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Important Forms

Tips for Resizing Photographs

Always work with a copy of your original. The more megapixels the camera had you took your image with, the larger the file size of your photograph. An average image taken with a 10 MP camera will have around 2.5 MB and its sides will measure around 3500+ pixels on the longer side. Most image editing programs, including the ones listed below, contain a resize/resample function. Resizing reduces the length of the sides of a photograph, but not necessarily its file size. Therefore, just because you reduce one side to 1,000 pixels, does not mean that the file size will decrease dramatically as well. Resampling reduces the image quality, specifically resolution. You want to "play" with your image to find the optimal size where you are complying with the length requirements at the highes resolution possible.

Photography Tips

  • Tell a story. Make it interesting. Make it surprising. Is this a photo you and others like to look at for a longer period of time?
  • If you can, take several shots of the same scene, moving in and out.
  • Try and frame your scene, for example by putting a person on a bench under a tree in front of a house.
  • When photographing during low-light conditions (dawn, dusk, room with no lights on, at night), steady your camera by either setting it on a table etc., or by using a tripod.
  • If you use your on-camera flash indoors, you risk creating harsh shadows behind people and in their faces, as well as lens glare and red eyes.
  • Top 10 tips to take better photos:
  1. Get down onto the level of what you're photographing (example: your dog).
  2. Use a plain background, eliminate clutter behind your main subject.
  3. Use flash outdoors if your subject's face is in the shadow (because they're wearing a hat, for example).
  4. Move in close
  5. Take some vertical pictures.
  6. Lock in the focus. If you can, focus in once, then switch autofocus off.
  7. Move it from the middle. Portraits etc. tend to look boring with the main subject smack in the middle.
  8. Know your flash's range.
  9. Watch the light. Light outdoors is usually the most beautiful in the early morning and late afternoon.
  10. Be a picture director. Suggest what people should wear, how they should sit etc.

Photo/Image Editing Tools

Other Helpful Resources