Holiday Photo Tips

With the holidays around the corner, here are some tips on getting better images of friends and family:

• No Group Mug Shots The worst type of pictures that you can get are the type where you line everyone up and take a picture from so far back that it looks as though you shot from a passing airplane. Take relaxed shots, catching people in what they ordinarily do when they think you're not taking a picture. Don't be afraid of zooming in and catching a head and shoulders shot, or from the waist up, or even a pair of hands or eyes doing something interesting.


• Get The Right White Balance Make sure that you're using the right white balance, whether indoors or outdoors, to avoid introducing odd color casts to your images. For the best quality (assuming your camera will do this), bring along a white surface and use your camera's instructions to set a custom white balance. As you change locations or as the light shifts, reset the white balance, because it will change.


• Keep Your Camera Ready The best images will just happen, so be ready with your camera and learn to use it well enough so you can get ready and squeeze off some shots without thinking that much about it.


• Find Iconic Images It's great to have photos of the people you know and love - or at least tolerate - but you don't have to settle for that. Take pictures of decorations,food - anything that will help trigger memories of the event.


• Bounce The Flash If you're using a strobe, bounce it off walls or the ceiling. That softens the lighting, you diffuse the shadows, and the results are more flattering.


• Bring Extra Memory Cards Why take pictures only to find out that you've run out of room for them? Memory cards are getting downright cheap, so keep an extra around so that, should the shooting be easy, you can swap out and keep going.

Good luck, and remember to have fun. Don't hide behind the camera. The more you're involved in the happenings, the more that will show in your results.

Vacation Snapshots Become 3D Models

Researchers at the University of Washington, TU Darmstadt in Germany, and Microsoft Research have an interesting project: they're building 3D models of landmarks out of vacation snapshots. By downloading many pictures from Flickr, they can compare all the different views and have a computer construct 3D surfaces by comparing all the photos, essentially interpolating what surface could offer all the images. There is a lot of sorting, as only a small portion of the photos of any given subject will work for the method. Check the link above for an abstract of the paper and some examples of the imaging, or see this New Scientist article for a more easily digested explanation.