How to Rebel Series: You Wanna Be a Rebel????

I got a great response from post about posting Rebel tips, so let's jump right into it!

This post is going to be about the basics, at least, the basics I tried to focus on when I first got my Rebel. I'm going to walk you through them, show you some examples from my photos and ask you to go out and do it and come back with your results! Then we'll all vote on our favorites!

I talked to several different people about the basics when I got my Rebel, so I can't remember who told me what, but these are the key things I learned fist:

1. If you shake the camera when taking a picture, it's going to be blurry. This may sound like an easy one, but even the action of pushing the button on the camera makes it move, so you really need to be conscious of that. If you want clear, clean pictures, you gotta stabilize that camera as much as you can. If you have shaky hands, you're gonna have fuzzy pics. So, stabilize it on a table, on a little tripod, put your elbows on something - just be still.

2. Your best pictures are going to be ones with clean, solid backgrounds. Don't worry about whether you're in front of the house, or the flowers in the yard or whatever - you don't even want that stuff in the picture, so get a solid background. The more color, the better.

3. Perspective is key. If you want good pictures, don't shoot something as you are seeing it. Get down on the ground and shoot up. Literally lay on the ground - don't feel stupid, just do it. It makes kids laugh and when you're outside, you can use the sky as your solid background (see #2) and the ground to stabilize yourself (see #1). Take photos at an angle, get up high, get really close, get far, far away.

So, to put those ideas at work, here are some photos I took of my little guy last January, right after getting my camera. They were all taken in the auto mode, it was a sunny day and he was playing with some new toy he'd just gotten. I just let him play and I took pics, while laying in the grass, on my back, upside down...you get the picture (ha ha...snort snort snort)...and the blue skies were perfect that day, giving me the colorful, solid background, and I could rest my elbows on the ground to stablize myself. These are still my most favorite pictures I've taken this year. No editing at all on these pics...







So, your photo challenge this week is to shoot a photo using two of the above tips and tell me why you chose to take the shot and why you think it's good (and also if these tips helped you at all). I'll post all photos here next week and we can vote on which ones we like the best!