) that gives you greater depth of field.

11.Perfect Exposure: Understanding exposure is critical to knowing photography. Technically, exposure is controlled by three elements in your camera. The duration for which the shutter is open (Shutter speed), the amount of light which passes through the open shutter (Aperture) and the sensitivity of the sensor to the light (ISO). These three controls whether photography will be over exposed (when too much light passes through the aperture) or underexposed (when less light reaches the sensor).

12.Capture Dark & Highlighted Areas Together: Using the Exposure Bracketing feature of your DSLR., you can capture different photographs that capture details in both highlighted and shadowed areas. In Exposure Bracketing, the camera takes a picture at the exposure provided by you, and then it takes one underexposed shot and one overexposed shot, as predefined stops. Usually it takes three shots with +2 and -2 FV stops.

13.See the Right White: The color of light reflected from any object varies depending upon the color of the source light. Our brain is capable of seeing adjusted color, no matter what kind of light we are seeing, whether it is sun light or tungsten light or fluorescent white. Digital cameras also have the capability to process image according to the color of the source light. This feature is known as ‘White Balance’. You can use White Balance feature whenever you want true White or True skin tone colors regardless of the color of the source light.

14.Get Closer: Macro or Close up shooting is one of the most creative areas of photography. To get the real macro shot, you need a good compatible macro lens to let you closer to the subject. If you want to shoot Stamps, Jewellery, Stamen, Insects, Spiders or Butterflies in the garden, use shallow DOF to get very small area in focus and the rest of the frame to be out of focus.

15. Handling Low Light Conditions: It is tricky and challenging. You need to apply all your understanding of photography to get right exposure without missing your shoot. Typically these situations arise when you are trying to shoot cityscapes in the night or when you shooting poorly lit indoor parties or events.
In order to handle such situations, you can open the aperture at maximum to allow maximum amount of light inside the camera. If the aperture is wide open already and still, you get underexposed photographs, then you should try using a slow shutter speed. Beware of camera shake when using slow shutter speed. You most use a stable tripod to avoid unsteady shots. Or you can increase the sensitivity of the sensor by increasing the ISO.

16.Get The Most Out of The Built-in Flash: Most of the cameras are capable of using the
built-in flash automatically when there is poor light. Don’t limit its usage; use the flash in different ways. The built-in flash can give you unbelievable results if used in creative way.
If used in daylight, it can add catch lights in portraits, reduce harshness of shadows and boost colors as well.