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10 tips to help you get sharp photos when shooting handheld

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Getting sharp photos when shooting handheld is probably the biggest struggle for new photographers – especially if they haven’t figured out how exposure and shutter speed works yet. Even if you know what you’re doing with exposure, though, it can still be a little tricky sometimes. And with as tiny as camera LCDs are, it can be difficult to spot until you get back home and look at them full-screen on your computer.

So, how can you help to guarantee you get sharper photos? Well, photographer James Popsys is here with a bunch of tips to help you figure that out. Not all of them may apply to you – particularly the first one if you don’t drink coffee – but between them, with a little practise, you should be able to start seeing sharper images in no time.

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Learn photography now with 100 free online lessons from School of Visual Arts

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There’s a seemingly endless amount of photography tutorials on the internet. But just how many of them feature leading photographers and experts? Right now, School of Visual Arts is offering dozens of online lessons from some of the best in the industry. And what’s great about it is you don’t have to pay a dime to access them.

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How to Find the Best ISO for Astrophotography: Dynamic Range and Noise

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ISO is one of the three major exposure settings in the exposure triangle of a digital camera. Of the three: shutter time, f/number, and ISO, it is ISO that is probably most misunderstood. Even more so than f/number. In fact, it is a common misconception that higher ISO settings will cause images to be noisier. In fact, the opposite is often true. Wait, what?

That’s right, higher ISO settings alone do not increase image noise and higher ISOs can even be beneficial to low-light photography. In this post, I talk about the craziness surrounding ISO settings, how ISO actually affects exposure and how to find the optimal ISO setting on your camera for astrophotography.

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5 tips you can use right now to improve your photography

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Do you compare photos with others and wonder how come they are better than yours? You should learn from your mistakes and use them to improve your photography. Peter McKinnon points out to the most common mistakes, and gives you fives you five short, but important tips for making a progress. And each of them takes only a few seconds of extra thinking or preparation.

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Watch: Long Distance Cable Cam tutorial for fantastic time-lapse videos

Photographing time-lapses where the camera moves a long distance is not easy. You can set up tracks, but this is a long and laborious project. Plus, you need to make sure the tracks are not in the shot. This is where cable cameras come into play. It may look like a hard thing to set up, but this video by Morten Rustad will take you through all the steps you need to take to create fascinating time-lapses.

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How to Get Better at Photography – and stick with it forever

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I think you can look around at a lot of the content based around photography on the internet and extract a theme: People want to be better photographers. At the lower levels of the hobby that’s fairly easy. There are a lot of concrete skills and tips to pick up and integrate that are available via a variety of mediums. Doing tutorials for processing. Covering some basic design concepts like composition and other visual elements for shooting. Learning about lens optics and exactly what is going on in your camera. There are a lot of easily articulated skills to practice; it can keep you busy for years just consuming the basic instructional content.

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This nifty interactive tool will help you learn photography basics

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According to the results of a survey Sony published in 2012, as much as two thirds of non-professional DSLR users have never or rarely taken their camera out of auto mode. There may be plenty of reasons for this, such as buying a camera for fun or as a status symbol. But one of the reasons is that the initial learning process can be way too confusing for the beginners. A London based animator and designer, Simon Roberts, created a fun solution to this problem.

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