Trees and light poles love sneaking in behind your subject right when you’re taking a photo. You would swear they weren’t there before and maybe they weren’t. But take a second to double check and make sure those sneaky trees know not to hop into your photos.
Also, a plain background can accentuate your subject and a jumbled background can distract your viewers from the subject.
A Megapixel is one million pixels. Pixel stands for picture element and are the little dots that make the picture. The number of megapixels is found by multiplying the number of horizontal pixels by the number of vertical pixels.
My Nikon D90 has 12.3 megapixels. My cameraphone has 5 megapixels. A photo taken with my cameraphone would be fine if I’m planning to only display the photo online. But for printing, more megapixels is usually better than fewer.
Other factors are important to the quality of an image. The digital camera’s image sensor, processor, lens, and other factors are as important as the number of megapixels.
I found data online that gives the minimum megapixels for quality prints printed at 300 dpi.
Max Print Size || Minimum MP || Resolution
4 x 6″ || 2 megapixels || 1600 x 1200
5 x 7″ || 3 megapixels || 2048 x 1536
8 x 10″ || 5 megapixels || 2560 x 1920
11 x 14″ || 6 megapixels || 2816 x 2112
16 x 20″ || 8 megapixels || 3264 x 2468
16 x 24″ || 12 megapixels || 4200×2800
If you normally take most of your photos horizontally, take every photo vertically for a day.
If all your pictures are in color, look for the setting in your camera that will change them to black and white and experiment with that for a day.
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” -Wayne Dyer
A macro lens allows you to take a very small object and make it look massive and magnified. On a point and shoot camera and the camera on my phone, I am able to change a setting to macro. On a DSLR, you’ll need a special lens or attachment.
Some people have made some really amazing macro photos. I will not claim to be one of them since I haven’t spent much time practicing. A quick google search brings up many amazing macro photos. Here are a few I had a merry time taking today.
I learned that depth of field is really shallow when taking macro photographs. I had to use a small aperture (f/18) in order to get a decent amount of the flower in focus.
I also noticed that I had to take pictures in very bright light. I was outside with the sun directly on the flower. After a few minutes, the sun moved behind a tree and the shutter speed dropped from 1/250th to 1/5th of a second.
I hope this post has inspired you to experiment with macro photography. 
After taking lovely Mother’s Day family pictures, I gave the camera to my sister. While standing, she began taking pictures of her dog with the camera pointed down to the floor at him. Here’s an example of such antics:
I offered the suggestion to squat down and get on his level for a different perspective. Here’s an example of that:
Moving your body to get different perspectives will often lead to photos that are more interesting than the usual ones taken from the same standing height. A picture of a house from a helicopter or from the viewpoint of a blade of grass will give drastically different images. This was the first assignment given in my very first photography class.
I challenge you to take a picture from a different perspective and view your world with new eyes.
