Taking Photos for the Web - 6 expert tips

By Clint Randall of Pixel Photography based in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire.

Everyone writes top ten tips, but with photography for the web there are just 6 that you need:

1. Fill the frame - just like when you were at school and the art teacher told you to fill the paper, but fill it with good stuff; we don’t want to see loads of junk in the background. Get in close or zoom in close.

2. Exposure - Get it right, the computer can help, but it’s always better to get it right first time. But if you are hoping to rescue a bad exposure on a computer, don’t over expose - rescuing an over exposed picture is harder on digital than it was on film.

3. Here’s an easy one. Set the resolution to the highest your camera will go. You can always delete the rubbish to save disc space but you can never improve a great shot that you want to enlarge to the size of a bus.

4. Think about the light, that’s what photography is all about. Help yourself to get great pictures by choosing the right time of day. I rarely have the choice of when to shoot, but if I do, I always avoid mid day. Overhead shadows are always unflattering on people and boring on everything else. You need a bit of sidelight on the subject, so I’m afraid it’s early mornings or late afternoon for the best light. When I’m on holiday I always get up before dawn, if I want really special pictures.

5. This is often overlooked - hold the camera steady. Camera shake is the cause of most out of focus pictures, especially if you’re taking pictures in low light. My top tip is to carry a bag of rice with you or a small bean bag, rest the camera on it or wedge it against a wall between camera and you and you’ve got a brilliant lightweight tripod.

6. If you’ve got a zoom lens, use it - stand back and zoom in, the perspective is much better and the background will go out of focus to make your subject stand out.

Clint Randall is a Gloucestershire based former Press Photographer who has given up the press after 23 years for life as a PR Photographer and Wedding Photographer.

There are many ways to wreck a brand - Toyota’s been doing its best recently and history is full of examples.

I played a part in wrecking the Haig Scotch Whisky brand myself so I speak with some authority - for a change. That was a price positioning mistake - too cheap in a sector where image is vital.

But Google’s crassness in revealing people’s contacts when it launched its Buzz Twitterlite service last week is so arrogant, so irresponsible and so stupid that it’s got to be a classic.

In case you haven’t heard, Google launched Buzz to users of its Gmail service and just to help people get started, (because Google’s like that, it really wants to help), its default was to show some of the people that a user mails most frequently on the user’s contacts. As invasions of privacy go, this is top of the Premiership.

Suppose you’re a dissident in a country like Burma, North Korea or Iran and you use Gmail. How long before the secret police come knocking at your comrades’ doors?

When a company puts commercial gain before its values (er, anyone remember ‘don’t do evil’), it’s usually heading for trouble. And when it copies other company’s products with inferior imitations and uses its market dominance aggressively, it’s supposed to be called Microsoft, not Google.

The rot started when the company put shareholder interests before its ideals and signed a pact with the devil in China.

Somebody at the Googleplex needs to get a grip. They’ve undone the default but the damage is done.

Is there anything online that Google doesn’t want to dominate? It’s latest product shows that it’s not a company to sit back and get complacent. In fact, it may even be worried by the increasing importance of Facebook and Twitter.

Google wants a slug of the social media action so it’s launched Buzz to its Gmail users - there’s over 175 million of them so they’re not insignificant. Buzz ticks the boxes you’d expect - you can share pics, messages, links and so on. But the key points are:

- any message that you post and flag as openly publishable will be indexed by Google’s search engine and usable in the engine’s realtime search results

-  it’s part of Google’s strategy for dominating the mobile internet. Buzz will be available on both the smartphones that use its Android software and on the mobile versions of its website and maps.

Yet another thing to worry about or a low cost opportunity to get found in Google? You decide.