Digital Camera tips and advice

How to Hold a Compact Digital Camera

It’s too bad that every new digital camera does not arrive with a helpful guide on how to hold your new camera to insure sharper pictures.

Most digital camera user guides do mention holding the camera, however, typically it’s pretty brief and from all the user manuals we’ve seen the instructions are not done well.

Most of the time new digital camera owners pick up their new camera and start taking pictures with very little thought about how they’re holding it.

Holding your digital camera incorrectly will cause blurry photos and inconsistent results.

If you watch professional photographers in action one of the things you’ll notice is they are VERY consistent with how they hold the camera. They have learned that a solid foundation virtually eliminates ‘camera shake.’ After a while holding the camera in the correct way becomes second nature, or in other words, habit.

Without coaching most us never develop a proper digital camera holding technique. That’s probably why they call them point-and-shoot cameras.

In reality it takes seconds to learn and even less time to implement. However, once you connect the logic behind it with the consistent results it yields, you too, will develop ‘the habit.’

Doing either of the above will almost guarantee your pictures will be unpredictable and blurry.

Taking predictable photos with your compact digital camera is a two step process.

Step #1 - Holding your camera so that it is more stable.

Step #2 - How to press the shutter and how you breath.

Step #1 - Holding your camera so that it is more stable…

- Helps reduce camera shake

- Keeps your fingers off the front the camera and out of the way of the lens, flash, and auto focus light.

Here is how most people hold their compact digital camera. (Very unstable)

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Notice how the camera is held only by the finger tips and with fingers actually extending onto the front of the camera. In fact, on the second photo, notice how getting in the habit of putting your fingers on the front of the camera can result in your fingers covering the lens and actually being in the picture? That blurry object in the lower right corner of the LCD screen is the photographers finger.

Here is a more stable way to hold your compact digital camera.

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This is a much better camera holding habit to develop. Notice how the fingers on the top and bottom of the camera now use more surface area? Also, notice the sides of the camera. Now the photographer has her fingers bent and is pressing against the side of the camera, further stabilizing it, plus keeping any possibility of wondering fingers out of the lens, flash, or auto focus light. This technique helps lock the entire camera into position.

Now as long as she keeps her arms bent and close to her body she can eliminate camera shake and achieve a MUCH higher degree of predictable and more importantly she can duplicate her picture taking ability from situation to situation.

Step #2 - How to press the shutter and how to breath.

How to press the shutter button.

- Don’t ‘tap’ - ‘Gently’ press

How to breath or in this case ‘not breath.’

One of the hardest habits for me to develop was to remember not to breath while taking my picture.

It works, really!

Try this little experiment.

Right now look down and notice your chest and upper body as you breath and air moves in and out of your lungs. Notice how your your arms and chest move slightly up and down. Now hold your breath, just for a moment. Everything stops moving. This might not seem like an earth shaking revelation UNTIL you try and take a photo in a low light situation where ANY camera movement translates into blurry photos.

So… a great habit to develop is stop breathing while you gently press the shutter button of your digital camera. Initially it’ll be a conscious effort, soon, it will be a habit.