Taking good pictures

I'm old. 45 to be exact. Old enough to remember when "Instamatic" camera's came into being. In fact I can remember the very christmas (ok, it was Hanukah...) that I received a Kodak Instamatic camera.

I was perhaps 8 or 9, but old enough to understand what I was given and be thoroughly awed! Back then, "Instamatic's" were a big deal for a number of reasons: they were inexpensive, small, and usable by just about anyone. This was the birth of "point and click".

As with the advent of desktop publishing many years later, it put the ability to create and record into the hands of the masses. And just like with desktop publishing, it spawned hordes of terrible, 'creating it because I *can* create it' junk.

The problem, again as with the desktop publishing phenomena, is that just because you can do something, doesn't mean you're gonna do it well. If you are old enough or were involved with computers at the time, you well remember the newsletters that had 19 different fonts, random rows & columns, etc. Pictures were the same way, and for the same reason. In order to produce something decent, you have to follow some basic should-be-obvious-but-isn't-always rules.

I take pictures for a living. Or more accurately, I sell prints made from pictures, many of which I take myself. My site, graffitipix.com, sells graffiti pictures that I and my partner have taken. But I also solicit and buy pictures that other people take. And I cannot begin to tell you how many unusable pictures could have been terrific if those basic tennets of good picture taking were followed.

And so I've posted the 'top 10' suggestions for better pictures from Kodak. They may sound very intuitive, but when you're standing there, eyeballing a terrific tag and getting ready to point your digital camera, it's worth pausing for a moment and running through a mental checklist:

1.	Look your subject in the eye
2.	Use a plain background
3.	Use flash outdoors
4.	Move in close
5.	Move it from the middle
6.	Lock the focus
7.	Know your flash's range
8.	Watch the light
9.	Take some vertical pictures
10.	Be a picture director

Thanks Kodak!

Molly